Some junk is normal, but half is a targeting and goal problem rather than a fact of the industry. The most common cause is that the account is optimising toward calls rather than toward booked jobs.

On this page

• Why is my Google Ads account producing junk calls?
• What should I check first, and in what order?
• What actually fixes junk calls from Google Ads?
• Which number should I judge lead quality on?

Why is my Google Ads account producing junk calls?

Smart Bidding maximises whatever you feed it. Point it at raw calls and it will find you the cheapest people who will call — price shoppers, wrong-service callers, people outside your area.

The bidding is working exactly as instructed. Nothing is broken.

What should I check first, and in what order?

1. Check what the campaign bids on. Not what the account-level flags say — what the campaign's goal configuration says. A conversion action set to secondary still bids if it sits inside a custom goal.

2. Check the call threshold. If any call counts as a conversion, the bidder has no quality signal at all. A duration threshold is a weak proxy, but it beats nothing.

3. Check the query mix. Segment search terms by intent: service plus buying signal, service with no signal, and research or DIY. If the junk clusters in one bucket, that is a negatives job — but validate across multiple windows before negating anything.

4. Check geography. Covered separately, and it is a bigger cause than most people expect.

5. Then look at the ad copy and the landing page. Copy that does not price-qualify attracts price shoppers. If you have a minimum call-out fee, saying so filters aggressively and cheaply.

What actually fixes junk calls from Google Ads?

Upload booked jobs as the conversion action. That moves the target from the top of the funnel to the point where the business earns something, and the junk problem largely solves itself because the bidder stops being rewarded for producing junk.

Two constraints when you do it:

Google will match only part of your uploaded jobs back to clicks — a measured 0.56 to 0.83 band across a real network, so your effective target is your stated target divided by the match rate — a 5× target at 0.6 match demands about 8× real. Fix the match rate before tuning targets.

And never inflate the value on a booking to force spend. The value is a fact about the business, not a lever.

Which number should I judge lead quality on?

Not the junk rate. Cost per booked job. A channel producing 50% junk at an acceptable cost per booked job is a channel that works — the junk is a cost of doing business, not a defect. A channel producing 20% junk at a terrible cost per booked job is the one to fix.

Related questions

Are Google Ads Smart Campaigns any good for a plumbing or electrical business, or should I switch to a normal Search campaign?

Switch. A Smart Campaign bids on Maximize Clicks — it is not optimising toward any conversion outcome at all. Read the full answer.

My Google Ads campaign has spent thousands with zero conversions — is the traffic bad or is something set up wrong?

Check what the campaign is allowed to bid on before you touch the traffic. A campaign spending thousands with zero conversions is far more often pointed at the wrong goal, or at a broken tag, than buying bad traffic. Read the full answer.

How do I track which calls came from Google Ads if the client won't use a call tracking number?

You can still get most of the way there with dynamic number insertion on the website and Google's own call reporting, but you should tell the client plainly what they are giving up — and the gap is bigger than they think. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-08-26.