Google Ads Lead Form Extensions: The complete guide to Google lead generation

TL;DR

• Google lead form extensions are now called lead form assets.
• They let users submit their details directly from the ad.
• They can lower friction and increase lead volume, especially on mobile.
• Lead quality can drop, so use qualifying questions and CRM tracking.
• Syncing leads automatically is a must in order to follow up fast and measure real conversions.

Every business owner knows that setting a strong lead generation strategy helps attract high-quality prospects. However, generating high-quality leads is not easy. In this article, we’ll explain how Google Ads lead form assets can help businesses capture leads more efficiently.

This includes Google lead form ads, as well as some Google Ads best practices and examples to follow. Additionally, you will discover how LeadsBridge’s integrations, as a Google Premier Partner, help you automate your advertising experience.

What are Google Ads lead form extensions?

Google Ads lead form extensions (now lead form assets) are lead-generation ads designed to help businesses drive leads. Lead forms can serve on Search (desktop or mobile), and can be used with Display and Performance Max. 

Lead form assets run on Search and Performance Max. Google dropped Display and Video support, so if you’re running lead forms there, don’t count on them serving much longer.

The lead data is collected as they search for a product or service, or when they type specific keywords on Google. These extensions can help various businesses across several industries, such as real estate, automotive, education, finance, B2B, travel, hospitality, and more.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use Google Ads for real estate, travel agencies, B2B, and retail, check out the articles below:

• A quick guide on Google Ads for real estate: How to write high-converting Google ads.
• The best travel agency ads to get inspired by.
• The complete guide to B2B ads: 5 strategies to follow.
• Google Ads for retail: How to generate more sales.

How do Google Ads lead form extensions work?

Google lead generation forms help capture new prospects with a simple call-to-action attached to a responsive form under the ad. It’s important that you know how to use them the right way to improve your Google Ads lead quality. 

Once users click on the ad, they are shown a Google-hosted form that is automatically pre-populated with their Google account data.

This form comes with a call-to-action (i.e., “Apply now”) to submit the form with a single tap (see an example below).

Reasons to use Google lead form extensions

For many years now, mobile users have accounted for over half of web traffic worldwide. Fewer people are using laptops to browse the internet or social media sites. 

Apart from building optimized forms, slow landing pages remain a major problem for advertisers. People give up while they wait. The longer a page takes to load, the more of your paid traffic leaves before seeing your offer at all.

To address these issues, advertising platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google have been rolling out new solutions for lead generation, such as native lead ads.

Native lead generation ads are designed to target audiences while they navigate on mobile.

Like Facebook lead ads and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, Google has its own native lead generation ads—namely, Google Ads lead form extensions.

Although Google lead form ads can drive more leads by reducing friction, they may trade off some lead quality.

Often, lead forms collect limited information, which can make it harder to assess lead quality. So how can they create seamless campaigns without compromising on some or all of their marketing efforts?

Google Ads’ lead forms and YouTube ad campaigns partially solve this pain point. Since users are actively searching for either your company or a product or service related to your offer, their narrowed-down interest can be seen as a synonym for quality.

This way, companies can drive large numbers of leads without giving up on quality.

Watch our webinar to get the most out of the Google Ads suite for better ad results and higher conversions.

How to create a Google lead form extension

Before you can turn lead forms on, your account needs to qualify. Google used to require $50,000 in lifetime ad spend. That rule went away in July 2026. Now you need a clean policy record, Advertiser Verification, and roughly $1,000 spent in the account (or $15,000 across your accounts). Most active advertisers clear this without noticing.

A few other things to know before you start:

• Lead forms run on Search and Performance Max only. Display and Video are no longer supported.
• Your campaign needs conversion-focused bidding, optimized toward the lead form conversion goal.
• On Search, lead forms work with Responsive Search Ads. Older formats like expanded text ads aren’t eligible.
• You can attach a lead form at the account level or campaign level. If you have both, the campaign one wins. If the campaign one gets disapproved, Google falls back to the account one.
• Have your privacy policy URL ready. You can’t collect user information without it.

