Contact forms in Google Ads – contact form configuration

Every second, Google handles more than 40,000 queries, adding up to an almost astronomical 3.45 billion daily questions. With each of these, there is a good chance that someone from your geographic area is typing the phrase into the search engine. What if they specifically want a service or product related to your company? Take advantage of this opportunity and create a Google Ads campaign to acquire leads through contact forms!

Google Ads – a few words about the tool

What is Google – we suspect that everyone knows it well, and there is no need to create a general outline of this company. We will only add the exciting fact that in 2022 the company exceeded the employment of 140,000 people worldwide – it is as if half the population of Katowice or all the residents of Zielona Góra worked at Google. This work is undoubtedly a lot because this company is not only servers that handle queries, that is, providing answers to the phrases we type in. It is also several valuable tools in everyday life and business. Gmail (email), Google Maps (maps with extensive functionality), Calendar, or Translator are the most popular. However, from the point of view of entrepreneurs and marketers, one of the essential functionalities is Google Ads, a package for advertising on Google’s search engine. When a relevant query is made, an adequately prepared campaign will display your product or site at the top of the results. Tracking of marketing results is possible with Google Analytics.

Before you create a form in Google Ads,…

… you will need to set up your Google Ads account and prepare your first ad. At this point, it’s worth spending at least an hour on a reasonable marketing plan: preparing your ad text, choosing keywords, and identifying the optimal location. Once the ad is created, of course, you will be able to manage it by adding ad campaigns, but the basis in the form of at least keywords will always affect search results. Therefore, check whether the suggested subject area corresponds to your offer. Otherwise, a vulcanization shop may show up for a search for “shock absorber replacement” and a veterinarian for the phrase “root canal treatment of a tooth.” You will be paid in CPV (cost-per-view) format for each missed display, even if the user does not interact further. Once you have created your ad, you will be taken to the Google Ads dashboard, where you can create ad campaigns.

Contact form in Google Ads

At the outset, it should be noted that launching contact forms is an activity that can cause slight confusion. People who have never worked in Google Ads before may have difficulty creating a contact form. The reason for this is that this functionality is a bit “buried” and requires following a strict pattern. In making this post, we spent a good few hours looking for the cause of one of the problems (in our case, it turned out that we had not paid for the campaign we had created, which meant that not all the options showed up for us right away). But let’s move on to our topic and get started with a new campaign – to do this, in the main menu, we click the round blue button with a plus sign and select “New Campaign.” When asked about the campaign’s goal, we point to the “Potential customers” box, and then in the conversion goals, we select the “Send contact forms” option. Selecting any other option will result in us being unable to add a form and thus not acquiring leads.

Google Ads setup for contact form

Google Ads already knows we will be interested in soliciting information from potential customers. What remains to be specified is that we will want to do so using the contact form we defined (as if we hadn’t just indicated that…). The next step, therefore, requires indicating the type of campaign: we chose the search network, under which suggestions for ways to achieve the goal immediately appeared – we are, of course, interested in “Submitting a contact form.” If we are planning more than one campaign, it is worth titling them so we can easily discern which ad will perform the tasks. Although Google promises us that we will already define our form in the next step, we will have to wait for that – now we have to prepare the ad’s content. So we do what Google Ads asks us to do, including specifying the audience, defining the advertising budget, or configuring the marketing parameters. And here, a considerable communication disadvantage for Google Ads should be noted – the instructions on the help page talk about searching for the “Resources” tab, which in our case… was not there. It was difficult to determine the reason for this, so after several minutes of nerves, we moved on.

Adding a contact form

After launching the campaign, on the left side of the tabs, you will see an option “Ads and extensions” (in the screenshot, there is no such tab because we only had a draft version of the campaign). We select the “extensions” option, then using the round blue button with a plus, we choose “contact form extension.” In the next step, we specify in which campaigns we want the contact forms to appear – they can be added to all ads, or you can select only one of the campaigns. You will be taken to the contact form window, where you will be asked to fill in the company name, form name, and form description. Next, select the questions (up to 10 options) you want to ask in the contact form – this could be a request for your phone number, location, or email address. They can also be questions related to a specific industry, and you can add your questions – but remember the limit of 10 options.

In the next step, Google will ask you to add a URL link to the privacy policy – unlike Facebook Ads, Google Ads treats this element as mandatory. The culmination of your form will be a thank you for filling out the form and creating a CTA (Call-To-Action). Make sure the entire form looks exactly as you want it to, and save the prepared scheme. The data acquired by the Google contact form will be displayed in the extensions table. You can easily import such prepared information into CRM systems that can be configured with Google Ads.

At this point, it is essential to mention that Google also offers campaigns solely to collect contact forms, not as an extension to an ongoing campaign. According to information obtained from the U.S. advertising giant, such an option is only enabled on Google Ads accounts with over $50,000 in spending. Well…

Importing requests from Google Ads contact forms into the CRM system

Setting up a campaign extension that collects contact information for potential customers requires campaign managers to transfer the data to sales and contact persons. It will significantly facilitate the work and speed up contact time, which is crucial to sales success, to link Google Ads contact forms to the CRM system. SalesWizard CRM enables integration with Google Ads through the use of webhooks mechanisms. You can read more about CRM integration with Google Ads submissions here.