More leads or better leads? Optimize for what your business needs

There’s a familiar conversation in almost every marketing organization: “We need more leads.” Then, a few weeks later: “The leads we’re getting aren’t good enough.”

So the marketing team tightens targeting, changes creative, adds qualification requirements, and raises the bar for conversion. Lead volume drops, and the cycle begins again.

The problem is the assumption that lead quantity and lead quality are competing strategies. They’re different growth objectives that require different inputs, signals, and channel levers.

The question you should be asking is: “What does the business need right now, and have we given our advertising platforms the signals necessary to achieve it?”

Start with the business objective, not the media metric

The first mistake is jumping directly into channel metrics. If the business says it needs 30% more leads, the media team shouldn’t automatically start optimizing toward cost per lead.

If the business says it needs more revenue from marketing, lowering CPL might actually make the problem worse. A $30 lead that never becomes a customer isn’t necessarily better than a $100 lead that consistently closes.

Think about the funnel as a progression: Impression → Click → Lead → Qualified lead → Opportunity → Customer. Your optimization strategy should reflect where the business is trying to create growth.

When volume is the priority

A volume objective makes sense when:

• You have insufficient leads to support sales capacity.

• A new campaign or market needs to build demand.

• Your sales team can handle substantially more opportunities.

• You’re intentionally expanding your addressable audience.

• You need more data before you can confidently identify quality signals.

In this scenario, you want to remove unnecessary constraints that prevent the platform from finding more potential customers.

When quality is the priority

A quality objective makes more sense when:

• Sales is overwhelmed with poor-fit leads.

• Lead-to-opportunity rates are weak.

• Close rates are declining.

• Customer acquisition costs are rising despite healthy lead volume.

• Sales capacity is limited.

• You have enough CRM data to identify what a valuable lead looks like.

You want to find more people who resemble those who ultimately become customers.

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If you need more leads, remove friction and expand the funnel

When volume is the priority, look for opportunities to increase eligible audience size and reduce barriers to conversion.

That might mean:

• Expanding keyword coverage.

• Broadening match types.

• Testing additional geographic markets.

• Expanding paid social audiences.

• Using automated audience expansion.

• Introducing additional inventory, such as Display, Demand Gen, YouTube, or other video placements.

• Testing shorter forms.

• Reducing unnecessary qualifying questions.

• Creating additional landing pages or offers.

• Increasing creative variety.

Google Search

For volume, look beyond the handful of exact queries that already perform well.

Expand keyword coverage and give Google’s automation more room to find incremental demand. Broad match and automated bidding can help when conversion tracking and negative keyword management are strong enough to protect against obvious waste.

You can also expand beyond Search into Google’s broader inventory when incremental volume is the goal. But there’s an important caveat: More inventory means more responsibility for your conversion signals.

If Google is rewarded for every form submission, it has little reason to distinguish between a future customer and someone who submitted a form simply because it was easy.

Paid social

Paid social can also be useful when reach and lead volume are the priority. The volume-oriented playbook generally means giving the algorithm more room to work:

• Broader audiences.

• Automated placements.

• More creative variations.

• Fewer targeting restrictions.

• Lower-friction lead forms.

• More conversion opportunities.

The objective is to maximize the number of people who can potentially enter the funnel without unnecessarily restricting the algorithm.

That doesn’t mean “target everyone.” It means being intentional about which constraints are actually helping performance and which are simply limiting scale.

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If quality is the priority, teach the platforms what ‘good’”’ means

This is where many lead-generation programs break down.

The advertising platform sees 1,000 form submissions. Your CRM sees 1,000 leads → 300 qualified → 75 opportunities → 20 customers.

If the platform only receives the first data point, it doesn’t know what happened to the other 999 people.

You’re asking an increasingly sophisticated machine-learning system to optimize with an incomplete definition of success. The solution is to close the feedback loop.

Google’s current lead generation framework supports qualified-lead and converted-lead conversion goals, allowing advertisers to feed deeper-funnel outcomes back into Google Ads. Google says these goals can provide more information for optimization and help advertisers balance lead volume and quality.

Meta’s Conversions API similarly connects CRM and other first-party data to its optimization systems. Meta says advertisers can use down-funnel lead data to help optimize for people more likely to become customers rather than simply maximizing lead submissions.

In other words, the conversion doesn’t necessarily have to be the form fill.

It can be what happens after the form fill.

Dig deeper: How to improve Google Ads lead quality with CRM data

Google Search

When quality is the priority, consider optimizing toward a deeper-funnel event:

• Qualified lead.

• Sales-qualified lead.

• Opportunity.

• Application.

• Purchase.

• Closed customer.

The challenge is finding the lowest-funnel event with enough volume to provide a useful signal. If you generate only a handful of customers each month, optimizing exclusively toward customers may not provide enough data for effective automated bidding.

A higher-volume but still meaningful event — such as qualified leads or opportunities — may be the better optimization point. Choose the deepest conversion that still gives the platform enough signal to learn.

Paid social

The same principle applies to Meta and other paid social platforms.

Connect CRM data where possible and use your actual business outcomes to inform optimization. Meta specifically supports sending down-funnel CRM data through the Conversions API so its systems can learn which leads are more likely to convert.

Help the platform find people who are more likely to become customers, rather than simply people who submit forms.

Don’t overlook creative: It can be a quality filter

Creative is one of the most underappreciated levers in lead quality. Your messaging determines who recognizes themselves in your offer.

An ad that simply says “Get started today” is likely to attract a broader audience than one that communicates something specific about the product, price, experience, eligibility, or outcome.

That isn’t necessarily bad. But creative can function as a qualifier . When quality is the priority, make your value proposition more explicit. Tell people:

• Who the product is for.

• What problem it solves.

• What makes it different.

• What the commitment looks like.

• What the next step requires.

You may see CTR or raw lead volume decline. That’s OK if the people who remain are more likely to progress through the funnel.

When volume is the priority, the opposite may be appropriate. Test broader messages, more entry points, and more creative concepts designed