The 3 Most Important Things You Need for Digital Marketing Success – All Things PPC Podcast Ep11

By having your ROAS target in place for an e commerce retailer, you can then work at how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a sale. And that is the line between profitability and not.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the PPC Geeks podcast, all things PPC. I’m your host, Chris, the co founder and managing director here at PPC Geeks. And today. I want to talk to you about the three most important things to have success in a digital advertising campaign. Too many people miss these three fundamentals and they get too in the weeds on all the good stuff we talk about here, like performance max and how to manage your clients, et cetera.

But if you haven’t got these three key things in place, Then you are setting yourself up for failure. So I want to spend a good amount of time over the next 20 to 30 minutes talking through what these three things are and why they are so important and. Spoiler alert, the conclusion is this is often true in life as it is in marketing, that these three things are so important to get the best quality out of whatever you’re doing.

The state of digital marketing today is, it’s a cornucopia of ideas and fads and tools and new tools and techniques and seeing what other people are doing. You are spoiling Feeling like you’re constantly having to catch up. Should you have videos on here? Should your videos be 30 seconds long? Should they be 10 seconds long?

Should they be 90 seconds long? Should you have adverts on all platforms or just one platforms? Should you go back to offline tracking and offline advertising techniques? There’s just so much out there and the next thing’s coming along and it’s a constant uphill battle for business owners and digital marketing managers.

But the good news is that the fundamental things don’t change. You need a good product or service to sell. You need to be able to create a compelling message to get that across to people. And you need to make sure you’re getting an ROI on those marketing pounds and dollars that you spend. And the best way to do that is to make sure you’ve got.

All of these three key elements in place for whatever you’re doing when it comes to your marketing. So I’m going to be taking you through today, these three things, which are firstly conversion tracking. There’s that old adage, what gets measured gets managed. And that is so key for marketing campaigns.

We’re also going to talk about having the right strategy measuring to KPIs. And that is the next thing, having that goal and the strategy to get there. And then finally, the thing that people don’t like these days because everyone wants everything instantly, and that is time. These things take time.

You’ve got to have time to see things working. So that’s what we’re talking about today. Not maybe the most exciting topic, but potentially the most important topics to talk about when it comes to success with digital marketing. So let’s dive straight into the fundamental first thing you need, no matter what you’re doing in my opinion, and the opinion of how we work here at PPC Geeks, and that is conversion tracking.

So firstly, what is conversion tracking and what do we mean for it when it comes to digital marketing? Conversion tracking is ultimately why business exists, in my opinion. If you are a business and you’re wanting to make money, which the vast majority of businesses do, you need people or customers or clients to take an action and give you their money, essentially.

They’re not giving you their money for, for no reason. They’re giving you their money in exchange for the provision of a service or a product. You need to know when people or how they get to you and how they convert into those paying customers. And that is the fundamental thing that conversion tracking is about.

It’s taking those actions, those visitors to your website or your store and saying, okay, out of, All these people, how do we know whether these people and how we’ve got them here have actually turned into customers? And that is tracking. If you don’t have tracking in place, but you’re getting loads of organic traffic, you’re posting on social media, you’re paying for adverts, you’re taking out, uh, billboards and all that kind of thing.

If you don’t have tracking in place, how do you know which of these channels is working for you and how can you calculate an ROI? And when we get into the weeds then of Google advertising and we start looking at what keywords are we using, et cetera, without conversion tracking in place, how do we know which of the keywords are actually making us money and which of the keywords are costing us money?

And that ultimately is what conversion tracking is. It’s finding out and understanding and measuring what works and what doesn’t. When it comes to turning people into customers, and that’s what you need to know. And only when you have that in place, can you measure what works and what doesn’t. So that’s what conversion tracking is.

Let’s get into the weeds a bit on PPC conversion tracking or paid advertising conversion tracking specifically, and look at the different types of conversions we can track. There’s an old adage in marketing that 50 percent of my marketing works. Uh, but I don’t know which 50 percent and maybe in the past that was true when you’re advertising in newspapers, et cetera.

