The most common mistake I see many companies make when it comes to digital marketing is not being clear about campaign objectives.
And another mistake, perhaps even worse, is having a multi-target campaign.
With numbers in hand and backed by the experience of more than 15,000 campaigns, I can assure you:
1. If you have made a spectacular video of your business/product and you promote it online, 99% of the time, the campaign you will run will be a viewing campaign, not a conversion campaign.
What does that mean?
That the goal is to get users to watch your video, not to get them to buy, because they are at a different point in the sales funnel.
2. They've told you that a Google Ads Display advertisement for your business has had who knows how many millions of clicks, but no one can tell you the conversion rate (which is the % between how many people have clicked the ad and how many have converted) or how many sales it has generated.
Why?
Because in many cases, we're talking about brand awareness and reach or brand consideration campaigns, not conversion. Branding campaigns have a unique objective: to raise awareness and visibility of your product or service.
There's a fundamental aspect of Google Ads that I always explain to my team and my clients:
Each Google Ads campaign has to have a single objective.
Because each user is at a different point in the purchase decision or at a different place in the conversion funnel.
This is why Google Ads has 8 campaign objectives:
The classic funnel is divided into
1. Brand Awareness (unfamiliar with it)
2. Brand Recall (somewhat familiar)
3. Consideration (is thinking about it)
4. Conversion (becomes a customer)
5. (or 4+) Loyalty (customer retention)
And Biriwuanga specialises in points 4 and 5 (4+): conversions from non-customer to new customer. Together, we will analyse lead generation, lead nurturing and customer maintenance (remarketing, cross-selling and upselling).
Our key metrics are CPL (cost per lead – how much we have to invest to get a new lead) and CPA (cost per acquisition or conversion – how much we have to invest to get a sale/booking/new customer).
We know the CPL and CPA of each of our clients' campaigns at all times.
Why?
Because thanks to this data, we can measure the ROAS (return on ad spend) and ROI (return on investment) of the campaigns (example at the end of the blog post).
In addition, we will give a value to each conversion, from leads to sales, in order to get a real value in €uros (or USD, pounds or the account currency) of how much the campaign has generated.
How do we measure this?
We connect your Google Ads account with your website's Google Tag Manager and create conversion tags, variables and triggers (I don't want to go into too much detail on this because it's quite technical).
We use it to measure how many conversions each campaign has generated and what type of conversions it has generated.
Let's look at an example:
You have a hotel with a spa, event facilities and restaurant.
We promote your hotel on Google Ads because it's the company's core business, and we will soon know your cost per conversion of each booking.
What if the person who visits your hotel's website doesn't end up booking?
We will do remarketing campaigns and use behavioural analysis software to analyse the movements and flows to see where the problem lies.
What if this person doesn't book a room but does book a table for 4 people at the restaurant?
Okay, we'll call them cross-conversion and we will measure it thanks to Google Tag Manager.
And if at the end of a season or year you have new email addresses from customers, use them both for newsletters and to create a remarketing audience in Google Ads. And if you want to promote both the hotel, spa, event facilities and restaurant together, campaigns will be created for each sector, and based on bookings we can promote one and pause others. This is why we are in daily contact with our clients.
Why do we give different values for each conversion?
Hotel campaign conversion value:
· €200/night x one week: €1400.
Event conversion value:
· 50-person wedding at €80 per person: €4000.
Restaurant conversion value:
· table for 4 people: €200.
It would not be correct to measure conversions with an approximate value because a table booking is clearly of lower value than an event.
Here is a screenshot of the one of our clients' campaigns similar to the example above.
There are several types of active campaigns that have generated a total of 240 conversions in the last 30 days (8 conversions per day), with an average cost per conversion of €3.31, resulting in a conversion value of €35,000 from investing €800 in campaigns.
ROAS & ROI, these unknowns:
We calculate the ROAS (return on ad spend – return on your investment in Google Ads):
With a net of €34,200 for this campaign, the ROAS is 4275% (every €1 invested in Google Ads campaigns has generated €42).
Now, let's calculate the ROI (return on investment) also including our monthly fee.
With a net of €33,000 for this campaign, the ROI is 1650% (every €1 invested in Google Ads campaigns + Biriwuanga fee has generated €16).
The importance of measuring conversions in Google Ads. This is why we measure conversions and why we don't have a long-term contract, because all our clients have positive ROAS and ROI.
On to the next conversion!
Dean.