Grow online sales
To grow high-value online sales, top advertisers are using the Google Ads Growth Formula’s four step, best-in-class strategy.
Meet the formula that will drive high-value sales for your business
There are many paths to success with Google Ads - the Growth Formula was designed to help you follow the most direct path to driving your online sales.
To 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 CFO and CMO 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 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 high-value online 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 online 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, it’s imperative to shift focus to actual business outcomes, with KPIs like ROAS or lifetime customer value.
EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT
See how Jen sets objectives for her company, Feather.
Meet Jen. She’s in charge of digital marketing at the mattress company Feather.
Know your business objective
Jen’s CEO’s business objective for the year is to increase revenue from online channels and affiliates by 25% – from $10M to $12.5M – by the end of 2022.
Knowing this, Jen can draw a direct line from hitting her goals to hitting her CEO’s goals.
Align on your marketing objective
The topline marketing objective that Jen and her CMO care about is increasing the number of sales on their website from new and existing customers by 25% before mid year — from $4.5M to $5.6M.
Set your media objectives
Jen sets two media objectives for Feather:
- Her performance objective is to drive 7K purchases from customers from Google Ads by mid year.
- Her brand objective is to reach 2M engaged viewers on YouTube by mid year.
Together, they should help her CMO reach their marketing objective.
Pick your campaign objectives
Since Jen has two media objectives, she sets a campaign objective for each of them:
- For her performance objective (7K purchases): her KPI is a target return on ad spend (ROAS) of 350% over Q1-Q2.
- For her brand objective (2M engaged viewers): her KPI is a 15% brand lift from viewers on YouTube.
Get ready
Success is built on solid foundations. Make sure you have privacy-centric measurement in place, and a view of the complete user journey.
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. That’s why Google is charting a course towards a more privacy-first web.
COLLECT YOUR ONLINE FIRST-PARTY DATA
A strong measurement foundation starts with your most valuable data: your company’s first-party data, both online and offline. Why? It’s high-quality, hyper relevant to your customer set, and privacy-centric.
The Google taglets you use data from your website to help you measure the effectiveness of your website and ads. Google Ads uses this first-party data with machine learning to support a successful digital marketing strategy.
Ensure that you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data that you collect on your websites, and getting consent for that collection where legally required.
Nine out of ten companies say that first-party data is important to their digital marketing programs.1
CONNECT YOUR OFFLINE FIRST-PARTY DATA
From there, connect your first-party data (e.g. data in your CRM) with Google Ads to create a complete picture of the customer journey. This will help you to identify your highest-value prospects, and optimize your ads to deliver better experiences and drive more sales.
1Google and BCG, "The Keys to Scaling Digital Value", n=545 "digital leaders" (i.e. businesses with above average digital maturity), Aug - Nov 2021
Once you’ve set up the foundation, ensure you have the tools to understand and optimize the customer experience.
COMPARE APPLES TO APPLES
Google Analytics gives you a deeper understanding of user behavior across devices and platforms, with tools to understand the customer journey and improve your marketing ROI.
By leveraging Google AI through Google Analytics, you can surface valuable campaign insights about your customers, and take action by exporting these insights to Google Ads in the form of new audiences.
OPTIMIZE FOR WHAT WORKS
With measurement and analytics in place, improve the accuracy of your conversion tracking in a privacy-preserving way, using enhanced conversions for web to mitigate conversion loss. From there, invest in attribution across the entire conversion path.
Together, these will provide Google AI with better data about what works, and enable deeper alignment between your campaigns and your business goals.
Advertisers who switch to data-driven attribution from another attribution model typically see a 6% average increase in conversions.2
2Google Data, Global, Ads, Jul 11th 2022-Aug 25th 2022.
EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT
See how Jen gets measurement and analytics in place for Feather
Measure what matters
After placing the Google tag on her website, Jen sets up conversion tracking in Google Ads to measure when a site visitor makes a purchase.
Jen realizes that she has valuable first-party data that could be useful for optimizing her ads, so she uses Customer Match to build two audiences: repeat customers and first-time buyers.
She also connects her CRM system to Google Ads, to import offline conversions for sales that started with a phone call.
Consider the full customer journey
To get a better idea of how users discover and then engage with the website, Jen sets up Google Analytics 4 and follows five key steps to power her advertising:
- Links Google Analytics to Google Ads
- Enables personalized advertising
- Imports additional conversion actions to Google Ads
- Creates audiences, like “cart abandoners”
- Enables those audiences in Google Ads
With these steps complete, Jen has provided powerful data for Google AI to optimize bidding, audiences and creative optimization in her ads.
Take action
Now that you’ve got best-in-class measurement in place, let’s take a look at different types of campaigns that can supercharge your marketing investments.
FIND YOUR HIGHEST-VALUE CUSTOMERS
For performance advertising with the goal of driving online sales, begin by identifying your ideal return on ad spend (ROAS). Some customers bring more value than others, and your strategy should reflect that.
Traditional bid strategies like Target CPA control for ad spend and treat all conversions equally, but Target ROAS controls for both ad spend and customer value. Across all Google strategies, this is our best-in-class solution to get the most value out of every dollar.
To find your Target ROAS, use this formula:
START WITH SEARCH ADS
People are constantly turning to Google Search for answers─what to do, where to go, what to buy, how to do things.
Search campaigns are great for driving sales or traffic to your website because you can show your ads to people actively searching for the products you offer.
Use our power pairing of Broad match, Smart Bidding, and responsive search ads to show your ad to your most valuable customers with personalized creative to break through and get impactful results.
57% of US shoppers surveyed say they have used Google Search for discovery and inspiration.3
MULTIPLY YOUR RESULTS WITH PERFORMANCE MAX
Use Performance Max, our AI-powered solution, to consolidate multiple campaigns into a single campaign, and drive better results across all of Google’s advertising channels and inventory.