But with conversion tracking in the digital form We can track pretty much everything when it comes to user journeys now. Sure there are Rightfully privacy and compliance things that we need to do to ensure things are tracked in the right way And that does open up some ambiguity for Well The types of data that we can get, but ultimately what we’re most interested in is it is fundamental level.

How did people find us and did they become a customer? So the different types of conversions we can track are purchases or leads or signups, or just views to a page, et cetera. Although we’re more bothered here about profitable conversion tracking. So by taking a look at your business, now, most of the businesses out there are either these days that are digital advertising, they’re either e commerce.

So it’s just tracking whether someone actually makes a purchase, puts their card details in and pays the money. So that’s tracking a purchase or their lead generation, which means they are, maybe you need a plumber, so you look for a plumber online and you call up the number and say, You know, can you come to my house and fix this leaky tap?

That is a lead because they haven’t become a customer at that point in time, but they are elite. So in that case, we would track calls or fills to a form or chat conversations. And then that way you’re tracking the right point for you of what you’re trying to do, which is get more people to. Be aware of your business and call up and then you can hopefully turn them into customers or maybe you’re a SAS company and then you’re looking for signups to your website.

So people either doing a free trial or signing off and becoming a paid customer. Ultimately. The conversion type that you track needs to be aligned to the business objective you have. If you’re an e commerce company, you want people to purchase your products. If you are a plumber, you need people to call your phone.

We speak to lots of service companies that just say they just need their phone to ring. Or if you’re a SaaS company, you need that sign up to try out your platform. Now we can track then if we get more nuanced, we can track, uh, just leads. Which is still a conversion or we can track actual sales. And this is where we get more complicated.

So I refer you to our other episode, where we talk about offline conversion tracking, and this is when we. Look at tracking the leads that you generate, the generate phone calls, and then whether they actually convert into the customers down the line, we can feed that data back into Google ads or metal or whatever you’re using to advertise and ultimately work out the conversion value of those people.

Now there’s lots of tools out there for helping with conversion tracking, but the main ones you need are the ones that are built into the platforms. That you’re actually using to do your advertising. So you want to track your conversions for Google ads within Google ads, and then you can have centralized everything by using Google analytics to see all your different channels and analyze trends and data and see what’s going on.

Once you’ve got all this tracking in place, and that’s obviously a whistle stop tour of what conversion tracking is, and it, there is setting it up is fundamentally a technical skill. Once you have that data working and you’re confident that data is accurate, only then can you actually start to optimize your campaigns and know what’s working and what’s not.

So to summarize this first main point, The reason I talk about conversion tracking first is I feel if you haven’t got conversion tracking in place for your business and you’re spending money on advertising, then why bother? Because you do not know what is bringing you the money and what is not. Now, a lot of people would say, well, I’m the more I spend on PPC, the more sales I get.

Great. But I can tell you that if you have conversion tracking in place, it will be so much better if you’re tracking it accurately and you know what works and what doesn’t. And the reason you want to know what works and what doesn’t is because then you can double down on what works and cut what doesn’t, making you more efficient.

Google and Meta and LinkedIn, they make so much money out of advertising. By not tracking and knowing what works and what doesn’t, you are just giving them more money than you need to. It’s very likely you could spend a bit less and get. Even more just by having that data available. So if you’re not measuring it, you can’t manage it successfully.

So that’s conversion tracking. And that is key to the first step before you go anywhere. That is the starting blocks for a successful PPC campaign. Now, once you’re confident, the tracking is right. We move on to the second thing you need for successful marketing campaigns. And that is KPIs and strategy.

What are KPIs? KPIs are key performance indicators. In the same way that having conversion tracking in places helps with what gets measured, gets managed, having the KPI to actually measure against is what tells you how your campaigns are performing. So if you are a e commerce business, you might have what we call a ROAS target.

