The Guide to Setting Advertising Goals and Objectives for Search Network Campaigns

Setting your advertising goals and objectives is a fundamental stage of any campaign strategy. It doesn’t matter how big your business is; you should define your targets before you start spending money on advertising.

Read on to find out the essential questions you must ask yourself to set advertising goals and objectives that make sense for your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

8 Vital Questions to Guide Your PPC Advertising Goals and Objectives

So, here they are:

1. Do you want to build brand awareness among your target audience?
2. Do you want to remarket your product or brand?
3. Do you want to increase your organic traffic?
4. Do you want to improve your sales volume and other conversion rates?
5. Do you want to increase your profit?
6. Do you want to create a need among users?
7. Do you want to promote your App?
8. Do you want to leverage seasonal trends?

1. Do you want to build brand awareness among your target audience?

Building brand awareness is one of the most common advertising goals and objectives.

Brand awareness campaigns have several benefits:

• They put your brand in the minds of prospective customers.
• They influence consumer decision-making when considering products and services in your niche.
• They increase your sales, repeat business, and market share.
• They help establish your brand name online.

Imagine you have a clothing brand. If you want to get customers, you need to create brand awareness first.

You can use Google Ads to spread your brand message, effectively reaching a wider audience — which may result in more new customers.

How to Achieve this Objective

If you want to achieve the objective of creating more brand awareness, you should focus on the following:

• Increase impressions – Driving impressions will help your ads reach more people in your target audience, which makes more prospects aware of your brand, products, and services.
• Drive customer engagement – Track clickthrough rate (CTR) on your Search Network campaigns to assess how engaged people are with your ads. More clicks indicate that your ads are relevant and interesting to users.
• Reach and frequency – A more extensive reach suggests that your ads are connecting with a lot of prospects. This, in turn, will boost brand awareness. Frequency is the average number of times a user saw your ad over a defined period (like per day, week, or month).

Learn More: How to Boost Brand Awareness with Automated Google Ads

2. Do you want to remarket your product or brand?

If remarketing is one of your advertising goals and objectives, you must first build brand awareness. After that, you can look to retarget your app users and site visitors with remarketing strategies.

A well-planned remarketing campaign offers your business several benefits:

• Well-timed targeting – You can reach users who not only have interacted with your business already, but they also are in the consideration phase of the customer journey, which makes them more likely to convert.
• Focused advertising – You can create remarketing lists to advertise for specific cases. For example, a remarketing list targeted for users who abandoned their cart online could encourage them to return to complete their purchase.
• Large-scale reach – Remarketing provides a way of reaching people on any device, across millions of websites, mobile apps, and countless channels.
• Budget optimization – With automated bidding, you can devise a high-performance remarketing campaign. This real-time smart bidding will calculate the optimal bids for users viewing your ads, which helps manage your budget.
• Easy ad creation – You can use the Ad gallery to produce text, images, and video ads for free. By combining dynamic remarketing campaigns with Ad gallery layouts, you can scale beautiful ads across your entire range of products and services.
• Campaign statistics – Use data reports to analyze campaign performance, gaining knowledge about your ad engagement, costs, and return on investment (ROI).

How to Achieve this Objective

If you want to use remarketing, you should:

• Target all web visitors and app users.
• Use the ‘Similar Audiences’ feature in Google Ads.
• Use dynamic remarketing.
• Use auto-targeting.
• Keep an eye on your pricing/budget, making adjustments as needed.

Learn More: Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices

3. Do you want to increase your organic traffic volumes?

One of the most common advertising goals and objectives is to increase organic traffic. Typically, this requires a consistent focus on search engine optimization and content marketing that targets valuable keywords.

However, you can also drive traffic through PPC advertising. Strictly speaking, this isn’t organic traffic, but it is nonetheless a very effective method of increasing your sales and conversions.

And in business, that’s what really counts!

How to Achieve this Objective

If you want to get more traffic through PPC advertising, you must focus on clicks & clickthrough rate (CTR). As your ads get more clicks, your website gets more traffic.

So, to improve your CTR, think about the following aspects:

• Keywords – Monitor keyword performance, removing or replacing those that aren’t generating a good ROI.
• Ad copy – Create compelling ad text that is relevant and engaging for users.
• User search query reports – Use the Google Ads tools to review the customer search queries that trigger your ads. Identify valuable new keywords for your campaign, and also irrelevant terms that can be added as negative keywords.
• Ad groups – Organize your groups by a common theme, goal, or product/service. When you use smaller lists of tightly-related keywords with a similar theme, your ads will all be highly relevant and intriguing for viewers.

Learn More: The Relationship between Google Ads CTR and Interaction Rate

4. Do you want to increase your sales and other types of conversions?

Regardless of what type of business you have, the chances are that if you’re using Google Ads, one of your main advertising goals and objectives is to increase your sales.

