For businesses running paid search activity, aligning it with your broader business goals is essential for achieving measurable success. This guide outlines practical steps for defining objectives, setting targets, tracking conversions, and optimising your campaigns to ensure they support your overall business strategy. By following these strategies, you will maximise the value of your PPC activity.
Define Clear Business Objectives
The first step in aligning paid search with business goals is to clearly define your overall business objectives. This may include setting long-term targets such as growing revenue, generating quality leads, or enhancing brand awareness. When you have a clarity in your priorities for your wider business. It becomes much easier to translate those across to paid search activity.
Set Specific And Measurable PPC Goals
Paid search is most effective when used as a performance marketing tool. This is to say that the best paid search outcomes are typically the result of working towards an achievable and measurable goal. For example, if your overall business aim is to generate more leads. Your PPC goal might be to deliver X number of leads per month with Z amount of budget.
The key to success here is establishing one central KPI for your paid search activity that can be tracked and measured within a fixed time period. There may be other considerations, like available budget or number of products in stock. But these are better understood as constraints rather than targets.
Implement Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is critical for measuring the success of your paid search activity and ensuring campaigns are hitting their targets. By setting up conversion tracking, you can track actions such as form submissions, purchases, or downloads that matter most to your business.
There are several options for conversion tracking depending on the platform you’re using (e.g. Google Ads, GA4, Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, offline conversion imports). Though most forms of tracking involve adding a snippet of code to a webpage that measures how many users make a particular action after clicking through your ads.
This allows you to make data-driven decisions and optimise your campaigns to focus on the keywords, ads, and strategies that best hit your KPI. Without conversion tracking, you would be flying blind and unable to effectively measure and improve your campaigns.
Target The Right Audience
As privacy concerns in tech become more widespread, ensuring your ads are shown to the most relevant users becomes harder and harder. Audience targeting is a powerful feature to focus your advertising campaigns on the right users.
Most platforms offer their own audience targeting, usually grouping users by their demographics, interests, and purchasing decisions. However, the most useful data is almost always your own. First-party data uploaded into your advertising platform of choice can be used to build look-alike audiences. Meaning your ads will show to new users whose demographics and online behaviour mirrors that of your pre-existing customers.
Optimise Campaign Performance
With all of this in place, regular monitoring is still crucial for identifying areas for improvement. You should always keep an eye on key metrics such as click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and conversion rate (CVR). As well as the key indicators of efficiency like cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS). Based on these metrics you will have the necessary information to adjust your campaigns by changing bidding targets, updating keywords, or refining ad copy.
By monitoring performance continuously and making data-driven adjustments, you can ensure that your paid search campaigns are consistently aligned with the pre-established achievable and measurable KPIs.
As paid search is a specialised performance marketing tool. It can seem daunting to try and align it to your wider business objectives. However, by following the above steps you will be able to ensure your PPC activity is having a measurable and valuable impact for your business.
For more information on this, or for support with your digital marketing. Get in touch with our team of digital specialists. If you’re looking for improved PPC campaigns, send us an email to team@modo25.com
