When a B2B company says its Google Ads leads are junk, the usual fix is to look at the leads: who filled out what, which ones the sales team ignored. By then the money is spent. Most of the junk was decided earlier, at the search, the ad, the landing page and the form, by people who typed the same words a buyer types and found nothing along the way that told them this wasn't for them.
This bonus chapter gathers those earlier filters into one place. It looks at what the twelve example companies in this guide actually ask on their forms, where their careers pages sit, the audience setting Google offers for job seekers, and the bots that fill out forms too. Then it ends with the one number that tells you whether any of it worked. It picks up from Chapter 13, where AI Max showed how quickly a loose setup fills with the wrong people.
Only 3 of the 12 B2B Companies We Checked Ask a Question That Sorts Buyers From Everyone Else.
We saved the contact and quote forms on the sites of the twelve example companies in Milwaukee that this guide follows and listed every field. Most want to know who you work for: 10 of the 12 companies ask for a company name on their contact or quote forms, and 8 make it required.
Very few ask anything that would separate a buyer from a browser. Only three of the twelve ask a qualifying question:
- An injection molder asks for estimated annual quantity, industry, material and project timeline.
- A mixing equipment maker asks for a project timeline and whether the buyer wants a formal or a budgetary quote.
- A storage rack maker asks how soon the buyer plans to purchase, from "Today" to "Budgetary purposes only."
The rest stop at contact details, a message box and, on several, how the visitor heard about the company or which department should get the message.
A company name field is a start, but a student can type "Marquette University" and a job seeker can type their last employer. A qualifying question does more. Practitioners suggest the kind of fields that cost a real buyer nothing and give everyone else pause:
- A dropdown for order size or annual quantity. A buyer knows roughly. A student doesn't, and a hobbyist who needs ten parts sees the minimum before your sales team does.
- A timeline question. "When do you need this?" with options from "this month" to "just researching" sorts the urgent from the curious without turning anyone away.
- A work email. One agency's B2B clients told it free email addresses were off-limits, because their sales teams wouldn't even look at those leads. Requiring a work email is stricter than many small firms want, but asking for one and flagging the free addresses for the sales team is a fair middle ground.
Jyll Saskin Gales, who used to work at Google, suggests the same kind of dropdowns, for company size or starting budget. Our view is to keep it to one or two questions. Every extra field costs some real buyers too, and the goal is to sort leads, not to make them work.
Careers Is a Main-Menu Link on 5 of the 12 B2B Sites We Checked. A Job Seeker From Your Ad Finds It Fast.
The second filter is the site itself. On five of the twelve sites we checked, careers is a top-level item in the main menu, labeled "Careers" or "Employment" on four of them, and, at the staffing agency, a menu item aimed at job seekers comes first. On three more it sits inside an About dropdown, and on four it isn't in the header at all.
There's nothing wrong with recruiting on your own website. Manufacturers, distributors and logistics firms are hiring, and a visible careers page helps. The trouble is the Google Ads visitor. Someone who searched "cnc machinist" and clicked your ad is one tap from the careers page and one more from your quote form, where an application by mistake becomes a lead your sales team has to read. In Chapter 1, job seekers showed up even in the Google reviews of the twelve companies, mostly at the staffing agency.
Two fixes keep recruiting and ads apart:
- Send ads to pages without the careers link in the main menu, or at least to product pages built for buyers, as Chapter 4 recommends.
- Exclude the careers pages from any setting that lets Google pick landing pages, as covered in Chapter 13.
A B2B company that also recruits machinists or drivers through Google Ads should keep that spend in a separate hiring campaign, counted by submitted applications rather than quote requests. Keep that conversion out of the goal your sales campaigns bid on. Otherwise every application looks like a lead to Google's bidding, and the account slowly learns to find more applicants. The staffing agency in our set shows why this matters: most of its ads speak to workers, which is right for its business, but only if the worker conversions and the client conversions are counted separately.
You Can Tell Google to Skip People Hunting for Manufacturing Jobs. It Won't Do It Unless You Ask.
