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Before creating your first Google Ads campaign,
it’s important to think about your broader strategy and goals.
What are you hoping to achieve from your ad campaign, or from digital marketing in general?
In this video, you’ll learn how to think strategically about your goals,
so that you drive the actions that matter the most to your business.
They may range from broader business or marketing goals
to more tactical digital advertising goals.
At the highest level, the goal of most businesses is to increase top line revenue
and decrease costs, so they can ultimately be more profitable.
These objectives are typically measured through numerical key performance indicators,
or KPIs, for a specific time period, region or audience.
But not all businesses use the same metrics or vocabulary.
So it’s important to ask yourself:
What are your business objectives and metrics of success?
Your business goals should reflect your strategy.
They’ll likely depend on your competitive positioning,
the nature of the industry you are in,
and other external factors.
Examples of goals that businesses care most about are:
Growing profits,
expanding market share,
increasing customer lifetime value,
and building brand equity.
Let’s take a look at four broad business types and their specific goals.
First, Ecommerce.
These are all businesses that sell goods or services online.
These could be physical goods like gadgets, clothes and furniture.
Digital goods like software, eBooks and music.
Or even services such as tickets or travel insurance.
An Ecommerce business can have multiple goals.
For example, a primary goal could be to drive sales,
while a secondary goal could be to build a pipeline through brand awareness.
Ecommerce businesses may monitor many different KPIs,
but they likely care most about the number and value of sales.
However, many choose to focus on their secondary goal in order to drive their primary KPI,
such as moving people from low purchase intent to high purchase intent.
The next business type is Lead Generation.
These businesses typically focus on generating leads for products or services.
They care about the number of leads they receive,
how many convert to sales, and the value of those sales.
They may also care to track how many lead forms are started, but not completed.
A secondary goal could be to track when a purchase is completed offline.
Some examples that fall in this category are banks,
insurance companies, or even review websites trying to drive leads to an external business.
The next business type is an Omni-Channel business.
These are businesses that sell products online and offline at a retail location or franchise.
They might sell furniture, clothes, or appliances.
These businesses care about creating a seamless online to offline experience,
and driving in-store traffic.
Their main KPIs are typically volume of sales and the value of total online and offline sales.
Finally, let’s look at Consumer Goods businesses.
These are businesses that create products typically bought by consumers
through third-party distributors or retailers, both online and in-store.
This business type might sell food, personal care goods, and apparel.
Their KPIs mostly include the volume, value, and margin of sales measured for each retailer.
Identifying your business goals isn't always enough, you need marketing goals as well.
Learning about your customer's journey from start to finish
helps you connect your business goals to your marketing goals.
This will also help you uncover additional opportunities to be present
at various points throughout your customer’s journey.
The marketing funnel is a useful framework that helps you follow the consumer path to purchase.
The stages are there to help you determine where you should invest your marketing budget,
what marketing objectives to use, and how to measure success.
The funnel helps you think about your customer’s journey,
but keep in mind, the journey itself is rarely linear.
Customers hop around from stage to stage, and define their own purchase journey.
In the Build Awareness phase, it’s important to ensure that people know your business exists.
For example,
an Ecommerce business, may want to build awareness in order to acquire new customers
and increase sales or subscriptions.
In the Influence Consideration phase, you guide people to show interest in your brand.
If your existing customers are shopping for other products in the same category,
give them reasons to consider your brand.
For example,
a common goal for Lead Gen businesses, is to obtain high-quality leads.
Typical activities to drive consideration include whitepaper downloads,
online demos,
or ‘request-a-quote’ form submissions.
In the Drive Purchase phase, you lead potential customers to complete the purchase process.
For example,
an Omni-Channel business may achieve this through a ‘Buy Now’ button on an ad,
promoting a new store location, or by remarketing to interested customers.
This strategy can help increase the total units sold.
In the Grow Loyalty phase, you want to encourage potential customers
to purchase more, and advocate for your business.
This can be achieved by sending offers to existing customers, in turn reducing churn.
Now, it’s time to think about how digital advertising can help you
achieve your marketing objectives.
Start by asking: Who do you want to reach and how are you going to reach them?
First, let’s discuss reach.
Reach is an estimation of how many people, and in what locations they can see your ad.
This is usually tied to building awareness, consideration, and loyalty.
Second, let’s talk about frequency.
How many times did someone see your ad on average?
Frequency is generally connected to reach.
Within Google Ads, it’s helpful to look at metrics that help you best measure
your digital advertising goals.
Using the Ecommerce example, it’s important to consider how many people
interested in your product saw your ad online,
as well as how many times they saw it.
Within Google Ads, this can be measured by the metrics
‘Unique reach’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Video Views’,
‘Cost-per-thousand-impressions’ or ‘Cost-per-view’.
Third, let’s talk about engagement.
How did someone engage with your ad?,
did they click on it?,
did they watch the full video?,
or even better, did they share it with one of their peers?
This metric shows that your message has resonated,
so it sits between consideration and purchase, and is commonly used to measure loyalty.
Engagement can be measured through ‘video watch time’,
social interactions or clickthrough rate.
Finally, let’s talk about conversions.
How often did someone take a desired action after seeing your ad.
After clicking on your ad, did they engage with your website or download your app?
Conversions can be measured through Google Ads metrics such as clicks, CPC,
website visitors, purchases, or app installs.
Remember that each of these goal types are interconnected.
It’s helpful to map them out
before deciding on the different Google Ads campaign types you want to invest in.
Experimentation is key to understanding what works best for your business.
Now that you understand how to be strategic about your goals,
let’s dive into the fundamentals of measurement and attribution
in your Google Ads account.
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