Then follow these steps:

1. Log in to Google Ads and go to Campaigns.
2. Click the plus (+) button and select New campaign.
3. Choose Leads as your objective, then click Continue.
4. Add the “Submit lead form (Google hosted)” conversion goal. This tells Google to optimize for form fills.
5. Select Search or Performance Max as your campaign type, then continue.
6. Enter your campaign settings: budget, bidding, and targeting.
7. To add the lead form, scroll to the Assets section, click More asset types, then select Lead forms. In the editor, select New lead form.

For Performance Max, you build the lead form at asset group level rather than campaign level.

1. Fill out the form details

Add a headline, business name, and description (up to 200 characters).

Then pick your questions. You need at least one. Standard options include:

• Name (full name, or first and last separately)
• Email or Phone number (only one of these can be optional, not both)
• City, Postcode, State, Country
• Company name, Job title, Work email, Work phone number

Optional but worth doing: click +Question to add qualifying questions. You can write your own or pick from Google’s categories. These filter out people who aren’t serious.

Use the toggle switch to mark questions as optional where it makes sense. Then add your privacy policy URL.

For Search campaigns, you can also upload a background image. Recommended size is 1200 x 628 at a 1.91:1 ratio.

2. Set the submission message

Add a headline, description, call to action, and landing page URL if you have one. Your submission CTA can be different from your ad CTA if that suits the offer better.

3. Set up lead delivery

Decide how leads reach you. Options are CSV download, email notifications, webhook, Zapier, or the Google Ads API.

If you’re syncing to a CRM through LeadsBridge, paste your Webhook URL and Webhook Key into the lead delivery settings, then send test data to confirm it works.

4. Finish up

• Choose your optimization setting: More qualified or More volume.
• Turn on phone number verification if you want to filter out fake numbers.
• Accept the Terms of Service if this is your first lead form.
• Click Save to attach the form, then publish your campaign.

You’re now ready to start collecting and syncing leads.

Here are some other top Google Ads lead form extension integrations you can use:

Check out all the available integrations for connecting Google Ads lead form assets with your marketing tools.

How to improve lead quality with Google lead forms

Google lead forms can bring in a lot of leads quickly. But not all of them will be high quality. Some people submit the form without any real intent, simply because it’s easy to do.

In order to drive better leads, it’s worth filtering out low-intent customers before they reach the sales team.

Opt for phone number verification. 

This is the easiest fix right now, as Google can send a text verification to a number that the user will have to enter before submitting the form. 

By doing so, fake numbers, bad numbers, and casual inquirers are effectively filtered out, allowing your sales team to follow up on legitimate leads. The trade-off here is volume: using this option will reduce the total number of leads.

Use the “More qualified” optimization setting. 

When building your form in Google ads, there is an option to select between “More volume” and “More qualified,” and the latter will allow Google to favor the collection of leads that are more likely to engage. This comes at the expense of total leads collected, as fewer people will fill out the form.

Add custom questions. 

Adding a couple of qualifying questions to your form will allow you to separate real leads from tire kickers and will help your sales team to prioritize following up on the most promising leads. Some example questions might include:

• Job title
• Budget
• Timeline 
• What they’re looking for

Adding questions to a form might seem counterintuitive as it will reduce the number of people filling it out, but will greatly improve the quality of the leads. 

You will get less overall leads as a result of these adjustments, but they will be better quality and more suitable to follow up on, and your cost per qualified lead should decrease as a result, despite the increase in cost per lead.

You can also turn on phone verification. 

The user gets a one-time code by text and has to enter it. Fake numbers don’t get through. This is the single fastest way to stop your sales team wasting time on junk leads.

Google Ads automation and LeadsBridge as a Google Premier Partner

LeadsBridge is a Google Premier Partner. This means LeadsBridge has access to direct Google support, which benefits our customers.

All our Google integrations are Google-certified, indicating that LeadsBridge offers advanced Google product training, direct Google support, Customer Match, and Offline Conversions tracking.

In addition, LeadsBridge offers a wide range of integrations with Google Ads lead form extensions so that you can create your Google form directly in the app.

How to integrate Google lead form extensions with your CRM

If using a webhook integration to sync leads to its CRM, the CRM manager must ensure that it works correctly and adequately.

Otherwise, the form extension will stop working altogether. Besides, a dysfunctional webhook URL will trigger malfunctioning errors that result in the rejection of the lead form.

