Google Ads lead forms add lead scoring to custom questions

Google Ads has added a lead scoring option to lead form assets. When you build a custom question, each answer now carries a tick box that marks it as one that qualifies the lead for your business. Google's in-product note says the point is to get higher quality leads, and it sends advertisers to the Leads page to manage them.

The setting started appearing in accounts around 15 October, after PPC practitioners shared a screenshot of it on LinkedIn. Google has not announced it on its blogs, but it documents the feature in its help centre under the name qualifying responses, in an article called About qualifying responses in lead forms and an entry in Create lead form assets. Its general About lead form assets article does not yet mention it. What follows is what the interface shows and what those help articles say.

What changed

Lead form assets let a person submit their contact details inside the ad rather than clicking through to a form on your site. Google offers them on Search and Performance Max campaigns, and alongside the standard contact fields you can add custom questions of your own. The qualifying responses setting is narrower: Google's help article says it is available for Search campaigns only.

The new control sits inside those custom questions. Under a lead scoring section, each answer option gets a tick box, and you can add up to 12 answers per question. Ticked answers are the ones that describe a lead you want. The in-product text reads: "You can now indicate answers that is a lead to your business to get higher quality leads. To manage all your leads, go to Leads page." The grammar is Google's.

The screenshot doing the rounds shows the setting on a service type question, with several answer fields, a character limit on each, and a tick box per answer.

Where to find it

Go to Assets, then Lead Form, then Create Lead Form, then Custom Questions. Create a question, add the answer options, and tick the ones that count. If the section is not there, check the form is attached to a Search campaign; otherwise your account may not have it yet. It lands in the same fortnight as the channel priority tiers and budget caps Google added to campaign settings, so there are two new controls worth checking in every active account.

Why it matters for Australian lead-gen

Anyone who has run lead forms knows the trade. Among the benefits Google's own help page lists are a higher volume of leads than a standalone website form and OTP verification to keep them genuine. The volume claim is the one that bites. Because the barrier is low, a share of submissions come from people who tapped a button with little intent.

For a plumber in Penrith, a conveyancer in Geelong or a solar installer on the Sunshine Coast, the cost of that trade is time. Somebody rings every lead, and the junk ones take the same ten minutes as the good ones. Marking qualifying answers pushes part of that sorting to the form stage, so the Leads page can separate the enquiries that deserve a same-day call from the ones that can wait, or be dropped.

It does not yet settle a question lead-gen accounts rarely resolve. Our comparison of Performance Max cost per lead against Search found the cheaper leads on Performance Max, with opacity the usual objection. Google limits qualifying responses to Search campaigns, so the flag is no help with Performance Max lead quality for now. If it ever reaches Performance Max forms it would be one more way to check what those cheaper leads are actually worth.

Treat it as a filter for follow-up first, but know that Google also records it as a conversion. The help article says that when a qualifying question is in an active campaign, a conversion action called Lead form - Response qualified (Google-hosted) is added automatically to the Qualified lead goal, and matching submissions are tagged as qualified leads. Google does not say how Smart Bidding uses it, so check which goals each campaign optimises towards before assuming it changes anything about bidding. The serving rules have not changed: a lead form still needs a conversion-focused bidding strategy and a Google lead form conversion goal on the campaign. If you want the account to learn which leads became customers, the established route is still offline conversion imports. Google added detail on those to its conversion measurement help in September. The conversion action source must be Manual uploads or Other rather than Website, names must match exactly, processing takes 24 to 48 hours, and the click ID must be within 90 days. Errors such as "Invalid date" show up in the Diagnostics tab. Phone leads have their own rules, including call reporting switched on, the call conversion action set to Primary, and conversions attributed to the date of the ad click.

How to write a qualifying question

The feature is only as good as the question. One that every visitor answers the same way sorts nothing. The useful ones force a choice that separates a buyer from a browser.

• Service type. List the services you actually sell and tick those. Leave an "other" option unticked so the general enquiries sort themselves out.
• Timeframe. This week, this month, just researching. Tick the first two.
• Budget or job size. Ranges that line up with your minimum job. Anything under it stays unticked.
• Location. The suburbs or regions you service. An enquiry from outside the area goes unticked.

Keep the list short. Qualifying questions are compulsory for the person filling in the form, so every extra one costs completions. Twelve answers is the ceiling, not the target, and a form with twelve options per question will lose the people you want most. One question with four or five answers will do more than three questions with ten.

Delivery and retention

The Leads page is where Google points you, but leads also arrive by email notification, CSV download, the Google Ads API, a webhook or Zapier. Google says each submission carries a Lead stage in the CSV, webhook and API outputs. It does not mention email notifications or Zapier, so send a test submission and see what lands in the inbox or the CRM before anyone relies on those.

Two limits are easy to miss. The CSV export only covers the last 30 days, and Google stores leads for 60 days. An account that relies on manual downloads needs a routine, and a CRM connection is the safer option.

What is still unclear

• Whether the qualified status reaches email notifications and Zapier. Google documents it only for CSV, webhook and API.
• How Smart Bidding treats the Qualified lead conversion action Google creates.
• How far it has rolled out.

What to do this week

Open each active lead form asset on a Search campaign and look at the custom questions. If the lead scoring section is there, tick the answers that describe a real prospect and leave the rest. If there is no custom question, add one on timeframe or service type, since without a question there is nothing to score. Three caveats from Google's documentation: qualifying questions are compulsory for the user, an existing form may need to be rebuilt to take one, and a new custom question can send the form to review and pause its campaigns until it is approved, so make the change outside peak hours. Then watch the Leads page for a week and compare the qualified share with what the sales team says about the same leads.

The cost of skipping this is a conversion column full of things that were never customers. We found that at scale on Meta, where welcome message views counted as conversions across seven accounts. Google's new tick box is a small thing, but it is a simple way to say, at the point of capture, which enquiries you actually want.