Your Google Ads account thinks every lead is worth zero
The single setting that makes an ads account fill with the wrong people, and the fix that moved a solar installer’s campaign to a 10.84% click-through rate.
Open the conversions column in most Google Ads accounts and every row says the same thing: one conversion, value zero. A tyre-kicker and a factory owner, both worth nothing. That one setting explains more wasted spend in this country than any ad copy ever has.
What the bidding is actually doing
Google's automated bidding is a machine for getting more of whatever you told it counts. If a form submission is a conversion and every form is worth zero, the machine's job is to find people who submit forms — as cheaply as possible. It is very good at this. It will find renters, students, and people who wanted a price to argue with their current supplier. It will report a falling cost per lead, and the sales team will report a falling close rate, and both will be right.
The fix is arithmetic, not creative
Every enquiry has to arrive already carrying a rand value that says what it could be worth.
On the solar account we run, each enquiry carries the price of the system it asks about into the account — from R 4 000 to R 25 000 of value, by system size. An enquiry about a R 250 000 system is no longer worth the same as one about a R 40 000 system, and the bidding now knows that.
The campaign rebuilt on top of those values holds a 10.84% click-through rate against 7.4% across the account's lifetime, and R 255 294 of recorded lead value against its spend — read from the account on 21 September 2026. Not because the ads got cleverer. Because the machine was finally told what a good one looked like.
Three things to check in your own account today
- Conversion value. If every conversion is zero or every conversion is the same number, the bidding has nothing to learn from.
- What counts as a conversion. A page view of the thank-you page is not an enquiry. A WhatsApp click is closer. An answered WhatsApp message is the thing.
- The attribution window. If your customer takes two months to decide, a thirty-day window is throwing away the conversions that matter most.
If you would rather we looked, bring last month's spend. Fifteen minutes, no charge.