Grow omnichannel sales
To maximize high-value omnichannel customers, top advertisers are using the Google Ads Growth Formula’s four step, best-in-class strategy.
Meet the formula that will maximize your omnichannel sales
There are many paths to success with Google Ads. The Growth Formula was designed to help you follow the most direct path to driving valuable in-store sales at scale.
To help marketers drive results amid economic uncertainty and build resilience for the future, download our condensed best practices guide.
Set objectives
Pinpoint and align your business objectives with your team. Then you can make sure your marketing, media, and campaign objectives and KPIs are working together to achieve that goal.
Align with executives like the CEO to make sure you fully understand their main business objectives. This usually falls into one of three categories: market share, revenue, or profit.
To create long-term sustainable growth, shift your focus from driving sales volume or revenue to profit.
And keep in mind – great business objectives are measurable, time-bound, and raise the bar above what you’re already achieving.
The marketing objective should be informed by the bottom-line business objective and signed off by the CFO and/or CMO. In this case, we’ll focus on growing omnichannel sales as the primary marketing objective.
This positions marketing as a profit center, rather than a cost center.
Media objectives help you meet the marketing objective – which, in this case, is increasing high-value omnichannel sales. They’re usually set by the digital marketing team, and break down into two parts:
Performance objectives focus on the bottom of the funnel, measured by KPIs like transactions and form submissions.
Brand objectives focus on the mid-top of the funnel and drive factors like ad recall, brand awareness, and brand interest.
Best-in-class advertisers look beyond lower-funnel performance marketing, and focus on a full-funnel strategy – with brand goals that drive lower funnel outcomes.
Campaign objectives are the KPIs used to gauge the success of a specific marketing campaign. We recommend you keep a close eye on return on ad spend (ROAS).
If you’re measuring proxies like CPA or CPL, it’s imperative to shift focus to actual business outcomes, with KPIs like return on ad spend (ROAS) or lifetime customer value.
EXPLORE HOW KIRA DOES IT
See how Kira sets objectives for Bellevue Bookstore
Kira is the Marketing Manager for a retail chain, Bellevue Bookstore. They sell books and magazines online and have brick-and-mortar stores in a few cities.
Know your business objective
Kira’s CEO’s business objective is to increase overall revenue by 30% by the end of Q4 – from $2M to $2.6M. Knowing this, Kira can work backwards to develop an effective digital strategy after she checks in with the CMO.
Align on your marketing objective
Kira’s CMO generates the majority of revenue from online sales, but is looking to grow in-store sales 20% by the end of Q4. Coupled with potential online sales growth, the CMO is confident the business can reach the 30% overall business growth goal.
Kira sets her sights on growing high-value omnichannel sales as her primary objective, and creates media objectives that align.
Set your media objectives
Kira creates two media objectives:
Her performance objective is to drive approximately 13K in-store purchases from Performance Max for store visits campaigns.
Her brand objective is to demonstrate 30% Ad Recall with a YouTube for Reach campaign with location extensions.
Together, that combo should help her CMO meet their growth goals for in-store sales.
Pick your campaign objectives
Since Kira has two media objectives, she sets a campaign objective for each of them:
To meet her performance objective (13K in-store purchases), she sets a goal of driving 26K store visits from Performance Max campaigns since she knows about one in every two visits results in a purchase.
To meet her brand objective (30% Ad Recall), she sets a goal of 22M impressions on YouTube at a $4 CPM.
Get ready
Success is built on solid foundations. Make sure you have the big three in place: privacy-safe measurement, an automation strategy, and powerful creative.
Over the past few years, users' concerns over the usage of their data, and increased industry privacy regulations, have made the long-term future of digital measurement more challenging.
Make first-party data your best friend
Use cookies that live on the same domain as your site, known as first-party cookies, to track conversions. This will help prevent potential conversion loss from browser cookie restrictions. It’s best to avoid using third-party cookies that are restricted by some browsers.
Marketers who effectively use their first-party data can generate 2x the incremental revenue from a single ad placement.1
Measure the full customer journey
Once you’ve set up the foundation, improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement in a privacy-safe way to mitigate conversion loss. From there, invest in attribution across the entire conversion path.
Advertisers who use enhanced conversions for web see an average increase of 17.1% in YouTube conversions.2
Compare apples to apples
Consolidate platforms to bring all sources of customer data into one place. As your data scales and your process becomes more automated, this will be even more important.
1 BCG, Responsible Marketing with First-Party Data, 2020
2 Google Internal Data, Mar 2021- Sept 2021
Connect your digital presence to your store
The best way to understand and measure the ROI of your Google Ads is with store visits, which track the number of users who visited your store up to 30 days after they clicked on or engaged with your ad.
If you don’t meet the criteria for store visits, you can also track Local Actions to value phone calls and driving directions to your store.
Calculate your conversion value
Now that you’re measuring store visits, let’s understand the purchasing power of your visitors. We’ll do this by finding the value of each store visit. This will help reveal insights like your omnichannel ROAS and the overall value for your store visits conversions. Here’s a formula to help.
Combine your online and in-store goals
Since Google Ads campaigns will drive both online and in-store conversions, make sure to measure your success with an omnichannel ROAS that combines the two together.
Combine automation with strong creative. Research backs up what we know to be true: the creative aspects of an ad (like headlines) are still the most important element in driving sales and getting leads.
Advertisers that switch from expanded text ads to responsive search ads, using the same assets, see an average of 7% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion.3
Write more effective display ads
With responsive display ads (RDA), you upload your assets, and Google will automatically generate ad combinations.
By adding RDA to an existing ad group, on average we see 90% more conversions at a similar CPA. 4
Create more effective YouTube ads
After lots of testing, we boiled down the essential rules for effective creative on YouTube. Make sure to share them with your creative team before they start on their next video ad.
