When it comes to paid ads you are paying for every single click and in some cases every single impression. Therefore, in that case, pay for what you want. Whether it is leads, add to carts, purchases or calls. Whatever your business needs to grow that is what you should pay for. Link clicks, landing page views, and engagements can empty your wallet without a huge return. So for Google Ads ALWAYS setup Google Analytics and for Facebook Ads ALWAYS setup the Facebook Pixel.
By setting up the Google Analytics gtag and linking the Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account you can see the average time on site and the pages per visit from every single click. You can also go to the “goals” section of Google Analytics and set up individual goals based on URLs you want to track such as contact pages. You can also import goals from Google Tag Manager such as when user’s click on individual buttons such as call buttons or submit buttons on a contact form.
For Facebook Ads, you can set up the Facebook Pixel (which is the equivalent of the Google Analytics gtag) and track individual events such as individual pages or button clicks similar to Google Analytics. The Facebook Pixel again is on my checklist of things that must be set up and verified to be working before launching a new account. You can also use the Facebook Pixel to create audiences and lookalike audiences so retargeting user’s who have already been to the site or targeting users that have similar characteristics to the user’s already visiting your site.
For Google Ads once you have tracking setup and you import your goals from Google Analytics into your Google Ads account (under the conversions tab) you can first start to optimize for clicks and switch over to maximize conversions once you have at least 5-10 goal completions in a week. If you don’t have past conversions in the account then Google will not have any past data to use to find more conversions. Even if the goal completions are from a different campaign Google can still use that past data to find more conversions. As long as Google has the past conversion data in the conversion tab that is what Google will use to find more conversions.
Facebook, on the other hand, is a little bit different. You set up your goal from the start of a campaign so this is when you select “conversions” from the beginning. That should be your goal every single time you create a new campaign on Facebook. The more goal completions you have the easier it is for Facebook to find the next one. However, if you have a goal that user’s WANT then it is easy to find more of them. Free trials, coupon offers, add to carts are great first steps for goals to optimize for. The more desirable your offer is in your ad the easier it will be for the algorithm to find the next person.
However, this all relates back to having the right north star. If your goal from the beginning isn’t right you will find the wrong conversion and fail. The algorithm is smart but only as smart as you let it be. So if you tell the algorithm to find you likes, that what it will find you, nothing more nothing less. If you ask the algorithm to find you page views then it will find you page views. Again nothing more, nothing less.
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