Google Ads Campaign. Start With Setting Up a Goal

Goals – why do you need them and how to define them?

If you decide to invest in something, you probably expect it to be profitable. Thus, before launching a Google Ads campaign, you should define its goals – what do you aim at, which activities contribute to the successfulness of your business and what do you focus on? Do you want to increase the number of orders or inquiries from your customers or do you put more emphasis on the number of impressions of your blog? Knowing the answers enables you to optimally configure your Google Ads account and assess the effectiveness of individual marketing activities. Moreover, setting specific goals for your campaigns allows you to take advantage of numerous Google Ads functionalities such as more bidding options.

Make your goals SMART

• S – specific – they should be clear, simple and leaving no room for any misunderstandings,
• M – measurable – it should be possible to express them in numbers,
• A – achievable – they should be feasible,
• R – relevant – they should determine the progress and effectiveness of your business,
• T – time-based – they should have a specified time period in which the goals are planned to be achieved.

Although it may all sound too academic and pompous, after asking yourself a few questions, everything turns out to be clear and simple: why should you need a goal that can’t be measured in numbers and whose extent to which it’s been achieved can’t be assessed? Why to set infeasible goals that only demotivate you and your employees? Why to define a target whose analysis doesn’t change anything and every employee perceives it differently? For the abovementioned reasons, it’s advisable to consider whether your goals meet each of the above points – poorly defined objectives can not only be demotivating, they can also lead to financial losses and you certainly should want to avoid that.

The transaction, meaning purchase, is the main goal (conversion) when it comes to e-commerce. You can configure it both with the use of Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Goals – micro and macro conversions

While defining objectives of your campaign you should remember that the targets of your conversion can be divided into micro and macro ones. Macro-conversion is an activity that translates directly into the company’s profit and it’s usually connected with a completed purchase transaction or acquiring a new customer. On the other hand, micro-conversion is an action completed on the website, for example subscription to a newsletter. It indicates that the users are interested in your offer and it’s very likely that in the future their activities on the website will change into macro-conversion.

Exemplary macro-conversions:

• sending a contact form,
• purchasing a product,
• making an appointment online,
• telephone contact.

Exemplary micro-conversions:

• subscribing to the newsletter,
• clicking on the button on the website,
• entering the contact tab,
• adding a product to the shopping cart,
• visiting a specific subpage, e.g. a category or service page,
• viewing 10 subpages on the website,
• downloading a file from the website,
• using the search engine or filters on the website.

How to set conversions in Google Ads?

Ok, so you’ve defined your business goal and want to start track it in a Google Ads campaign. The easiest way to do that is to link your Google Ads and Google Analytics account and then transfer the targets set in Google Analytics to Google Ads. It can be done in 3 simple steps:

Step 1:

Link your Google Ads account to Google Analytics. Follow the instructions that can be found on the Google support page: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033961?hl=en

Step 2:

Define your goals in Google Analytics:

• Log in to Google Analytics accounts
• Click Admin in the bottom left corner of your account
• Click goals in the view column

• click +goal

• Choose a custom goal and clich next step

• Enter the name of the goal, for example in the shopping cart (as an example we create a goal for the customer visiting the shopping cart subpage. For this purpose, let’s assume that the URL to your shopping cart is yourwebsite.com/shoppingcart.html)
• Select the destination goal and click next

• In the details of the destination, select regular expression and type /shopping cart in the URL of the page. Note that the URL may look different for your site, therefore you need to verify this before creating a goal.

• Click Save

In this way you can create multiple goals such as more than 10 minutes spent on the site, visiting 10 subpages per session, going to the thank you for placing an order page or sending an inquiry.

Step 3.

Import conversions from Google Ads:

• Log in to your Google Ads account
• Go to tools in the top right corner
• Click conversions

• Click on the + sign
• Select import (import conversions from another system, including Google Analytics)

• Select Google Analytics and click next

• Select the goals you want to import and click import and continue

If you’ve implemented e-commerce on your site, apart from the created goals, you can also import e-commerce conversions (transactions) to your Google Ads account. This enables you to track some additional parameters in Google Ads, including conversion value, ROAS and various options allowing to choose your bidding strategy.

• After clicking on the name of the selected conversion you can modify its settings such as attribution model, conversion window or value assigned to the order.

For a more detailed description of these advanced methods of tracking conversions, go to: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722054?hl=en.

Goals – how do they work within a Google Ads campaign?

Remember not to confuse the goals (conversions) set at the Google Ads account with the goals set directly while creating your campaign. After selecting a goal, you’ll be shown different types of campaigns that will help you to achieve your objectives. You can set only one goal for each campaign and you can modify it in the campaign settings at any time you wish. The goal you focus on should be the same as what you’re most concerned about in a given campaign, for example it should concern sales or visits to the website.

[NOTE: While creating a Google Ads campaign, some users may be asked to select the type of campaign before specifying its goal]

Goals in the new version of Google Ads

To sum up:

To sum up, you can tell whether a given campaign works properly or not after defining and implementing conversions in Google Ads. Remember that preparing appropriate goals in accordance with the SMART principles before the start of your Google Ads campaign is a must. Thanks to this you’ll be able to track the effectiveness of your ads and optimize them in order to achieve the highest possible return on investment in advertising.

In case you have any problems with deciding which goals and budgets are the most appropriate for your business or you simply don’t have enough time to run a Google Ads campaign on your own, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to help you!