The third filter is the audience. Google's list of in-market audiences includes job-seeker segments, among them people in the market for manufacturing jobs, construction jobs and transportation and utilities jobs. When we checked the Google Ads API, those segments were available for Search campaigns. Google's help page says audience exclusions can be added to Search campaigns, though not during campaign creation: you add them to a campaign that already exists. The same page also says exclusions apply only to first-party data, so after you add one, check that it shows as active in the campaign's audience settings.
Practitioners disagree on how hard to push. One specialist who runs accounts for managed IT firms routinely excludes people in the market for jobs. Another, on a B2B marketing podcast a few years ago, warned against excluding careers-page visitors outright, because real prospects sometimes read the careers page to learn about a company's culture, and suggested lowering bids for them instead.
Our approach is in between, in this order:
- Negative keywords first. The job and training words from Chapter 5 stop the obvious searches before they reach the auction.
- Ad copy second. The line that names the buyer from Chapter 8 turns away many of the people who get through.
- The job-seeker audience exclusion third, added once the campaign is running, for the segments that match your industry.
Bots Fill Out B2B Forms Too. Half the 12 Sites Showed No Sign of reCAPTCHA on Their Forms.
The fourth filter is the least glamorous. Of the twelve companies' forms, six showed Google's reCAPTCHA in the page code. The other six didn't, at least not in what we could see.
Bots matter more in Google Ads than elsewhere because of what happens next. A bot submission counts as a conversion. If the account bids on form fills, Google learns to find more of whatever produced it. One B2B agency put the problem plainly: a robot can submit a form, and so can a job seeker. Google's own guide to lead generation agrees, listing qualifying questions, reCAPTCHA on landing pages and forms, and server-side checks as ways to protect lead quality.
If your form has no reCAPTCHA, add one. If it already has one and spam still gets through, a hidden field that bots complete and humans never see is a cheap second check your web developer can add in an afternoon.
Phone leads need a filter too
Many B2B buyers call instead of filling out a form, and calls have their own junk: wrong numbers, sales pitches, job seekers asking whether you're hiring. Google now does some of the sorting by default. Its help page says call recording is turned on by default, that recorded calls are evaluated by AI and only qualified calls count as conversions, and that a call that can't be recorded counts if it lasts long enough. Recording only works when both numbers are in the US or Canada, callers hear a short automated message first, and it's skipped by default for some healthcare and financial services advertisers.
Two settings deserve a deliberate choice:
- The minimum call length. Our standard for most accounts is 30 seconds, long enough to drop hang-ups and wrong numbers. Some B2B specialists set two to five minutes, on the reasoning that a real quote conversation runs longer. That works for a firm whose calls are all quotes; it undercounts for a distributor whose best customers call in a quick reorder.
- Whether to let Google's AI decide. It's a reasonable first filter, but it isn't your sales team. Keep the qualified-call stage from Chapter 1 as the number you bid on, and treat Google's call verdict as a hint.
B2B Lead Quality Comes Down to One Number: the Share of Leads Your Sales Team Would Call Back.
Lead quality sounds like a feeling. It can be a number. The tracking from Chapter 1 already records two stages: every lead that arrives, and the ones the sales team marks as qualified. Divide the second by the first, by campaign, every month. That share is your lead quality.
For context, Jyll Saskin Gales has said some companies she meets see one marketing-qualified lead for every ten form fills. A B2B account doing much worse than that has a filter problem, not a bidding problem.
Watch what happens as the filters go in. Total leads usually drop. The share that's qualified should rise, and the cost per qualified lead should hold or fall. If total leads drop and the share doesn't move, the filter is cutting buyers too, and it's the one to loosen first. Run each change for at least a month before judging it; in a B2B account with a few dozen leads a month, a single week tells you very little.
Next: Distributors Can Bid on Your Brand, and Google Allows It
Chapter 15 covers channel conflict, when distributors and resellers show up in Google Ads on your own brand name. Every chapter is listed on the Google Ads for B2B guide home. If you want help building filters for your own account, see our Google Ads management.