That’s where a trusted third-party platform such as LeadsBridge comes in.

An automated integration helps create an automated data bridge between the CRM and the Google lead form campaigns. Check our ultimate guide to the best Google Ads – CRM integrations.

How to run remarketing ads with lead form extensions

Lead forms help to get people to enter the sales funnel, but many of them will not be ready to make a purchase straight away. Google’s Customer Match simplifies remarketing to these users by allowing you to target them based on their stage in the funnel.

Using first-party data directly from your CRM, Customer Match can segment your audience into different groups, including: 

• Everyone from those who’ve had a sales call to those who simply signed up to your newsletter
• And those that filled out a lead form but then didn’t return are another group, and each will need a tailored remarketing message.

Customer Match works by uploading customer identifiers to Google, which then hashes them using SHA-256 before storing them on Google’s servers. 

This means you can target your remarketing audiences on Google Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube and Gmail.

Before getting started with Customer Match and segmenting your audiences, a few things should be noted:

• Your account must be in good standing, including having a healthy policy compliance status and an up-to-date billing setup with Google.
• Uploaded customer lists will expire if they’re not actively updated. 
• Individual users who’ve been matched to an ad will stop being targeted after 540 days. 
• Also, for Customer Match lists to stay active, they must have a minimum of 100 total active users. This means a list uploaded once and never touched again will slowly stop performing.
• If you’re remarketing to users in the EEA, you must obtain consent to use their personal data to send them ads.

Are you building out connections to their CRM for the first time? Then your new customers can only connect to Customer Match via the Data Manager API. The Ads API will stop accepting new customers on April 1, 2026.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to develop your audience with Google Customer Match.

How to track conversions for Google Ads lead form extensions?

A company always needs to make an effort to drive leads that convert into sales.

Tracking real conversions in an all-inclusive PPC reporting template can provide insights on return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS). 

To track the quality of the newly collected leads, you need to measure conversions via a full-funnel strategy. Google allows advertisers to master the sales funnel using its conversion tracking tool.

Conversions are not necessarily purchases. Instead, any time a visitor responds to a call to action and completes the desired goal, they have converted while becoming identified prospects in the process. 

Generally, companies run cross-channel advertising campaigns and target audiences on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Search. So, it becomes critical to understand which channel drives the most conversions.

The best way to measure where the conversion came from is to push first-party data from your CRM to Google. You can download this data from the CRM segment of people who booked a 30-minute introductory call. Then, import it into Google to match it with the leads coming from the lead form campaign.

A step-by-step guide on how to track conversions for Google Ads lead form extensions

If you’re syncing leads to your CRM automatically, you still need conversion tracking in Google Ads. Otherwise, you can’t really point out which ads are producing real business and which are just spending money.

Step 1: Turn on the lead form conversion goal

Google-hosted form submissions are tracked for you. You just need to tell your campaign to optimize for them.

• In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions.
• Add the Submit lead form (Google-hosted) conversion goal to your campaign.
• That’s it for form fills. There’s nothing to install on your website, because the submission never touches your site.

Step 2: Set up lead delivery

Getting leads out of Google and into your CRM fast is what makes the follow-up work. You’ve got a few options: a webhook, Zapier, email notifications, or the Google Ads API.

If you’re using LeadsBridge:

• Create a new bridge with Google Ads lead form assets as the source and your CRM as the destination.
• Copy the Webhook URL and Google Key out of LeadsBridge.
• In Google Ads, open your lead form asset and find the lead delivery options.
• Paste in the URL and Key, then click Send Test Data to check it’s working.

Step 3: Track what happens after the form

A form fill isn’t a sale. To know which ads bring in leads that actually close, you need to send outcomes back to Google.

That’s what enhanced conversions for leads does. When a lead turns into a booked call, a signed contract, or a paying customer, you upload that back to Google, and it matches the outcome to the original ad click. Google can then bid toward the ads producing real customers instead of just form fills.

Two things changed in 2026 that matter here:

• Enhanced conversions for web and for leads are now a single on/off setting. You don’t configure them separately anymore, and existing accounts were migrated automatically.
• Since June 15, 2026, these uploads run through the Data Manager API. The old Google Ads API route is blocked for anyone who wasn’t already using it. If you’re setting this up fresh, use Data Manager.