3 Google’s Internal Data, June, 2022
4 Google Internal Data, Q3 2020
EXPLORE HOW KIRA DOES IT
Learn how Kira gets Bellevue Bookstore ready
Understand your customers better with privacy-safe measurement
In an effort to improve her conversion measurement and better understand her customers in a privacy-centric way, Kira decides to implement enhanced conversions for web. After a few weeks, Kira starts to see a conversion uplift across her Video campaigns and is excited that she can better measure the impact of her YouTube investment.
As a result, she decides to build on her current YouTube strategy, while keeping in mind omnichannel best practices and enabling Location extensions across her campaigns.
COMPARING ATTRIBUTION MODELS FOR BELLEVUE BOOKSTORE
A data-driven model distributes credit differently for each interaction along the consumer journey.
Take action
Now that you’ve got best-in-class automation and measurement in place, let’s take a look at different types of campaigns that can supercharge your marketing efforts.
Show up when customers are searching for you
The key to driving store traffic from the web is letting potential customers nearby know your storefront is close by, and that you have what they need. Performance Max for store goals is our latest solution to drive more traffic to your store. To set yourself up, there are a few housekeeping items to take care of.
Performance Max combines several campaigns into one, simplifying campaign management and allowing you to reach customers across more of Google’s channels – YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps – from a single campaign.
Performance Max for store visits campaigns not only drives more people to your business, but also gives you flexibility to provide customers the information they need to decide how and when to visit your stores. You can:
- Highlight your open stores, re-opened locations, and in-store recovered availability, and update this info as a store’s status changes.
- Communicate your current offerings and inform customers about your safety measures: rising demand for pick up, drive thru, delivery services and contactless payments.
- Promote your in-store products, availability, specific holiday offers, and destocking campaigns to increase profitability this holiday.
Once you’ve captured shoppers who are already looking to buy your products, it’s time to generate more demand at the top of the funnel and acquire new customers. Then you can continue to nurture them as they continue along the journey to purchase.
Before you get started, make sure you have clearly defined brand objectives to qualify the impact of your top-of-funnel marketing (these will look different to the performance objectives you use for things like Search).
Launch Video ads
When it comes to driving store visits and sales, TrueView for reach is a great way to reach an even larger audience across YouTube using Location extensions. You can even make your video interactive by displaying information from a Google Business Profile feed or an affiliate location feed. And show business information alongside the video to boost store visits and transactions.
83% of TrueView for reach auction campaigns drove a significant lift in ad recall. 5
5 Google Brand Lift Meta Analysis, Global, 2017
EXPLORE HOW KIRA DOES IT
See how Kira takes action for the bookstore
Capture existing demand
After confirming that Bellevue Bookstore qualified for Store Visits, Kira creates a Performance Max campaign to automatically target customers who are actively searching across Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and more.
Since her business qualifies for Store Visits, Google’s machine learning automatically optimizes for the combinations that drive the most customers to her door.
Generate new demand
To generate demand with customers who weren’t already looking for a bookstore, Kira runs a TrueView for reach campaign, with location extensions, on YouTube to efficiently catch the attention of a wide range of book lovers using the simplicity of CPM.
Evaluate & expand
As time passes, you’ll better understand how your ads are performing. Use this information to optimize your performance, test new strategies, and find more opportunities for growth.
Unsure how many times a customer has to interact with an ad before purchase? We’ve got you. Go to “Tools & Settings” in your Google Ads account and select “Attribution”.
Meet your superfans
Now let’s see what else we can learn about your top customers. Head to “Tools & Settings” in your Google Ads account and select “Customer value”. This will give you anonymous, aggregated consumer data showing what characteristics your top customers share.
Use pencil before pen
Before trying out new strategies, give them a test drive using drafts and experiments in your Ads Account. Then stop by the Performance Planner to see the impact different budgets could make.
If your campaign is hitting its targets – but maxing out its budget – there’s probably more room to grow. Check your impression share in your Google Ads account – it’ll tell you how many impressions were gifted to competitors due to insufficient budgets.
Reevaluate your campaign objectives
Now that you have more data, evaluate your performance goals. For instance, consider adjusting your ROAS. If it’s too high, you could be missing out on additional sales. If it’s too low, you could be sacrificing profits for volume.
Try to find the inflection point that allows you to maximize your overall profit.
Optimize for lifetime value
Evaluate customer lifetime value when planning your next steps, take lifetime customer value into account.
Figuring out the value of each of your customers isn’t easy. You’ll need to evaluate data from paid sources, organic sources, and your other marketing efforts. Figuring out lifetime value will allow you to bid to the full value each customer provides your business.
To get started, find out how much you’re earning from each customer, go into Google Analytics, open reports, and select “Audience > Lifetime Value”.
EXPLORE HOW KIRA DOES IT
See how Kira optimized their marketing investments
Kira is glad to see that Local campaigns helped Bellevue Bookstore’s in-store sales increase by 20% during the first half of the year. However, she knows she can do more.
So, she continues to optimize her campaigns for her top-performing stores and creative assets. Then, she invests in more upper-funnel strategies leading up to the holidays (like YouTube for reach), to make more people aware of the Bellevue Bookstore brand.
Together, these efforts help her pass her 20% goal of growing in-store sales, and help her CEO exceed the 30% revenue growth goal for the year. Business objective? Check. Marketing objective? Check. Promotion? We think that should get a check, too.
Congratulations on completing the Growth Formula
Since it’s not a linear journey, you’ll want to revisit steps as time passes. We recommend bookmarking this website. We'll keep this guide up to date with the latest Google product announcements and launches to position you for continued growth.
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