If you’re running Google Ads for your local business and your phone is getting blown up with junk leads and irrelevant phone calls, you’re not alone.

I see this issue all the time when I’m auditing campaigns for local businesses.

People are spending good money on Google Ads, but instead of getting quality leads from potential customers, they’re getting calls from people looking for jobs, asking about completely unrelated services, or just straight up wasting their time.

The frustrating part is that you’re still paying for every single one of those clicks, even though they’re never going to turn into actual customers.

Today, I’m going to walk you through exactly why this happens and what you can do to fix it.

Let’s jump into it.

The Root Cause: Traffic Quality

Before we get into the specific fixes, you need to understand the fundamental issue here.

A lot of lead quality problems on Google Ads come down to one thing, and that’s traffic quality.

If you’re getting low quality traffic into your campaign, that pretty much means your ads are showing up for searches that aren’t relevant to your business.

When your ads show up for irrelevant searches, you get irrelevant clicks.

When you get irrelevant clicks, you get junk leads.

So the entire goal of fixing your junk lead problem is to make sure your ads are only showing up for high quality, high intent searches from people who are actually looking for what you offer.

That’s what we’ll focus on with this blog post.

Problem #1: Running The Wrong Campaign Type

This is the first thing I look at when someone tells me they’re getting junk leads.

A lot of times, the issue starts with the type of campaign you’re running in the first place.

The main type of campaign you want to run if you want high quality local leads is a Google Search Campaign.

That’s it. The first option when you’re creating a new campaign.

Everything else, I tend to avoid for local businesses.

Smart Campaigns (Google Ads Express)

Before I even get into the other campaign types, I need to talk about Smart Campaigns.

Google used to call these Google Express campaigns, but now they call them Smart Campaigns. Honestly, they seem to change the name every year.

If you’re running some kind of Google Smart Campaign or Google Ads Express, there’s a very good chance that could be driving your low quality leads.

Sometimes these work okay for a little bit, but the problem is that it’s really hard to control these campaigns.

You have almost no say in what searches your ads show up for, and Google pretty much runs the whole thing on autopilot.

That might sound convenient, but when you don’t have control, you end up with ads showing for all kinds of irrelevant stuff.

If you’re running a Smart Campaign right now, that could be your entire problem right there.

Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns are another one that I see causing issues for local businesses.

These campaigns tend to produce really inconsistent traffic quality.

You can do some things to try to control what your ads are showing up for, but from my own experience and from what I’ve heard from other people in the industry, Performance Max for local lead generation is just not a very good choice.

Maybe that’ll change going forward, but from everything I’ve seen, lead quality from Performance Max campaigns is generally pretty hit or miss.

Display Campaigns

The other campaign type I see local businesses running when I’m auditing accounts is Display Campaigns.

Either they’re running a dedicated Display Campaign, or they’ve got it enabled within their Search Campaign (which I’ll talk about in the settings section).

For local businesses, I tend to stay away from Display Campaigns unless you’re doing a dedicated remarketing campaign, which is a whole other topic.

The reason I avoid Display Campaigns is that your ads will be showing up all over the internet on random websites and apps.

The traffic quality tends to be pretty low because people aren’t actively searching for your services, they’re just browsing around and happen to see your ad.

What tends to happen with Display Campaigns is you get low quality traffic, which leads to low quality leads.

Stick with Search Campaigns.

If you’re not running a Search Campaign and you’re running something like Performance Max or a Smart Campaign, that could be your issue right there.

Problem #2: Wrong Campaign Settings

Assuming you do have a Google Search Campaign set up for your local business Google Ads, there are a couple things in your settings that could be causing junk traffic and junk leads to come through.

To check your settings, just go to Campaigns, then click on Settings.

Networks (Search Partners and Display Network)

This is a big one.

Under the Networks section, you want to make sure that both Search Partners and Display Network are unchecked.

I know the first option makes it look like you’re unchecking the entire Search Network, but you’re not. You’re unchecking Google Search Partners.

Google Search Partners is another network where Google will display your ads on a bunch of different websites. Google’s not super transparent about where those ads get shown.

This used to be a pretty solid source of additional traffic, but something changed in the past year or two.

Google started showing ads in places that are even more irrelevant, and people started getting hit with a bunch of calls from people looking for jobs or asking about completely unrelated stuff.

A lot of that was coming from Search Partners.

Uncheck Search Partners. That alone can be a massive help in filtering out junk traffic.

Display Network is the other one you want to make sure is unchecked.

Like I mentioned before, Display Network is going to get you clicks from all over the internet. That might look good on paper, but those clicks aren’t targeted or focused.

What you want is people in your local market searching for your services.

If somebody is on a news website or using an app and they happen to see your ad, that’s very irrelevant traffic. We don’t want our ads showing up there.

Make sure both of these options are unchecked.

Location Options

The next thing you want to check is your location settings.

Scroll down to Location Options. This is a quick thing to check but it can make a big difference.

The biggest thing you want to make sure of is that you don’t have “Presence or interest” selected.

