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Should I start my campaign with a Website Traffic goal?
I saw in a video that, whatever my objective, I have to start my campaign with a Website Traffic goal. He doesn’t explains why, he just said: “Do it, this is the best way”.
Is there a reason for this?
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5 Replies
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It’s nice to meet a goal. But if it’s your first campaign then you might not be sure and just test the water. Once you know what reach and engagement you get then you can start figuring out goals.
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Why? I never fill my pixels with useless traffic. Use conversion only, then your lookalikes will be based on that and your conversion rate will be higher. Cheers
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For first initial ads while testing water.. try Website traffic goals such as navigated more than 2 page or stayed more than blah blah seconds .. something more solid goals than simply landed website.
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It looks like you’ve been watching some “gurus” videos:)
First, the reason they tell you website objective is that they don’t want to deal with the questions such as:
* I don’t have a thank you page, where do i put my pixel?
* If you’re an affiliate marketer – you can’t. You need to use offline conversions or the google ads api.
* If you’re a product owner, you “can” – in your cart system.*
* ***Disclaimer:** No guarantees that it will work due to:1. to cross domain tracking,
2. SSL problems
3. pixels being blocked
4. All kind of other annoyances.* I’ve added my code on the thank you page but conversions are not showing up? Why?
* I’ve added my code on the thank you page, but the sale amount doesn’t show up. why?
* Shall i use google analytic conversion or google ads?
* What’s the difference between Google ads and Google analytics conversions?
* …
* …Then, maybe they want you to ask those questions so you can join their exclusive 6 weeks mentorship, which will end up costing you, buying the “tools” they recommend and promoting the “products” they recommend.
# Your solution:
**First step:**
When you’ve got no data whatsoever in your pixel, you need to optimize according to the next significant interaction your visitors will do after landing on your page.
It can be an optin, a scroll, time spend on site, a click on a button, a visit on a key page (i.e. pricing page)…
Go slow on the budget until you improve your quality score, get rid of negative keywords, identify high performing keywords etc.. Long story short: gather quality data without spending too much.
The audience data you gather should be well segmented (i prefer Google Analytics for that), so you can then run retargeting campaigns* on this audience.
*Ad copy should be different since the users “already know you”.
**Retargeting campaign:**
**Objective** – Conversions – Sale, acquisition etc… whatever is the money objective.
As your initial campaign runs, your retargeting campaign kicks in as soon as you have enough data in your audience segment.
This is really up to you as to how you want to run it – 2 days, 3 days etc… It really depends what you sell, how you sell it and to who.
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* if you’ve collected optins, make sure you have a well thought email sequence that match with the user’s actions. (*i.e. thanks for checking product A, discount available until tomorrow).
* User’s actions: Make sure you don’t email the guys that actually purchased your product.**Second step**
1. Build a lookalike audience out of the audience you gathered in first step and run the same campaign as in **First Step.**
1. Objective – Engagements (same as step 1)
2. Retargeting campaign – Objective: Conversions
2. Because you’ve gathered demographic data on **First Step** you know the composition of your “engaged” audience. So update your initial campaign demographics and other targeting options you’ve uncovered.**Third step:**
Target CPA campaigns – Hopefully by now, you’ve got enough data and conversions to give google optimization engine the target cpa objective.
# Conversion tracking
This is obviously the most important aspect of your measurement and campaign optimization. You’ll have to check with your site’s, landing page system, or cart, how to go about it. Some systems are fully integrated, some others require tweaking, and some should not exist in the first place;)
# Here are some hints:
If you run a shopify, woocommerce store, it’s all prebuilt for you and you just have to put your GA id into the UI.
if you run on hubspot marketing, then it’s fully integrated.
If you run on clickfunnel, doable but complex.
If like many marketers have different systems connected to each others, then you have to take a deep breath, a couple of steps back and try to figure out what tools you can use to connect the dots.
# Some tools/connectors I use(d)
Zapier has an integration with Google Ads offline conversion – but it implies that you collect the customer data and pass tracking data to your CRM.
Segment – Great platform but you’ll need a data scientist first to understand how to implement it on your system, and then a developer to implement.
# To sum up:
Don’t be another “fool” who thought the so called “gurus” would really teach you how to run a campaign on google ads. There are real courses out there, provided by real agencies that run multimillion dollar campaigns (and i’m not one of them).
Yet, no matter what you learn, keep your head cold and “BS detector” on… Coz you never know;)
Also, each business has its objectives, nuances and challenges. There is no “one single” campaign flow that fits all businesses.
Tracking conversions in google ads can be super simple if everything you do is just collect emails and trigger the conversion on a “thank you page”, but as soon as your objective is a little more than an optin, things can get complicated and very fast.
So don’t run any ads until you are fully tracking your entire customer journey across your marketing stack.
Good luck!
ps: you might be wondering why the “rant”;) I am quite familiar with your scenario. Many of my customers have gone through these costly disappointment only to discover that they were just another guy in the “gurus” sales funnel.
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I think one should test his/her website for Usability and UX/UI issues before spending money & efforts on SEO. You can visit [https://www.lobmax.com/](https://www.lobmax.com/)
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