So a ROAS target is revenue on ad spend. So that means for every pound or dollar you put into promoting your products, how much do you get back in revenue? Now, the target you have will be based on how much money you make. From each sale that could be at the product level, but to keep it simple, let’s talk, talk about it at the account level.

You might have a product that costs a certain amount to make, it costs a certain amount to store. It costs a certain amount to market a certain amount to ship out. And based on all that, you’ll be able to work out your margin and this margin. So say you have a 20 percent margin on a product and your product costs five pounds, you have about a pound to play with of profit.

The more money you put. Towards advertising, the less profit you’ll make. And this is why ROAS is so critical by having your ROAS target in place for an e commerce retailer, you can then work out how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a sale. And that is the line between profitability and not, you don’t want to just spend loads of money and hit and hope you need that.

Key performance indicator to measure against so you can know whether you’re going to be profitable or not. So there are other KPIs, but you have, you usually have a headline KPI and they are around either cost per lead or profitability or cost per signup below that, and you’ll have common KPIs around more around the measures you might need to achieve.

To hit your business school, but don’t mistake what we call vanity metrics. Like how many clicks you get your position in the search engine, how many people see your adverts or what your click through rate is with actual ROI, I can get you loads of impressions, loads of eyes on your adverts. I can get you loads of clicks, but if they’re not turning it, turning into customers, they don’t matter.

So while they are good KPIs to have. Make sure you have the right KPIs that are aligned to the overall business goals and make sure they are set first to make sure that that can then inform the most important step here, which is having the right strategy to achieve those KPIs. By having the conversion tracking in place, having a fundamental business focus, profit focus, KPI, you can then use that data to make strategic decisions about how to structure your campaigns.

And this is what comes into the strategy allocation for your marketing. Only when you set those things out, can you know what you’re going to go after and how you’re going to go after it. There’s too many people in PPC. that see a problem in account and then just go and start clicking about and trying to fix it without taking a step back and saying, what are we actually trying to achieve here?

Is it being measured correctly? And what is the KPI we’re trying to perform to? When you have those in place, you’ll know How you can set up how you’re going to 24 months to achieve all those business objectives. I liken it to going on a journey. You don’t usually get in a car to go somewhere unless you know what, where you’re trying to go.

So first you decide, I want to go drive down to Cornwall. Okay. And you might live in, Uh, leads first, you decide the destination and only then that’s the KPI. The goal is to get there to your, to your destination. Only once you have that in place, do you work out the route you’re going to take? You wouldn’t get in the car and say, I’m just going to drive down the M1 and see what happens.

That’s not going to get you to your goal. You work backwards from that KPI and you need that measure in place in marketing to know if you’re correct on your course that you’re going on. You can then use those KPIs to optimize a campaign performance and the budget that you allocate to different areas.

And ultimately having that objective in place is what is needed for setting the strategy. So once you have those KPIs, you can then say, okay, What kind of adverts do we have? What do we want to do? What are our USPs? What are we trying to get across? What is the conversion action that we’re tracking? And having all those in place will set you up for a far better performance in your campaigns.

Again, A lot of people talk about these things, conversion tracking and KPIs and strategy, but most people don’t do them in the right order. Unless you can measure, and unless you know what you’re trying to achieve, how can you set the strategy? And that’s why doing them in the right order is so important.

So to recap, we need to understand Where we’re going. And then we need to remember, and this is the third thing, that that will take time. And this is the thing that people in 2024, when I’m recording this, don’t always accept. People want quick wins, quick fixes. The economy in the UK has been interesting over the last 18 months, 2 years.

And people. Feel like they need to quickly fix things. And that too many of them are just trying to throw money at it and not looking at the KPIs and the strategy, right. Or not even tracking correctly. And then not giving things enough time to utilize those measures. So you could have perfect conversion tracking.