This first option says “People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your included locations.”

Google says it’s recommended, but here’s what can happen with this option enabled:

You could have somebody who’s not even in your state searching for a keyword that’s specific to your area, and you could get phone calls from out of state.

We want to avoid that.

In order to avoid it, select the second option: “Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations.”

That can help cut down on issues with out-of-location leads and people calling from areas you don’t even service.

There are other things that go into location targeting as well, but this is one thing you absolutely need to have set up correctly.

It can help a ton with filtering out more irrelevant leads.

Problem #3: Bad Quality Search Traffic

If you’ve got all those other things set up correctly and you’re still getting junk leads on Google Ads, then we need to talk about search traffic quality.

How can you refine it? How can you make it better?

Like I said earlier, if you’re showing up for bad traffic, you’re going to get bad leads.

So let’s talk about how to diagnose the issue and fix it.

Check Your Search Terms Report

This is the most important tool you have for diagnosing traffic quality issues.

Your Search Terms Report shows you exactly what your ads showed up for.

To find it, log into your campaign, go to Insights and Reports, and then click on Search Terms.

It’s going to pull up a list of all the actual searches that triggered your ads.

Now, it’s not going to show you every single little search term because of privacy things and Google just doesn’t show everything. But it’s going to give you a really good idea of what your ads are showing up for.

This is the first place you need to look when you have a lead quality problem.

If you’re getting junk leads, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to look at this report and see searches you definitely don’t want to be showing up for.

I see this all the time when auditing local business campaigns.

You might be showing up for competitor searches, irrelevant services that aren’t aligned with your business, or totally unrelated businesses altogether.

Here’s what you should be seeing instead:

High quality, high intent searches that are relevant to the services you offer.

For example, if you’re a pool service company, you should see searches like “pool service near me,” “pool cleaning,” “pool maintenance,” “pool repair,” and things like that.

Everything should be relevant to what you actually do.

If you don’t see good quality searches in your Search Terms Report, there are three main reasons why:

1. You’re not bidding on the right keywords
2. You’re not using the right match types
3. You don’t have negative keywords in your campaign

Let’s walk through each one.

Issue #1: You’re Bidding On The Wrong Keywords

Sometimes when I audit campaigns, I see very generic keywords that are way too vague.

We want to pick keywords that are high intent and show that somebody is specifically looking for a service in their local area.

Good examples of high intent keywords:

• Pool service near me
• Pool cleaning service near me
• Pool care near me
• Pool repair [city name]
• Weekly pool service

These are all very specific to what you offer and show a high level of buyer intent.

You don’t want really vague keywords like just “pools” or “pool company.”

Those are going to be way too broad and don’t have enough intent behind them.

We want high intent keywords as the foundation of your campaign.

Issue #2: You’re Using The Wrong Match Types

This is a big one that I see causing problems all the time.

There are three different types of keyword match types in Google Ads:

• Exact Match – [keyword]
• Phrase Match – “keyword”
• Broad Match – keyword

I do not use Broad Match on pretty much any of my keywords.

Broad Match keywords will show your ads for a very, very broad range of searches, which drives a ton of irrelevant traffic.

Google will pretty much take your ads and show them for anything they deem even remotely kind of relevant to that keyword.

That’s why I avoid them.

On your end, you want to make sure you’re using [Exact Match] and “Phrase Match” keywords.

Those match types help you constrain the traffic a little bit and make sure you’re showing up for more relevant searches.

If you look at your keywords and you don’t see any brackets or quotes around them, those are Broad Match keywords.

That could be your problem right there.

Issue #3: You Don’t Have Negative Keywords

The third piece of the puzzle is negative keywords.

You want to have a very large list of negative keywords, and you want to constantly be building on it regularly.

Negative keywords are, as the name suggests, kind of the opposite of keywords.

They’re telling Google what you do NOT want your ads to show up for.

For example, if you’re a pool service company, you might add negative keywords like:

• Jobs
• Hiring
• Careers
• DIY
• How to
• Supplies
• Parts
• Above ground (if you only service in-ground pools)

And so on.

One of my pool service campaigns has over 3,100 negative keywords at this point.

You want to have a big list of negative keywords because this is going to help you cut out garbage traffic.

The more garbage traffic you cut out, the better your lead quality is going to be.

How to build your negative keyword list:

Go to your Search Terms Report regularly (at least once a week), and look for any irrelevant searches your ads showed up for.

Add those as negative keywords.

Over time, you’ll build up a comprehensive list that keeps your traffic quality high.

Need Help With Your Google Ads Campaign?

If you’re running a Google Ads campaign for your local business, but you’re just getting junk leads, we might be able to help out.

At the link below, you can find a free consultation form to apply for a free Google Ads consultation.

It will send a request over to me personally, I can review it, and then see if I can help you out.

In the meantime, if you want to see more Google Ads content you can check out a recent post giving out some Tree Service Google Ads tips.

Thanks for reading!

Need Help With Your Google Ads Campaign?