One of the most important steps before activating your PPC campaign is setting goals to determine your success. Even if you spent hours doing keyword research and crafting the most compelling ad copy, it’ll be difficult to determine how well your campaign is doing, if you don’t set those goals from the beginning. So what type of goal should you set? This largely depends on the goal of the overall business, but one general rule is to set specific metrics that quantify what success means to your business. For example, it’s easy to say that you want to increase website traffic, but how many clicks would you consider success? To quantify this, you may want to set a goal that you want to hit 1,000 clicks per week. In addition to setting goals for ad clicks, you can also focus on other areas of your campaign depending on the dynamic of your company. Generally, your goal will fall into one of the following three sections:
1. Increasing Brand Awareness
One of the most common goals a business has when it comes to marketing is to increase brand awareness, but the main issue with this in traditional forms of advertising is that it’s difficult to quantify. This is where PPC advertising has a leg up. You can quantify the impact your campaign has on users’ awareness by looking into the number of clicks and impressions your ads receive. If you want to focus on how many time your ad is shown, you could set a target number of impressions you want to hit each week. You can also gauge awareness by focusing on click-through-rate to see what percentage of searchers who saw your ad actually engaged with it.
2. Increasing Return on Ad Spend
If you sell products online, you should probably have at least one goal related to e-commerce. We usually recommend tracking ROAS, which shows the amount you make in revenue for every dollar you spend in advertising money. This is a good metric to track because it focuses on the profitability of your campaigns while also taking cost into account. If you just set a target of a certain number of conversion of amount of revenue per week, this wouldn’t guarantee profitability. However, if you determine that you’d need to make at least $5 for every $1 you spend in AdWords to be profitable, you can optimize your AdWords account toward this goal. You can track this in AdWords by adding the column ‘Conv. value/cost’.
3. Generating More Leads
If your company’s main focus is to increase the amount of leads coming in or you want to supplement your e-commerce, you’ll need to set targets accordingly. In this scenario, you’ll want to focus on decreasing the amount you pay for each lead. To do this, you’ll want to make sure that your conversion tracking is set up properly by creating a separate conversion action specifically to capture leads. Once you have this set up, you’ll be able to track your progress by looking into the cost per conversion to see the average amount cost for each lead.
So now that you’ve come up with goals it’s time to run those campaigns! The key to success is constantly monitoring your account and making adjustments that work toward your goal. Been hitting your goal consistently? It might be time to set new goals so you can keep aiming higher!