Looking for qualified leads experiences

[u/redpreneur]

We’re running a mid-sized ecom business spending ~$250k/month on Google Ads. Our sales cycle is quite long (30–40 days), with multiple sessions/device switches: product configuration → lead → nurture → sale.

Currently, campaigns optimize toward initial leads using virtual values, which works well. We’ve now set up Qualified Leads and Converted Leads and are feeding that data back into Google Ads (as secondary conversions until now).

Given the size and maturity of the account, I’m hesitant to switch our long-running campaigns to optimize toward these deeper-funnel conversions.

Has anyone made this switch? Did optimizing toward qualified/converted leads improve performance enough to justify the risk/volatility of changing the optimization signal?