How to Bring Your Google Ads CPL Down to Where It Should Be
- saurav soni
- Jun 10
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 16
Had a call last week with a prospect running Google Ads for lead gen. Decent budget, legitimate business, leads coming in — the form fills looked real, company names checked out, details were solid. But almost zero conversions on the sales side. Zero.
I'm not going to get into what happens after the lead lands — that's a sales conversation and I'll assume they have a decent team. What I want to talk about is what we can actually do on the ads side, and specifically how high CPL and low lead quality are almost always the same problem wearing different shoes.
Because here's the thing — if your Google Ads CPL is higher than it should be, you're not just spending more money per lead. You're probably also pulling in lower intent leads. And lower intent leads, umm yeaahh, they don't convert. Makes sense right.
The six causes of high Google Ads CPL — and which one is usually the culprit
Most of the time when I'm auditing a Google Ads account with a high CPL, it comes down to one of six things. Broad match keywords without a strong negative keyword list — so you're paying for traffic that has nothing to do with your actual service. A landing page that isn't converting the clicks you're already getting. Low Quality Scores, which means you're paying more per click than you should be. The wrong bidding strategy — Maximise Clicks is a classic one, it finds people who click, not people who convert. Incorrect conversion tracking, so you're optimising on bad data without knowing it. And finally, campaigns not properly segmented by intent — brand, competitor, and generic searches all lumped together in the same ad group.
Going back to that prospect call — their account had two of these happening simultaneously. Broad match keywords pulling in searches that were vaguely related but not commercial intent, and a landing page that was basically a homepage. Neither of those is a Google problem. Both are fixable.
The fastest thing you can do this week
Build your negative keyword list. Go into your Search Terms report — literally this week — pull the last 90 days, and go through every search that triggered your ads. Add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword. This single action has brought CPL down by 30 to 40% in accounts I've audited, without changing the budget, without changing the ads, without touching anything else. It just stops money going out the window on searches that were never going to convert.
Most businesses running Google Ads without a consultant haven't touched their negatives in months. Sometimes ever. The Search Terms report is one of the most valuable things in the whole platform and it just sits there unused.
High intent forms — the thing nobody talks about for CPL
Here's something I think a lot about on lead gen accounts. You can have a good CPL on paper and still be drowning in low quality leads. The way to solve this on the ads side — without handing it over to sales — is through high intent form design. Thinking right now about the difference between a form that asks for a name and email versus one that asks for company name, approximate monthly ad spend, and what's the specific problem you're trying to solve.
The second form gets fewer submissions. But the people who fill it in are genuinely interested. Your CPL goes up slightly, your lead-to-close rate goes way up, and your actual cost per acquisition — the number that really matters — comes down. This is one of those changes that feels counterintuitive until you see it in the numbers.
Quality Score and what it actually costs you
Quality Score determines what you pay per click. A keyword with a QS of 8 gets a lower CPC than a competitor bidding the same amount at a QS of 4. Improving Quality Score by tightening the match between your keywords, your ad copy, and your landing page can reduce cost per click by 20 to 50%. That flows directly into a lower CPL. And you don't need more budget to get it — you just need better alignment across those three things.
When to switch your bidding strategy
Once you have 30 or more conversions in the last 30 days, switch to Target CPA or Maximise Conversions. Below that threshold, smart bidding doesn't have enough data to work properly — it'll make random decisions and you'll get inconsistent results. Above it, smart bidding almost always reduces CPL compared to manual CPC because Google's signals are just better at finding converters than most humans manually managing bids.
If you're stuck below 30 conversions, the priority is getting accurate conversion tracking set up first — because right now you might be counting phone calls that went nowhere, or form fills from people who entered their number wrong. Real conversions only. Then you build volume from there.
What a good CPL looks like in the UK for B2B
For B2B services in the UK, CPLs between £40 and £150 are typical depending on the industry and average deal value. But honestly the benchmark matters less than the maths. If your average deal value is £8,000 and you close 1 in 5 leads, you can afford a £400 CPL and still be profitable. The number to actually track is cost per acquisition — CPL is just one input into that.
This is literally how I approach every new Google Ads account I take on — start with the Search Terms report, check conversion tracking, look at form design, and then work through the rest. If you want me to do this for your account, here's how I work with clients:
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