The right conversion, marking your leads and shipping them back to Google. If your Google Ads campaigns are bringing in mostly junk leads, you’re not just unlucky. You’re running the system without the one piece of feedback it actually needs to get smarter.

And until you fix it, you’ll keep paying for the same low-quality leads month after month, because as far as Google is concerned, it’s doing exactly what you asked.

To stop paying for junk leads and get better ones from Google, you need to teach the platform which leads are good and which are bad. And that’s a workflow SA paid media specialist Chantelle Bowyer runs with almost every account she audits.

Chantelle is the founder of Metis, a paid media agency she’s run for 16 years. She’s a former Google trainer and spends most of her time auditing SA accounts, which means she sees the same wasted-spend mistakes over and over again. Junk leads are the most common ones.

Here’s her workflow for fixing it.

Google Ads doesn’t know what a good lead looks like for your business unless you tell it. It can only track that 10 form submissions came through. What it can’t see is that seven of them were tyre kickers, two went cold, and one became a R200,000 client.

As Chantelle puts it: “Google is sending leads to you and saying, look how amazing I am, I just got you 10 leads. You, on your side, are looking at it and going, actually, only three were decent and out of those, only one became a sale. You need to send that data back into the system.”

Send the data back. Tell it which leads were good. The platform learns. Junk leads drop. Good leads rise. That’s the whole concept.

Before you can teach Google what a good lead is, you need to be tracking conversions properly. Most SA accounts Chantelle audits are tracking the wrong thing or duplicating the right thing.

Two specific things to fix:

If your tracking is broken, every step that follows will make the problem worse, not better.

Once leads are coming in, you need a process for marking them as qualified or junk. This is the part most founders skip — they get the lead, they make a judgment call in their head, and they move on.

That judgment call needs to live somewhere. A spreadsheet works. A CRM works. A Google Sheet that gets updated weekly works. Chantelle is clear that you don’t need a fancy stack:

“It does not have to be the likes of HubSpot. We have got some clients that are just working via a Google sheet, and we’re able to pull that data back in.”

What matters is that for every lead, you’re recording: was this a real prospect, or junk? Did they progress? Did they buy? Without that record, there’s nothing to send back.

This is the step that closes the loop — and the one almost no SA founder is doing.

Take your list of qualified leads and upload it to Google Ads as offline conversion data. The platform now knows: “these are the people who turned out to be real prospects, not the ones who filled in a form and disappeared.” Over time, it adjusts who it shows your ads to.

Important detail: don’t only send back the leads that became sales. Send back everyone who was qualified, even if they didn’t buy. They were still the right kind of person. As Chantelle puts it, the other qualified leads were good — they just didn’t happen to convert.

If you can also send the sale value back, do it. Once Google has revenue data attached to conversions, you can switch your bidding from “maximise conversions” to “target ROAS” — a much smarter way to bid that optimises for actual revenue, not lead volume.

Machine learning needs volume. Specifically, Google’s algorithm needs around 30 conversions per 30 days per campaign to actually learn anything useful.

If you’re only sending back the 1 lead a month that became a sale, you’ll never hit that threshold. That’s why sending back all qualified leads matters — it gives the system enough signal to work with.

“We need at least 30 conversions per 30 days for machine learning to work,” Chantelle notes. “You don’t want to only send the sale data back, because the other qualified people were still qualified — they just didn’t happen to go through to the sale.”

If you’re running multiple campaigns and spreading your budget too thin to hit 30 conversions on any one of them, that’s a separate problem — but it’s the same root cause. The algorithm has nothing to learn from.

If your business takes calls, you’ve got a hidden junk-lead problem most founders never see.

Chantelle shared a recent client case: of all the click-to-call leads Google was reporting, only 26% actually ended up as real calls hitting their switchboard. The other 74% were people who clicked, then dropped off, never connected, or hung up.

That’s a massive blind spot. Google is reporting click-to-calls as conversions and optimising your campaigns for them — but three out of four of them aren’t even real calls.

The fix is the same workflow as form leads, just with an extra step. Use call tracking that captures whether a call actually connected, then send only the real, qualified calls back to Google as conversions. Google then optimises for those, not for the click event itself.

Two reasons: First, SA paid media budgets are smaller than the global benchmarks Google’s best-practice docs are written for. Most of those docs assume you have huge budgets and can afford to let the algorithm experiment. SA founders can’t. Every rand of wasted spend on a junk lead is a rand that needed to be converted to keep the campaign viable.

“A lot of the information we get from Google is based on huge budgets and based on overseas. They do not think of South Africa when they’re putting these best practices together,” Chantelle says. “We actually find by getting a lot more specific, it ends up doing a lot better.”

Secondly, SA businesses tend to run leaner stacks — fewer integrations, less automation, more spreadsheets. That makes it easier to skip the offline conversion feedback loop entirely. Most accounts Chantelle audits have decent campaigns but no feedback flowing back, which is why the same junk leads keep coming through month after month.

Once the feedback loop is running, the same ad spend starts producing meaningfully better leads. You’re not spending more. You’re spending the same money on people who actually want what you’re selling.

Better lead quality also means your sales team stops burning time on tyre kickers, your conversion rate from lead to sale goes up, and you can finally start measuring real ROI rather than vanity lead counts.

It takes a few hours to set up. It saves you the kind of money most founders don’t realise they’re losing.

Stopping junk leads is one fix in a much larger system. In Chantelle’s full Founder Collab masterclass on Paid Ads 101, she walks through:

You can get access to Chantelle’s full playbook, plus 40+ other masterclasses from South African operators, founders and experts when you join The Founder Collab.

This workflow first appeared in our 28 April ‘26 issue on Ruka's small business AI tools.

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