You could really have nailed your KPIs and knowing what you’re trying to do, and you could have the perfect strategy in place. But if you don’t give it time to get results, then you’re just going to be spending things and not understanding whether it’s working or not over time. So, what I mean by that is, In PPC, you’re paying essentially per click.

So what that means is let’s imagine every click costs a pound in your business. If you’re spending a thousand pounds a month, it will take you maybe a month to get a thousand clicks. If you’re spending 30, 000 pounds a month, it will take you a day to get a thousand clicks. Those time horizons will give you far different feedback loops on what’s working.

And what’s not, but then there’s seasonality. There’s days of the week, there’s other times a day, there’s other trends, there’s things happening in the media, et cetera, that mean that looking at results in a close period of time, doesn’t always give you the stability and the statistical significance to know what’s going to work over the longterm and really.

Paid advertising is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to have the right measures in place. You need the right strategy and KPIs, and then you need to give it time to analyze trends over time and look at what’s working and what’s not. You then need to take that data and say, okay, this keyword is not working or this product sets not working.

And then you can adjust your budgets or use portfolio budgets or all these tools and techniques. To influence things and gather feedback and more data over more timing, incrementally get better over a longer period. And then you have seasonal trends that can affect things. There’s the frequency of ads are shown.

There’s so many things that affect the time that’s used. But again, this all loops back to making sure it’s tracked. You want to make sure also that you don’t let the automations in Google ads give you false data. By always promoting the one thing that works and not giving enough time and budget to the other areas.

So ultimately, if you want success, you’re going to have to be willing to, for it to take some time. It’s the tortoise and the hare is very much at play when it comes to PPC. Fundamentally, then I think these are the three key elements. They’re timeless principles. Whether you’re testing out a hundred years ago, a new.

Advertising campaign for washing soap or whatever in a, in a, in a newspaper, you want to know, okay, I put this advert in place. Can I, um, I’m telling people it’s in this shop. How many people go in? Do we measure that? How many people do we need to buy versus the cost of the advert? How long has the advert been running for?

Is there enough people seeing the advert, all that kind of stuff. With only with the right conversion tracking, The right KPIs and the right amount of time. Can you have success? And this works for life as well. So you’re trying to lose weight or, uh, which is something apparently a lot, a huge percentage of people are trying to do it all the time.

Are you measuring what you’re eating? Are you measuring what your weight is? Do you have a strategy to achieve that one that’s actually proven? Are you giving it enough time to see the trends over time? Or maybe you’re trying to stop biting your nails. How are you measuring that? Are you saying, okay, I went four hours without biting my nails.

Do you have a strategy, maybe using that paint that they’re using? Doesn’t taste very nice on your nails or you’re having mindful reminders on your phone. And are you giving it time the time the 21 days or 30 days or two weeks or whatever the latest science says on habit formation of how long you need to break a habit?

Or form a new good habit without these tight, this time and patient, you’re not going to get that quality outcome that you’re looking for. So, um, this is what we find. And this is why we’re a big fan of timeless principles here. Yes. New trends come and go. But without tracking things, having the strategy and having the time, you’re not going to get what you need.

And these are the things that we think are fundamentally the most important for success in PPC. So I encourage you to ensure and maybe go away and check your campaigns, check all your conversion actions are right, check the strategy and KPIs are aligned to where you are now in your business and check what you’re testing at the moment and whether you’ve given it enough time and let us know If you find this useful and whether these are the things that you think are the most important for digital marketing, or maybe you have some evergreen timeless principles that you think are more important.

So to recap again, make sure your tracking is right. Make sure you have the right measures and strategy and give it time. Thank you for listening. I hope you found that useful. Please do subscribe, share this with anyone, you know, and give us some ideas for other things you might want to hear about on the podcast.

We are also looking for guests, so. Please reach out and let us know if you know someone or would like to be featured on the podcast and you work in digital marketing, we’d love to have you on. Thank you for listening. And if you need any help with your PPC campaigns, we are the PPC Geeks and we can get you where you need to go.

Thanks for listening.