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.
But
first, we’ll help you outline your
company’s lead-to-sale journey
– which is the first step in understanding
how to improve lead quality and drive more growth
for your business.
Generate leads
To generate high-quality leads at scale, top advertisers are using the Google Ads Growth Formula’s four step, best-in-class strategy.
Meet the formula that will maximize quality leads 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 generating leads.
To help marketers drive results amid economic uncertainty and build resilience for the future, download our condensed best practices guide.
Set objectives
Some conversions are worth more to your business than others. Mapping out your lead-to-sale journey can help you identify the key stages in your funnel and determine the average values of your conversion actions, so you can effectively use a value-based bidding strategy.
First, consider:
- What are the highest-priority stages in your sales cycle? (typically 3-6 actions)
- Do you have conversion tracking set up?
Then, get your numbers handy:
- What is the average revenue you receive from the last stage in your lead-to-sale journey? (e.g. sale, policy signed, subscription)
- What is the conversion rate between each stage in your lead-to-sale journey?
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 lead 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 generating high-quality leads 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 driving high-quality leads at scale. 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 phone calls 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 customer lifetime value (CLV).
EXPLORE HOW MIKE DOES IT
See how Mike sets objectives for Best Insurance
Meet Mike. He’s the Marketing Manager for Best Insurance, a national home and auto insurance provider.
Map the lead-to-sale journey
Mike maps each touchpoint in their sales cycle: from lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to closed sale.
BEST INSURANCE LEAD-TO-SALE JOURNEY
Knowing the average value of a closed sale is $5,000, Mike works backward to figure out that if 4% of SQLs convert into closed sales, then an SQL is worth/valued at $200. He does the same thing from MQL to SQL to calculate the value of each step along the journey.
Now Mike uses that to optimize the entire lead-to-sale journey for the highest-value leads.
Know your business objective
Mike’s CEO’s business objective is to increase revenue by 20% by the end of Q4 – from $20M to $24M. Now Mike also needs to check in with his CMO.
Align on your marketing objective
Mike’s CMO’s marketing objective is to increase sales-qualified leads to $5M (a 25% boost) by the end of Q4.
Now knowing both goals, Mike can clearly see how that will help their CEO hit her goal.
Set your media objectives
Mike sets two media objectives for Best
Insurance:
His performance objective is
to get 50K sales-qualified leads through
Google Search by the end of Q4.
His
brand objective is to use YouTube to drive a
25% increase in branded search demand.
Together, those should help his CMO get that 25% boost she’s looking for.
Pick your campaign objectives
Since Mike has two media objectives, he sets a campaign objective for each of them:
For his performance objective (50K sales-qualified leads), Mike wants to drive 200K conversions at a 120% target ROAS in Q1, with bookings from new customers.
For his brand objective (25% increase in branded search demand), Mike wants to capture 59M unique impressions at an $8 CPM over the same period.
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-safe.
The Google tag lets 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.
9/10
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 leads.
FILL IN THE BLANKS TO FIND THE HIGHEST QUALITY LEADS
Now that you’re collecting and connecting your first-party data, help Google fill in the blanks by indicating your most valuable customer actions. (Calculate this using the Lead-to-Sales Journey Guide in step 1.) Then these can be imported as unique conversion actions.
1 Google 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.
Leveraging Google AI through 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 to mitigate conversion loss.
If you track your sales funnel in a CRM system, you can start with enhanced conversions for web, and then add enhanced conversions for leads.
| Enhanced conversions for web | Enhanced conversions for leads |
| Relevant for advertisers who want to track sales and events that happen on a website. | Relevant for advertisers who also want to track sales that happen off a website (for example, phone or email) from website leads. |
| Improves measurement of online conversions. | Improves measurement of offline transactions that came from a website lead or visitor. |
| Allows you to send hashed first-party, user-provided data from your website when a user converts. The data is then used to match your customers to Google accounts, which were signed-in to when they engaged with one of your ads. | Allows you to use hashed, first-party user-provided data from your website lead forms for offline lead measurement. When you upload your leads, the provided hashed information is used to attribute back to the Google Ad campaign. |
From there, invest in attribution across the entire conversion path with data-driven attribution. It’s enabled by default for new conversion actions, but you may need to check your existing conversions in case they use an outdated model.
Together, these will provide Google AI with better data about what works, and enable deeper alignment between your campaigns and your business goals.
6%
Advertisers who switch to data-driven attribution from another attribution model typically see a 6% average increase in conversions.2
2 Google Data, Global, Ads, Jul 11th 2022-Aug 25th 2022.
EXPLORE HOW MIKE DOES IT
See how Mike gets measurement and analytics in place for Best Insurance
Measure what matters
After placing the Google tag on his website, Mike sets up conversion tracking in Google Ads to measure when a site visitor fills out a contact form. He enters different conversion values for phone calls, general contact forms, and forms from each of his specific product landing pages. Then, he activates enhanced conversions.
