Oh, spare me the sanctimony. "Lead quality" is the go-to buzzword every agency tosses around to justify over-optimising on metrics that barely correlate with revenue. You know what's a real disservice? Burning through a client's budget on hyper-narrow targeting that never scales past 50 conversions a month, then claiming it's "quality."
Automated bidding can degrade-no argument there. But broad match? That's a tool, not a decision. The degradation usually comes from people setting up automated bidding without any guardrails or historical signal volume. If you've only got 500 conversions in the account, of course the algo is going to chase junk. That's not a platform problem, that's a strategy problem.
Bidding towards "lead quality" sounds noble until you realise most clients can't even define what a quality lead means beyond "filled in a form and didn't bounce." If you're not also layering in offline conversion tracking or at minimum lead scoring, you're just guessing. And guessing with automated bidding is a fast track to wasted spend.
so no, the disservice isn't failing to bid on quality-it's pretending there's a single bidding strategy that works for every account. Broad match + automated bidding can work, but only if you've got the data density and the stomach to let it run long enough to learn. Most people kill it after two days of bad leads and blame the algorithm.
