Google Ads has introduced a tool for mapping what happens after someone becomes a lead. For B2B, that’s where the important bit begins.
It’s always a temptation to treat a completed enquiry form as a successful conversion. It isn’t, of course. It’s just an enquiry. And Google appears to be acknowledging this rather explicitly with a feature called ‘Lead Journey Mapping‘, a visual tool which lets advertisers describe what actually happens between somebody arriving on the website and eventually becoming a customer.
A journey might begin with a website visit, proceed to a contact form submission or telephone call, then move through a qualification stage and finally end with a completed sale or job. For many B2B businesses, that’s a much more realistic description of the world than “clicked advert, filled in form, job done”.
The immediate purpose of the tool is largely diagnostic. Google says advertisers can use it to define the important stages, identify gaps in tracking and see where offline conversion information might be brought back into Google Ads.
It does not, on its own, suddenly make campaigns perform better. Indeed, Google explicitly says that Lead Journey Mapping doesn’t directly affect short-term campaign performance.
But the thinking behind it is important. Consider the idea we discussed a couple of weeks ago. Suppose Campaign A produces 50 enquiries at a cost of £40 each, while Campaign B produces 20 enquiries at £70 each. On the usual Google Ads dashboard, Campaign A looks comfortably superior.
Then the sales team tells us that Campaign A produced two genuine opportunities and no sales, while Campaign B produced eight opportunities and three orders. Suddenly our £40 “conversions” don’t look quite so impressive.
This has always been the argument for feeding offline sales data back into advertising platforms wherever practical. Google’s new journey mapping simply makes the principle more visible: if the advertising system is being asked to optimise for business results, we need to tell it what a business result actually is.
That becomes increasingly important as we hand more bidding decisions to automation. An algorithm may be good at finding more of whatever we’ve told it to find. If we’ve defined the objective badly, it can simply become extraordinarily good at producing the wrong thing.
So perhaps the useful exercise here isn’t even switching on Google’s new feature. Maybe we should get marketing and sales together and draw the journey ourselves. What happens to an enquiry? Which stages matter? Where do prospects disappear? Which eventual outcomes can be connected back to the original advertising? And which advertising is actually producing customers?