Mike realizes that he has valuable first-party data that could be useful for optimizing his ads, so he uses Customer Match to build two audiences: sales-qualified leads and high-value customers.
He also connects his CRM system to Google Ads, to import offline conversions for leads that turned into sales-qualified leads.
Consider the full customer journey
To get a better idea of how users discover and then engage with the website, Mike sets up Google Analytics and follows five key steps to power his advertising:
- Links Google Analytics to Google Ads
- Enables personalized advertising
- Imports additional conversion actions to Google Ads
- Creates audiences, like “closed sales”
- Enables those audiences in Google Ads
With these steps complete, Mike has provided powerful data for Google AI to optimize bidding, audiences and creative optimization in his ads.
After looking at conversion paths in Google Analytics, he notices that Video and Display ads are often contributing to conversions that end up with Search ads. He confirms that all of his campaigns use data-driven attribution, and plans to invest in Performance Max and Video campaigns.
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 efforts.
FIND YOUR HIGHEST-VALUE CUSTOMERS
For performance advertising with the goal of generating qualified leads, begin by identifying your highest-value conversions. 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 value-based bid strategies like Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value control for both ad spend and customer value.
Across all Google strategies, these are our best-in-class solutions to get the most value out of every dollar. Combined with broad match keywords or Google audiences, value-based bidding enables you to bid to the value of each customer – not just how much it’ll cost to acquire them.
Good - If you don't have a cost-per-lead target (the amount you’d ideally pay for a conversion), start with a Maximize Conversions strategy.
Better - If you do have a cost-per-lead target, set up a Target Cost Per Acquisition bid strategy.
Best - To optimize for your return on every dollar, use Target ROAS or Maximize conversion value.
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 ads are a proven way to drive qualified leads as people search on Google and its search partners, 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.
MULTIPLY YOUR RESULTS WITH PERFORMANCE MAX
Use Performance Max, our AI-powered solution, to drive better results across all of Google’s advertising channels and inventory, all from a single campaign.
With Performance Max you can reach customers across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps with images, video and text ads.
18%
Advertisers who use Performance Max achieve on average over 18% more conversions.3
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.
You can even generate leads by letting people submit their information in a form directly in your ad.
20%
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.4
3 Google Data, Global, Ads, November - December 2022.
4 Google data, Global, November 2022
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 feeds5, and 86% of feed users have discovered new products or brands on a feed6.
91%
Research shows that 91% of consumers took action immediately after discovering new products or brands on Google feeds, like Discover or Gmail.7
To engage these people as they “window shop” and discover new products to purchase, implement Discovery and YouTube campaigns.
COMING SOON: Demand Gen campaigns 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 next generation of buying reach in Google Ads, making it easier to buy skippable in-stream ads, bumper ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads for your campaigns. With Video reach campaigns, you can choose to reach more unique users or reach users with your entire message.
5 Google/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
6 Google/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
7 Google/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 MIKE DOES IT
See how Mike takes action for Best Insurance
Capture existing demand
Mike uses Keyword Planner to see what customers search for when researching insurance, and then creates a Search campaign targeting the most relevant terms. He deploys a Broad match keyword strategy to capture potential new searches he can’t anticipate.
Next, Mike uses responsive search ads to provide relevant and personalized ad copy, following the on-screen tips to reach an “excellent” Ad Strength score.
Mike wanted to make $1M in revenue for $250,000 in ad spend so he set a target ROAS of 400% -- meaning Best Insurance would earn $4 for every $1 he spent on advertising. Google Ads automatically adjusts his bids to maximize his conversion value while reaching his target ROAS.
Finally, Mike sets up a Performance Max campaign. He had previously experimented with Display, Gmail and YouTube campaigns, and decides to consolidate these efforts.
The setup process is similar to Search — Mike uses the same conversion actions and a Target ROAS of 400%. For creative assets, he starts with similar headlines and descriptions, adding images, logos and videos.
Generate new demand
To raise awareness with customers who weren’t already seeking insurance, Mike creates a Discovery campaign. Starting with the creative assets used in his Performance Max campaign, he makes small tweaks and plans to keep optimizing for this new audience.
Seeing promising results, Mike also runs a Video action campaign on YouTube to broaden his userbase, with prominent calls-to-action and headline text overlays. He 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 “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 MIKE DOES IT
See how Mike optimized his marketing investments
Mike increases Best Insurance’s online sales by 30% in Q1, but he thinks he can do more. He reevaluates his campaign objectives for Q2-Q4, adjusting his target ROAS and increasing his demand-generation upper-funnel tactics. He's able to help his CMO pass her $5M goal by the end of 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.
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