Having been a Google Ad Manager for years now, it’s easy for me to forget that some businesses don’t even know what their goal should be when it comes to their Google Ad Campaign. What defines a successful campaign for them?

A lot of times you’ll hear, “I want to be shown above my competitors in Google search” or something similar like “I want to just show up on the top of the page for this keyword 100% of the time”.

Other times they’ll say, “I just want more leads at this unrealistically low price”.

Sometimes you’ll hear they just want a campaign to increase “brand awareness”. I understand it has its place for bigger companies with bigger marketing budgets but for most businesses, they want to see a direct return on their ad dollars. It’s very difficult to attribute any return on ad spend (ROAS) with brand awareness campaigns. 

Then you’ll meet a business owner that understands the score. The real goal of your campaign should be to generate sales. Ideally you want to generate more sales revenue than you spend in ads especially when factoring in the average customer lifetime value. This gives you a profitable return on ad spend. At the end of the day, this is all that matters.  

The goal will differ a bit for businesses that have a lot of repeat customers vs businesses that have one-time customers and rarely ever see them again. For the later, they need to see a high ROAS directly from the ad campaign, otherwise they aren’t making money. For the former, they can sacrifice some ROAS to increase overall sales volume because they know once they get a new customer in the door, they’ll make many times over their ad spend investment when customers reorder.

I digress, okay, so you should track sales as a Google Ad conversion but should it be the primary or the secondary goal? Should you still track leads as a conversion? If so, should that also be a primary conversion or secondary conversion?

For ecommerce, you simply track sales as a primary conversion. For lead gen campaigns I like to track leads as the primary conversion and when a sale happens I update the same conversion passing the sale value as the conversion value. This makes the data nice and clean and you can still optimize based on leads to start the campaign and then switch to optimizing based on ROAS once you get conversion value data.