You can use the Google Ads platform to reach a defined target audience, attract them to click to visit your website, and, eventually, persuade them to make a purchase.

As such, any direct sales generated through your Google Ads campaign will grow your ROI.

How to Achieve this Objective

With the goal of increasing sales, you should invest your efforts in the crucial aspects below:

• Conversion Rates – A conversion is when a user completes an action that you have defined as valuable to your business. This could be a purchase, a download, or a sign-up form. By working on increasing your conversion rates, you improve the quality of traffic your website receives, and also generate more leads that can soon become customers.
• Landing page relevance – Your ad and landing page should align, meaning that after they click on the ad, users will be directed to a landing page for the specific product or service they see in the ad.
• Ad extensions – According to Google, link extensions and call extensions can deliver a 10% increase in CTR and conversion rates, respectively.

You could also use remarketing to engage previous site visitors as they browse the internet, as it is a powerful strategy for driving conversions.

Learn More: Clicks But No Leads: How to Solve the Problem

5. Do you want to increase your profit?

Remember that throwing money at Google Ads doesn’t guarantee success. You need a strategy that considers the needs and interests of your target market, your budget, and your advertising goals and objectives.

With that being said, if generating profit is a top priority, you will often find that you have to speculate to accumulate. By that, we mean you could find success by bidding higher on valuable keywords with high purchase intent.

How to Achieve this Objective

Here’s what to focus on to increase your profits in Google Ads:

• Conversions – Your ROI is intrinsically linked to your conversion rates. You can’t grow one without the other. So, with the information discussed in the previous objective, you can work harder on increasing conversion rates across your campaigns. Over time, higher conversion rates will lead to a better ROI, which ultimately leads to higher profits.
• Reduce wasted spend – Think about your keywords, match types, and bids. You should always be monitoring and adjusting these aspects to optimize your budget, minimizing unnecessary spending wherever possible. As you reduce your costs, your profit margins will grow.

Learn More: Do you want to increase your profit?

6. Do you want to create a need among the users?

There aren’t too many market spaces that don’t have fierce competition now. Even the most random niches are alive with innovation, which is excellent news for consumers who want choice.

For businesses — and their marketing teams — this reality poses a challenge. Companies must work hard to create a need. Moreover, your business must strive to stand out from the pack and prove to consumers that you have the solutions they need.

How to Achieve this Objective

When you want to create a need in the market and stand out as a unique solution people will want, there are a few things you can do:

• Build up brand awareness.
• Offer exclusive discounts on your products and services.
• Improve the quality of your product or services, so they appear superior to anything from your competitors.
• Focus on benefit-driving marketing, highlighting how your product or service will make people’s lives better.

Essentially, you must develop an understanding of the customer journey and map it to your marketing funnel.

Learn More: Everything You Need to Know About the Marketing Funnel

7. Do you want to promote your App?

Mobile marketing is impossible to ignore now. With smartphone usage at an all-time high, there’s no better time to have an app for your business, particularly in e-commerce.

The question many marketers have is this:

How can you promote your App?

Google Ads offers a route to finding more customers by promoting your App on the Universal App Campaign.

How to Achieve this Objective

If you want to use this campaign type, you must tell Google Ads a few things about:

• Your App.
• Your audience.
• Your budget.
• Your performance goals.

Then, to successfully promote your App on Google Ads, turn your attention to these factors:

• Remarketing – Once again, you can use remarketing strategies to nurture relationships with previous app users and site visitors, gently reminding them of the features and benefits of your App.
• Deep links – Direct users to specific elements of your App that are relevant to their needs.
• App indexing – Offer specific search results that align with user intent.

8. Do you want to leverage seasonal trends?

Take a look at this list:

• Valentine’s Day
• Halloween
• Black Friday
• Christmas

What have they got in common?

They are huge, seasonal events for retail businesses. Whatever your advertising goals and objectives are, you can leverage seasonal trends to maximize your ROI.

How to Achieve this Objective

If you want to use seasonal trends to your advantage, make use of these tips below:

• Create a dedicated campaign – Focus your efforts with a stand-alone campaign. Also, allocate a budget specifically for this campaign, as this makes it easier to track performance and ROI.
• Get a headstart – It can take a few days to receive approval for your ads. So, get started early to ensure your ads are ready to go live at the opportune moment. You can always pause your ad if it is approved too soon.
• Be relevant – Everything from your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages should align with user intent, making relevant offers to a specific audience.
• Use location-targeting – Consider where your audience is and tailor your ads accordingly.

Wrap Up

Keeping your advertising goals and objectives front-and-center is essential nowadays. With these targets top-of-mind, you can make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.

Think carefully about what you are trying to achieve through PPC advertising, and use the tips in this article to manage your budget. In the end, this will get you much closer to your goals.

If you want to increase your chances of achieving your PPC goals, read this blog to learn how to maximize your budget.