Building a successful digital advertising strategy can be challenging. And as consumer behavior continues to change, you might be reassessing your own approach to achieving different goals or reaching your customers in new ways.
Step1: Use data to set goals
Set campaign goals that: can be clearly measured, go beyond what you would achieve without any media spend, and produce a positive return on investment. At Google Marketing, the standard metric for our performance campaigns is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Step 2: Use conversion measurement to unlock automation
Once you have conversion measurement set up, use automated bidding to efficiently optimize your campaigns to hit your goals. And use responsive search ads, and other dynamic creative, to automatically tailor your ads to different customers and contexts.
Step 3: Consider waterfall budget planning
Waterfall planning allocates budget to different channels based on their efficiency. To do that, allocate your full budget to the best-performing channel until it captures all available demand within your goals. Then begin allocating additional budget to the second best-performing channel, and so on.
Let’s dive deeper into each step, shall we?!
Step1: Use data to set goals
You have to always structure your campaigns towards clear goals.
A simple thought process should look like this:
- What do you want to achieve with an ad campaign?
- This is our marketing objective (MO). Google ads performance products are designed with a particular focus on these four objectives: Lead Generation, Online Sales, Offline Sales, and Mobile Growth.
- What metric do you have to improve so that you can fulfill that MO?
- This is your key performance indicator (KPI).
- What value does the KPI have to hit in order to be successful?
- This is your campaign goal. This value is determined by the ROI (return on investment) required by our business based on the Customer Lifetime Value.
Source: Google.
- Quantifiable
- Results can be clearly measured.
- Incremental
- It goes beyond what we would naturally achieve without any media spend.
- Commercially viable
- Produces positive return on investment.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- This tells you how much you are willing to pay to acquire new customers. The reason CLV is to vial is that it helps you to set CPA with the appropriate financial return.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- This tells you the revenue returned for every dollar of ad spend invested in your campaign.
- It shows whether the campaign is effective in driving the desired KPIs and goals
- It allows us to calculate the campaign ROAS or CPA, to see if the campaign is cost-effective.
- It allows us to save time and improve efficiency by unlocking automated bid strategies in Google Ads.
- Optimizes your campaigns towards a metric or objective (eg. CPA)
- Saves you time, providing both flexible control options and insightful reporting tools.
- It’s guided by CLV and target ROI
- Ensures efficiency by placing the right bid at the right time.
- These ads are driven by machine learning algorithms to show images and/or text tailored to different customers & contexts.
- With up to 30 individual text, logo, video, and image variations, there are 45K+ potential permutations available to test.
- Examples include Responsive Search Ads and Responsive Display Ads. They can be used in Search, Display, Shopping, Discovery, and App campaigns.
Source: Google
- The best-performing channel receives full funding until it captures all available demand within our CPA and ROAS goals.
- at this point it’s considered fully-saturated; only then does the second best-performing channel begin receiving funds, and so on.
- We continue prioritizing channels in the way until our overall CPA and ROAS reaches our goal set by our CLV.
Why you should use waterfalls?
- Prioritizing our best-performing channels ensures that you remain financially laser-focused and measurement-oriented.
- The waterfall approach works equally across large and small budgets and for both single-country and global campaigns.
Source: google
The waterfall for Offline Sales
The waterfall for Apps and Mobile Growth
