Most organizations blame Google Ads. The problem starts much earlier.
It’s a sentence I’ve heard dozens of times, often halfway through a meeting.
Marketing has just finished walking everyone through the monthly dashboard. Click-through rates are up. Cost per lead is down. Conversion volume is healthy. On paper, the account appears to be moving in the right direction.
Then someone from Sales shifts in their chair. “We’re getting lots of leads,” they say. “They’re just not the right ones.”
The room goes quiet. Not because anyone disagrees, but because everyone recognizes the tension. Marketing has evidence things are improving. Sales has evidence they aren’t. Leadership is left trying to reconcile two realities that somehow exist at the same time.
Eventually someone says it: “Google Ads keeps bringing us the wrong clients.”
I’ve come to think that’s one of the most interesting and revealing sentences leadership can say.
Not because it’s wrong. In fact, it often describes the experience perfectly, but it doesn’t explain it.
It tells us what the organization is feeling, not what’s happening beneath the surface. That distinction matters, because the explanation determines where we go looking for solutions.
Most people start by looking inside the Google Ads account. They examine keywords, bidding strategies, audiences, search terms, landing pages, and ad copy. Sometimes the answer is there.
More often, I find myself looking somewhere else entirely, because businesses don’t necessarily have a lead quality problem.
They have a signalling problem.
Organizations can live with signalling problems for years before they develop the language to describe them. And frankly, Google Ads is often the first place that signalling drift becomes visible, not because it created the problem, but because it faithfully reflects the signals the organization has been giving it all along.
“Wrong clients” are a symptom
One of the reasons this problem is so difficult to solve is that “wrong clients” isn’t a diagnosis.
It’s a symptom, the organizational equivalent of saying, “something doesn’t feel right.”
The frustration is real. The wasted time is real. The marketing spend is real. But none of those experiences tell us why they’re happening. They tell us that somewhere between the business and the market, something has become misaligned.
I’ve found it useful to think about this as signal drift.
Every business sends signals, whether it realizes it or not. Some are intentional: messaging, positioning, offers, pricing. Others are operational: who the sales department follows up on, what the CRM records as a lead, what KPIs get celebrated, and what advertising platforms are asked to optimize.
Over time, those signals can drift away from the outcome the business values, and it rarely happens all at once. That’s what makes it so difficult to notice.
A campaign launches with a sensible definition of success. A new conversion action is added because someone wants better reporting. A form submission becomes a lead because that’s easier than qualifying it. A dashboard starts tracking cost per lead because it’s readily available. Marketing celebrates increasing volume because that’s what the scorecard rewards. Sales adapts because they know many of those conversations will never go anywhere.
Each decision makes sense in isolation. Together, they begin teaching the system a different definition of success than the one leadership believes it’s pursuing.
When organizations reward the wrong definition of success, they don’t just attract different prospects. They gradually optimize for a different business than the one they believe they’re building.
By the time someone says, “Google Ads keeps bringing us the wrong clients,” the account is often doing exactly what it has been taught to do.
The platform hasn’t drifted, the signals have.
Google doesn’t decide. It learns.
One of the most persistent misconceptions about Google Ads is that it’s making decisions on your behalf.
It isn’t. Google doesn’t know who your ideal customer is. It doesn’t understand your margins, your sales process, your service model, or the kind of client you enjoy working with. It has no opinion on whether a lead was worth pursuing or whether that customer became a long-term advocate for your business.
What it does understand is feedback. Every conversion you record, every value you assign, every optimization objective you choose becomes part of the picture Google is constantly building about what success looks like. Its job is remarkably simple: identify patterns in the signals you’ve rewarded, then find more people who look like them.
That’s why I rarely think of Google Ads as a decision-making system. I think of it as a learning system. And learning systems are only as good as the experiences they’re allowed to learn from.
Imagine rewarding a salesperson every time they booked a meeting, regardless of whether the prospect was qualified, bought anything, or ever intended to become a customer. Before long, you’d have an exceptional appointment setter and a frustrated sales team.
The salesperson wouldn’t be failing, they’d be succeeding according to the incentives they were given. Google behaves much the same way.
If every form submission is celebrated as a successful outcome, Google learns that every form submission represents success. If every phone call is recorded as equally valuable, it assumes every phone call deserves to be replicated. If every inquiry carries the same weight, it has no reason to distinguish between curiosity and genuine buying intent.
This is why I often remind clients that a form fill isn’t a lead, it’s an inquiry.
That isn’t a semantic distinction. It’s an operational one. An inquiry tells us that someone has raised their hand. A lead tells us they’ve moved meaningfully closer to becoming the kind of customer the business is trying to attract. Those are not the same thing. Treating them as though they are changes what the platform learns.
Google isn’t reflecting the definition your organization has given it, instead, it’s deciding what success looks like.
This raises an uncomfortable question beyond whether your keywords are wrong or your bid strategies need revisiting: Have we been teaching Google the right definition of success?
Drift rarely looks like failure
If drift announced itself with collapsing dashboards and obvious mistakes, it would be relatively easy to correct. It doesn’t. More often, it arrives disguised as progress.
- Cost per lead falls.
- Conversion rates improve.
- Lead volume increases.
- Optimization scores climb.
- Monthly reports become increasingly encouraging.
And yet something still seems off.
Sales starts asking harder questions about lead quality. Customer acquisition costs creep upward despite healthy marketing metrics. Projects become less profitable. Sales cycles get longer. Teams find themselves working harder for outcomes that once came more naturally.
The organization’s lived experience begins to diverge from the story its metrics are telling. This is where many leadership teams become trapped between two competing realities. Marketing isn’t wrong. The dashboard is improving. Sales isn’t wrong. The conversations are getting worse.