Step 4: Check it’s actually recording

• Submit a test lead through your own ad.
• Go to Goals and then Conversions and look for the status Recording conversions.
• Add these columns to your campaign view: Conversions, Cost per Conversion, Conversion Rate.

Now you can see which ads are bringing in leads and which are just costing you money.

Which assets should run alongside your Google lead form extension?

A lead form rarely runs on its own. Google picks which assets to show based on what it thinks will earn the click, so what you place around the form influences how and whether it gets served or if someone trusts it enough to submit it.

Here are three Google Ad extension examples you might consider worth attaching:

• Callouts are short trust signals (under 25 characters) that pre-empt objections before the form ever opens. For example, “No obligation quote,” “Licensed & insured,” “No credit card required.” That’s your unique selling point added to your ad.

• Sitelinks are a direct route for searchers who aren’t ready to hand over a phone number. Point them at pricing, reviews, or case studies rather than the homepage. They can be up to six on desktop (fewer on mobile), so lead with your strongest.
  They are commonly used to send users directly to specific pages on your website:

• Call assets are even better than a form for urgent or high-ticket services where people would rather talk it through than type. These assets basically let you add a phone number or call button to your ads, which they can click and make a direct call.

Keep in mind that on mobile, a call asset and a lead form compete for the same tap. If your team closes better on the phone, let the call lead. If follow-up happens by email anyway, keep the form primary and use callouts to do the reassurance work.

How do these assets show up in live ads across retail, SaaS, healthcare, and real estate? See our roundup of Google Ad extension examples.ategy that converts here.

What are Google Ads enhanced conversions for leads?

Enhanced conversions for leads links the leads you collect back to the ads that produced them. It doesn’t rely on cookies. Instead, it matches your own CRM data to the original ad click.

Here’s how it works. When someone becomes a lead, Google stores a hashed version of their details along with a click ID called the GCLID. 

Later, when that lead turns into a booked call or a signed deal or a sale, you send that result back to Google. Google matches it to the click. Now you can see which ads bring in customers instead of just form fills.

What happens without this? Every lead looks the same. But with it, Google can bid toward the ads that bring in people who actually buy.

Keep in mind that enhanced conversions for web and for leads are now a single setting instead of two. Google merged them and moved existing accounts over automatically, so you no longer pick between implementation methods.

How do enhanced conversions for leads work?

You add a Google tag to your website’s lead form. When someone fills it in, the tag sends their hashed details and the GCLID to Google.

Later, when that person becomes a customer, you send that outcome back to Google. Google matches it to the original click, so you can see which ads produced real business.

How to set up enhanced conversions for leads?

Step 1: Turn on conversion tracking.

Check that conversion tracking is running in your Google Ads account. If it isn’t, create a conversion action first.

Step 2: Accept the customer data terms.

Opt in to enhanced conversions in your account settings and accept the terms. You can’t upload customer data until you do.

Step 3: Set up your tagging.

Add the Google tag to your site, either directly or through Tag Manager. Google’s tagging instructions walk through it.

Step 4: Connect your data source.

Uploads now run through Data Manager. Connect your CRM there, or use a partner integration like LeadsBridge to send outcomes back automatically.

One thing to keep in mind. Once everything is live, leave it alone for a while. Your campaigns need time to gather data before the numbers mean anything.

Why bother with this at all? For three good reasons:

• Setup is straightforward using Tag Manager or the Google Ads interface.
• You can see which ads bring in leads that actually turn into customers.
• Google can bid toward those ads instead of treating every form fill the same.

FAQs

Key takeaways

Google Ads lead form extensions make it easy for users to submit a form. That too, without interrupting their navigation experience, like being directed to another landing page.

However, businesses should also implement more in-depth analytics to track real conversions. These assessments should analyze the performance of lead form extensions and video action campaigns.

To do so, it’s key to integrate their CRM with their Google Ads account, ideally through an official Google partner and automation platform, such as LeadsBridge.  

Discover all the possible integrations for Google Ads lead form extensions to get the most out of your marketing strategies.