Without conversion data, your Adwords campaigns are more or less rudderless, and optimising the campaigns to reach your online goals is simply a pipe-dream. Conversions can be sales, relevant email or phone call enquiries or a pre-determined user behaviour that you deem a goal, such as a newsletter sign up or significant engagement on your website.
Google Smart Goals are a recent “innovation” (insert generic sarcasm here) that, to be fair, are designed to help the digitally-naïve advertiser to gain further insight and measurement to their PPC campaigns. Google will use the vast wealth of information available (from those who opted in to share anonymised data) and determine “dozens of key factors that correlate with likelihood to convert: things like session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser”.
An advertiser that doesn’t have any clear conversion metrics can benefit from using Smart Goals however. For an advertiser that doesn’t have phone tracking and/or use contact forms or if you sell products in retail units but not online, for example, can benefit. Google will determine website behaviour that is counted as a conversion; Session duration, Pages per session, Location, Device and Browser etc. Without setting custom goals, this is a good indication of the quality of the traffic on your website. Using Smart Goals, in this instance, is better than not having any goals set at all. Measured over time, you can analyse the quality of your web traffic, well… to an extent.
Whilst this feature is welcome, at Blue Shark Digital we would never recommend using Smart Goals. If you don’t have the expertise to set up custom goals that are directly-aligned to your online business goals, then you should out-source this task to a suitably-qualified agency. Custom goals can measure sales, enquiries, downloads, etc and can link in directly with your CRM. This allows for analysis from the initial customer contact right through to sale/desired action. Doing this allows you to determine which keyword delivers the most sales, which keyword has the lowest cost-per-action metric, etc. Analysed over time, these custom goals are much more valuable than the Smart Goals by Google.
For more information on how Blue Shark Digital can assist with your analytics/adwords campaigns and goals, contact us now for a FREE consultation.