With Performance Max you can reach customers across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps with images, video and text ads.
Advertisers who use Performance Max achieve on average over 18% more conversions.4
Performance Max makes scaling creative across the web easy, building ads from your images, videos, headlines, descriptions, and logos. These assets are automatically mixed and matched to find the top-performing combinations.
Advertisers that included at least 1 video of each orientation (horizontal, vertical, and square) to their Performance Max Campaigns delivered 20% more conversions in YouTube compared to horizontal videos alone.5
ACQUIRE VALUABLE CUSTOMERS WITH APP CAMPAIGNS
If you have an app, use App campaigns to drive purchases and interactions with your most valuable customers.
On average, advertisers that add product feeds to their App campaigns achieve a 11% uplift in conversions.6
3Google/Ipsos, Shopping Tracker, online survey, n=1,232 Americans 18+ who conducted shopping activities in past two days, May 19-26, 2022.
4Google Data, Global, Ads, November - December 2022.
5Google data, Global, November 2022.
6Google Internal Data, Global, February 2023 experiment.
FEED THE FUNNEL
It’s critical to generate more mid and top of the funnel demand. When done well, the mid-upper funnel is the engine for a brand’s growth, and profit.
The funnel starts with attention—96% of feed users spend time on Google feeds7, and 86% of feed users have discovered new products or brands on a feed.8
Research shows that 91% of consumers took action immediately after discovering new products or brands on Google feeds, like Discover or Gmail.9
To engage these people as they “window shop” and discover new products to purchase, implement Discovery and YouTube campaigns.
COMING SOON: Demand Gen campaigns will build on the strengths of Discovery and Video action campaigns, helping you drive action with over 3 billion monthly users as they stream, scroll and connect.
BUILD AWARENESS WITH VIDEO REACH CAMPAIGNS
Video reach campaigns are the simplest way to drive reach on YouTube. They use Google AI to serve the best combination of ads, improving your reach and efficiency.
Rather than optimizing based on conversions, Brand Lift is a free tool that measures the effectiveness of your video ads by assessing metrics such as ad recall, brand awareness, and consideration.
7Google/Ipsos, Consumer Feed Behavior Research, August 2022, Online survey, US consumers aged 18+ who browse feeds (feeds defined as: Google, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Pinterest) monthly or more often. Base: Consumers n=2,000
8Google/Ipsos, Consumer Feed Behavior Research, August 2022, Online survey, US consumers aged 18+ who browse feeds (feeds defined as: Google, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Pinterest) monthly or more often. Base: Consumers n=2,000
9Google/Ipsos, Consumer Feed Behavior Research, August 2022, Online survey, US consumers aged 18+ who browse Google feeds (Google feeds defined as: Google, Chrome, YouTube and Gmail) at least once a month and discovered new products or brands on Google feeds. Base: Consumers n=1,263
EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT
See how Jen captures and generates demand for Feather
Capture existing demand
Jen uses Keyword Planner to see what customers search for when researching mattresses, and then creates a Search campaign targeting the most relevant terms. She deploys a Broad match keyword strategy to capture potential new searches she can’t anticipate.
Next, Jen uses responsive search ads to provide relevant and personalized ad copy, following the on-screen tips to reach an “excellent” Ad Strength score.
Feather wants to make $4 for every $1 they spend on advertising, so Jen uses Target ROAS bidding to only target customers who’d give her a 400% ROAS or better. This means spending up to $250 to sell a $1,000 mattress, or up to $10 to sell a $40 pillow.
Using Target CPA bidding, Jen would be eligible to target both customers Tony and Tiara. Using Target ROAS, Jen would target Tiara, maximizing her return.
Finally, Jen sets up a Performance Max campaign. She had previously experimented with Smart Shopping, Display, Gmail and YouTube campaigns, and decides to consolidate these efforts.
The setup process is similar to Search—Jen uses the same conversion actions and a Target ROAS of 400%. For creative assets, she starts with similar headlines and descriptions, adding images, logos and videos.
Generate new demand
To raise awareness with customers who weren’t already looking for mattresses, Jen creates a Discovery campaign. Starting with the creative assets used in her Performance Max campaign, she makes small tweaks and plans to keep optimizing for this new audience.
Seeing promising results, Jen also runs a Video action campaign on YouTube to broaden her userbase, with prominent calls-to-action and headline text overlays. She saves time by adding vertical video assets from a recent social media campaign.
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.
UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ PATH TO PURCHASE
Unsure how many times a customer has to interact with an ad before purchase? We’ve got you. Go to “Goals” in your Google Ads account and select “Measurement”, then “Attribution.”
The “Conversion paths” tab shows you the most common paths your customers take to complete a conversion.
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 lifetime value when planning your next steps.
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.”
IMPROVE YOUR PRODUCT FEED
Your product data shapes the way your ads and free listings behave and perform on Google surfaces. To make ads, listings, and your campaigns as successful as possible, you need to provide and maintain high-quality product data.
Keep optimizing your product feed by thinking strategically about your customers, highlighting important product details, using high-quality images, and maintaining up-to-date information about your products in the feed and on your landing pages.
EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT
See how Jen optimized her marketing investments
Jen successfully increased Feather’s online sales by 25%. However, when analyzing the impression share data for her campaigns, she notices that she is still gifting impressions to her competitors.
So she checked the Recommendations Tab, and used the optimization score to easily identify opportunities to maximize Feather’s potential by increasing the budget of specific campaigns.
By staying on top of all the opportunities for the account, Feather was able to hit their stretch goal for the year.
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.
Sign into your Google Ads account
Log into your Google Ads account to implement best practices from the Growth Formula.
Sign in