Leadership isn’t wrong to feel uneasy. They’re sensing a growing disconnect between what the organization is measuring and what it’s experiencing.
Unfortunately, this is often the point where everyone starts looking for someone to blame.
- Marketing blames the platform.
- Sales blames Marketing.
- The agency blames the website.
- Leadership blames the market.
Meanwhile, the signals continue drifting.
What fascinates me is that no one in the room is necessarily making poor decisions. Most of the decisions that contributed to this moment were entirely reasonable. Adding a new conversion action improves reporting. Simplifying CRM stages makes life easier for Sales. Optimizing toward lower cost per lead feels responsible.
Each decision solves a local problem. What almost no one has time to ask is whether those local improvements are still aligned with the broader outcome the organization is trying to achieve. We’ve become remarkably good at measuring marketing activity.
I’m not convinced we’ve become equally good at distinguishing activity from progress.
Those are two very different conversations.
And Google Ads, perhaps more than any other platform, has a way of forcing us to confront the difference.
Precision requires calibration
There’s a reason engineers calibrate precision instruments.
Not because they expect them to fail. Quite the opposite.
The more precise the instrument, the more important it becomes to ensure that what it’s measuring still corresponds with reality.
A surveyor doesn’t assume a laser level is wrong because the numbers have changed. A laboratory doesn’t calibrate its instruments because they stopped working. Calibration is a recognition that even the finest instruments experience drift over time.
- Temperature changes.
- Environments shift.
- Tiny deviations accumulate.
Eventually, measurements remain precise without remaining true. Organizational systems are no different.
Google Ads is one of the most sophisticated optimization systems most organizations will ever connect to themselves. Every day, it recalibrates against the feedback it receives. It learns from the outcomes you record. It refines its understanding of what success looks like. It becomes increasingly precise at finding more of whatever your organization has taught it to value.
That’s an extraordinary capability. It’s also an unforgiving one. Because Google has no independent understanding of whether your definition of success is still aligned with the business you’re trying to build. It assumes your conversion tracking, your CRM, your reporting, your sales process, and your leadership team are all pointing toward the same objective. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t.
- Businesses evolve.
- Markets change.
- Product lines expand.
- Pricing shifts.
- New services emerge.
- Sales teams mature.
- Customer expectations change.
- Leadership priorities change.
The business you taught Google two years ago may no longer be the business you’re trying to build today. The platform is continuously adapting and evolving. Organizations often aren’t.
What begins as a well-calibrated system can gradually become a collection of well-intentioned teams, reports, and platforms operating with slightly different definitions of success. Marketing celebrates one metric. Sales relies on another. Leadership watches a third. Google faithfully optimizes toward whichever signal it’s been given most consistently.
No single decision caused the problem. No single person is responsible for it. The system has simply drifted. Which is why, when someone says, “Google Ads only brings us the wrong clients,” my instinct isn’t to begin with keywords or bidding strategies.
My instinct is to ask a different question: When was the last time we calibrated the system that taught Google what success looks like?
Why second opinions matter
One of the more interesting things about organizational drift is that the people closest to it are often the least able to see it. Not because they lack expertise but because they’re the ones who built the system.
Every process, report, conversion action, dashboard field, and every meeting reflects hundreds of decisions that made sense at the time. Over months and years, those decisions become part of how the organization understands itself. Eventually, they stop feeling like decisions altogether. They simply become “the way we do things.”
That’s why meaningful second opinions rarely begin by recommending different keywords or bidding strategies. They begin by asking different questions.
- What are we really optimizing for?
- How are we defining a qualified customer? What are the conditions/contexts?
- Which signals represent genuine business value?
- Which ones are simply convenient to measure?
- Where do Marketing, Sales, and Leadership agree? Where do they disagree?
Those conversations can feel deceptively simple. In my experience, they’re often where the most valuable work begins.
Once an organization develops a shared definition of success, tactical decisions become much easier. Campaigns can be rebuilt. Conversion tracking can be redesigned. CRM stages can be refined. Reporting can finally align with outcomes that matter to the business, not just the dashboard. The technology was rarely the hardest part.
The hardest part is seeing the system clearly.
A better place to start
Organizations rarely wake up one morning and decide to optimize for the wrong outcomes.
They arrive there gradually. One reporting improvement at a time. One new conversion action. One dashboard. One sales process adjustment. One perfectly reasonable decision layered on top of another.
Eventually, everyone is working hard.
The platform is learning exactly as it was designed to, reports are improving, meetings are happening, and yet the organization increasingly feels like it’s solving the wrong problem.
That’s why I don’t think the most valuable question is, “How do we get Google Ads to bring us better clients?”
More so, it’s, “What have we been teaching our systems to believe success looks like?”
Because Google Ads is buying clicks while it’s continually learning from your organization.
It learns from what Marketing celebrates. It learns from what Sales records. It learns from what Leadership rewards. It learns from the definitions your business has quietly accepted over time. When those definitions are aligned, Google becomes remarkably effective. When they aren’t, it becomes more efficient at scaling the misalignment.
That’s a very different problem. And a much more interesting one to solve.
A note on second opinions
People often assume a second opinion is about finding mistakes. I’ve never thought of it that way. The best second opinions don’t arrive with a list of everything that’s wrong.
They’re just a set of fresh eyes. Sometimes that’s enough to notice assumptions everyone else has stopped seeing or reconnect and realign Marketing, Sales, and Leadership around a shared definition of success before changing any advertising.
Ironically, that’s often the point where the platform starts performing differently.
Not because Google changed, but because the organization did.
If your organization feels like it’s attracting the wrong clients, I’d resist the temptation to begin with the ad account. Start by asking a harder question:
Is Google bringing the wrong clients, or has it become exceptionally good at finding the ones we’ve unintentionally taught it to value?
The answer might change everything for the better.