To ensure your campaign gets the results you’re looking for, you must define and communicate your PPC goals to your agency. Even better, you should define your goals with your agency’s help.
Choosing Your Goals
Advertising campaign goals fit into four main categories:
- Increase Awareness
- Increase Audience
- Increase Leads
- Increase Sales
Ask yourself: what is most important to my business?
Before you answer, remember the first rule of business: “Make more money than you spend!”
This being said, I recommend that you tie your goals to the most important goal for any company, which is profit!
Tie Your Business Goal to Advertising Goals
The profit goal sounds obvious, but so many lose sight of this objective for two reasons:
- There are many data points your agency account manager uses to optimize performance, and it clouds the picture.
- The path from an ad click to a sale is not easy, and sometimes it is difficult to track.
You must understand the relationship of your bottom line goals to what can be realistically measured in a campaign.
An online business that makes sales on its website can easily tie the campaign to its profit and sales goals. Instead, if your business model generates leads or phone calls to close sales at a later date, the PPC campaign can only track those leads.
A critical step, commonly missed, is partnering with your agency to connect campaign leads to realizing revenue from those leads.
Once you have closed that loop, you’ll have all the details you need to optimize your campaigns fully. Also, you’ll be able to take advantage of the fact that most of your competitors don’t do this.
You’ll need to collaborate with your developers and agency to close the gap between a lead or sale via Google Analytics and your CRM or whatever you use to track leads and sales.
You can calculate ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) when you attribute revenue to PPC campaigns. This is a key performance indicator (KPI), which you can use for planning, forecasting, and growing your business.
If your goal is to increase sales by 20% and your website measures leads, you can work backwards to determine how many leads are needed to achieve that goal. The lead goal is easy to measure and manage and becomes the main focus of your PPC campaign.
Get More for Less
If you communicate to your agency that you want more for less, realize you are creating conflicting goals. This is not to say that campaigns shouldn’t be optimized – that is absolutely a top priority of any account manager: to get as many conversions as possible for the best price possible with all the strategies, tools, and techniques we have at our disposal.
However, Google Ads is an auction, and by its very nature, there is more exposure and traffic available to those who are willing to pay more.
A Better Method
Instead of creating a goal of “get more for less,” you should work with your agency to analyze and determine your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) goal.
Also, consider what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. This number is a powerful way to maximize your advertising investments. You can then optimize a campaign for leads or sales at this CPA.
You will be more visible than your competitors if you improve your business model to increase your CPA.
Be Specific
The more specific you can be with your goals, the easier it will be to measure whether your campaigns are successfully meeting them.
For example, if your goal is to “get more leads,” how will you measure success?
Will you be happy if there are one or two more leads than last month? Probably not. If you set your intention to “grow our leads by 10% over last quarter”, then you can measure success, and your agency will have a clear picture of what you expect from their efforts.
Be Realistic
PPC campaigns can go through different stages: growth, plateau, or expansion. Also, campaigns are affected by seasonality, competition, and search behavior. These factors are out of anyone’s control.
As you enter new expansion phases, manage your expectations. Expect a new channel or strategy to provide the same ROI as an optimized campaign.
Set testing budgets for your campaigns to allow you and your account manager to experiment with new ideas to uncover additional lucrative sources.
Set both short-term and long-term PPC goals
This is where you will need to assess your strategy and define its scope. This will allow you to set a timeframe for achieving your goals. You can include both short-term and long-term goals within this timeframe.
When planning to implement a PPC strategy, you must define a timeframe. You can set short-term goals that you can expand later and long-term goals that will allow you to evaluate how well your strategy is working for you.
Conclusion
Coming up with the right lead generation strategy and implementing it is not easy and requires a lot of planning. This is why you need to hire the best PPC agency to meet all your strategic needs.
Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency
- A small change to the website increased the conversion rate by 133%
- How an online medical supply store managed to use Google’s dynamic campaigns to its advantage and get 20 extra leads per month
- How do you increase sales with Google Ads for integrated playground equipment
Contact us for more information.
