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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.

1

Set objectives

2

Get ready

3

Take action

4

Evaluate & expand

Max growth

This is the most important step — ensure all your objectives ladder up to your company’s business objective.

Know your business objective

Align your marketing objective

Set your media objectives

Pick your campaign objectives

Lay the foundation for growth with privacy-centric measurement and a view of the whole customer journey.

Measure what matters

Google tag

Customer Match

Consider the full customer journey

Google Analytics

Enhanced conversions for web

Data-driven attribution

Maximize the full-funnel – capture existing demand using automation, and generate new demand through diversification.

Capture existing demand

Search campaigns

Performance Max

App campaigns

Generate new demand

Video action & Discovery

Video reach

Find opportunities to take your growth further. It’s a continuous cycle that ensures you get the most out of every ad dollar.

Spend your time where it counts

Optimization score

Test, learn, and refine

Don't leave opportunity on the table

Drive high-value online sales with the Growth Formula.

1

Set objectives

This is the most important step — ensure all your objectives ladder up to your company’s business objective.

Know your business objective

Align your marketing objective

Set your media objectives

Pick your campaign objectives

2

Get ready

Lay the foundation for growth with privacy-centric measurement and a view of the whole customer journey.

Measure what matters

Google tag

Customer Match

Consider the full customer journey

Google Analytics

Enhanced conversions for web

Data-driven attribution

3

Take action

Maximize the full-funnel – capture existing demand using automation, and generate new demand through diversification.

Capture existing demand

Search campaigns

Performance Max

App campaigns

Generate new demand

Video action & Discovery

Video reach

4

Evaluate & expand

Find opportunities to take your growth further. It’s a continuous cycle that ensures you get the most out of every ad dollar.

Spend your time where it counts

Optimization score

Test, learn, and refine

Don't leave opportunity on the table

Max growth

Drive high-value online sales with the Growth Formula.

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.

01

Know your business objective

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 sharerevenue, 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.

Action

Craft your business’ overall objective in the goal template.

02

Align your marketing objectives

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.

Action

Draft your primary marketing objective in the goal template.

03

Set your media objectives

The 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.

Action

Add your media objectives to the goal template.

04

Pick your campaign objectives

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.

Action

Add your campaign KPIs to the goal template.

EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT

See how Jen sets objectives for her company, Feather.

Read less Read more

See how Jen sets objectives for her company, Feather. 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.

01

Measure what matters

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 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

Action

Set up sitewide tagging with the Google tag to build a first-party database from web interactions.

Pro tip

Advanced users can use Server-Side Tagging available through Google Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 to place third-party tags in a cloud server.

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.

Action

Use Customer Match to reach and re-engage with your customers across the web.

Use offline conversion imports to understand what drives real business outcomes.

Pro tip

Offline conversionscan be used to record a conversion 30 days after an online sale, so you can exclude transactions that resulted in a return.

1Google and BCG, "The Keys to Scaling Digital Value", n=545 "digital leaders" (i.e. businesses with above average digital maturity), Aug - Nov 2021

02

Consider the full customer journey

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.

Action

Set up Google Analytics and power your advertising by connecting with Google Ads

Pro tip

Predictive audiences can identify likely 7-day purchasers in Google Analytics, and you can reach them with custom offers in Google Ads.

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.

6%

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

Read less Read more

See how Jen gets measurement and analytics in place for Feather 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 and follows five key steps to power her advertising:

  1. Links Google Analytics to Google Ads
  2. Enables personalized advertising
  3. Imports additional conversion actions to Google Ads
  4. Creates audiences, like “cart abandoners”
  5. 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.

01

Capture existing demand

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:

"Sales" divided by "Ad spend" times 100 calculates a Target ROAS percent.

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%

57% of US shoppers surveyed say they have used Google Search for discovery and inspiration.3

Action

Choose keywords with Keyword Planner.

Use broad match with a value-based Smart Bidding strategy.

Create responsive search ads to automatically show customized ads.

Run a branded search campaign to capture customers who are searching.

Pro tip

Use automatically-created assets to improve ad relevance and reduce the manual work when getting started.

Find new geographies to target where customers are already searching for your products with Market Finder.

Add business information to make your Search ads more helpful and engaging.

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.

18%

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.

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.5

Action

Implement Performance Max alongside existing campaigns by following these steps.

Use a value-based Smart Bidding strategy.

Connect your product information with a Merchant Center feed.

Pro tip

Follow the best practices guide, and use Product Studio to make creative product images with generative AI.

ACQUIRE VALUABLE CUSTOMERS WITH APP CAMPAIGNS

If you have an app, use App campaigns to drive purchases and interactions with your most valuable customers.

11%

On average, advertisers that add product feeds to their App campaigns achieve a 11% uplift in conversions.6

Action

Set up App campaigns to acquire new users across all of Google’s largest properties including Search, Play, YouTube, Discover, and Display.

Pro tip

Use deep linking to connect customers to the most relevant content within your app.

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.

02

Generate new demand

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

91%

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.

Illustrated phones show bike shop ad examples in Youtube Videos, Youtube Home feed, Android Discover feed, and Gmail app.

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.

Action

Launch a Discovery campaign to automatically introduce your brand to new customers scrolling through feeds in Gmail, YouTube, and Discovery.

Run a Video action campaign to capture potential customers who are using YouTube to decide what to buy.

When available: Create Demand Gen campaigns

Pro tip

Make YouTube even more shoppable and drive more sales by adding product feeds to Video action campaigns.

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.

Action

Set up a Video reach campaign.

Pro tip

Short-form video is booming. Upload a 60-second (or shorter) vertical video to your assets to appear next to YouTube Shorts.

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

Read less Read more

See how Jen captures and generates demand for Feather 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.

The Target ROAS formula is shown above a chart comparing target CPAs to target ROAS. The Target ROAS formula is shown above a chart comparing target CPAs to target ROAS.

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.

01

Spend your time where it counts

Let Google do the work for you. When you’re running hundreds of campaigns, surfacing opportunities can become more difficult. Your optimization score helps you by estimating how well your Google Ads account is performing, and gives you personalized recommendations that will improve performance.

78%

78% of marketers say they feel relieved that giving a larger role to digital tools (e.g., automation, machine learning) will free up time to focus on other priorities.10

Action

Check your optimization score to see how well your Google Ads account is performing.

Pro tip

You can now opt in to apply a certain subset of recommendations automatically, which can improve your account performance and save time.

10Google/Kantar, Org of the Future Study, US, 2021 N=500 senior B2B and B2C marketers

02

Test, learn, and refine

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.

Dashboard UI shows "Attribution" being selected under Measurement settings
Action

Explore attribution journey in Google Ads.

Pro tip

Explore the conversion paths report in Google Analytics.

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.

Action

Understand your best customers.

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.

Action

Use drafts and experiments to test new strategies, and Performance Planner to test different budgets.

03

Don't leave opportunity on the table

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.

Action

Use your impression share to re-evaluate 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.

An ROA guage measures the balance of ad volume to ad efficiency for maximum profit.

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.

Action

Understand 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.

Action

Optimize your product data.

EXPLORE HOW JEN DOES IT

See how Jen optimized her marketing investments

Read less Read more

See how Jen optimized her marketing investments 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.

  • Get started
  • 1 Set objectives
  • 2 Get ready
  • 3 Take action
  • 4 Evaluate & expand
  • Restart

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