There is no “one size fits all” for consumers. And in times of uncertainty, consumer behavior has shown to be even more unpredictable and evolve much more quickly than expected. The silver lining is that uncertain times lead to unexpected opportunities—especially for businesses who can stay agile and adapt quickly to continued change.
The formula for success requires a careful balance between two things: doubling down on what has worked best to drive reliable results, all while continuing to place calculated bets to unlock future growth. We’ve heard from you that you need a clearer recipe for how Google Ads can help you maximize both short-term and long-term ROI. Read this new playbook for the full step-by-step guide and get a quick recap of best practices below.
The Google Ads Growth Formula
Directly connect your marketing goals to real business outcomes
Not all customers and conversions are created equal in terms of value. To maximize ROI, start with defining the value of different conversions based on what they’re really worth to your business. Setting the right goals helps you point Google Ads to place the right bids so you can get the most out of your campaign budgets. This is critical to help ensure you maximize your impact across the consumer journey—whether you’re selling shoes online, sending customers to a dealership to test drive a car, or generating qualified leads for B2B software.
Revisiting your success metrics regularly allows you to identify the most important conversions that can drive the best performance possible. Your expertise combined with the power of AI is the true difference maker to help multiply your results.
Lay the measurement foundation that enables better performance
Making the right advertising investments requires accurate measurement to understand what’s working best and how to maximize it further. These three steps help you unlock more accurate, privacy-centric measurement as third-party cookies and other identifiers are phased out:
- Measure impact while preserving user trust: Set up sitewide tagging with the Google tag, and supplement it with enhanced conversions to collect consented, user-provided data. Rely on conversion modeling to learn from your first-party data and fill in conversion gaps when observable data isn’t available.
- Understand what’s driving performance: Make better bidding decisions across channels by switching to data-driven attribution. Typically, all conversion credit goes to the last ad that customers interacted with. Using data-driven attribution, you can instead assign conversion credit to multiple touchpoints that are the most incremental.
- Get more actionable insights: Ensure you’re using the best analytics technology possible by upgrading to Google Analytics 4. It’s a modern analytics experience that delivers a unified view of consumer behavior across web and app.
Capture existing demand now and generate new demand for the future
AI is helping us reimagine the size and scale of marketing challenges we can solve together. Among the billions of searches on Google every day, 15% are queries we’ve never seen before. And consumers continue to rapidly evolve! This makes it really hard—if not impossible—for marketers to anticipate and capture all the relevant query variations on their own. Meanwhile, Google’s state-of-the-art language models have gotten 50% better at understanding human language.1 These advancements in AI help advertisers show up in more valuable search moments and capture new performance opportunities as they emerge in real time.
To help fully optimize your Search campaigns, combine broad match keywords with Smart Bidding and responsive search ads. This helps you unlock incremental sources of conversions and ROI. Then, go beyond Search using Performance Max campaigns to multiply conversions across Google’s full range of advertising channels and inventory.
While most of your focus is on delivering results today, it’s also smart business to prepare for tomorrow. Today, we see consumers putting more thought into what they buy and being less loyal to any specific brand. In the past month, 47% of consumers in surveyed markets have purchased at least one new brand they’ve never bought before.2 So now is the time to capitalize for the future. Inspire customers and generate new demand with Google’s most visual ad formats by using Video action and Discovery campaigns together.
Evaluate and expand what’s working
Keep an eye on your optimization score and recommendations to quickly identify ways to improve performance, and automatically apply the recommendations that matter most to your bottom line. Finally, check the Insights page frequently to discover performance and consumer trends that are uniquely customized to your business.
We hope the Google Ads Growth Formula gives you a simple, step-by-step recipe to understand which Google advertising solutions to use to achieve your specific marketing goals. Whether you’re aiming to grow online sales, high-quality leads or omnichannel sales, we’re committed to helping you navigate uncertainty and drive strong performance that moves your business forward.
Posted by John Nicoletti, Vice President, Global Product and Sales Activation
1. Stephen Merity, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Richard Socher, Regularizing and Optimizing LSTM Language Models, Aug. 2017 vs. Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, et al., Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners, July 2020
2. Google commissioned Ipsos Consumer Continuous, US, CA, UK, FR, DE, IT, AU, JP, IN, CN, BR, MX, ES, ZA, KR, AR, CO, BE, CL, PE, SE, NL, DK, FI, NO ~n=500-1,000 online consumers 18+ per market. Sep 8 - 11, 2022