How to Use Google’s Smart Goals to Identify High Quality Traffic and Drive Conversion from Paid Search Advertising?
March 7, 2016
Nashaat Quadri
Have you ever tried to optimize the performance of your Google Ads account? If yes, then how do you optimize your ads, bids and website?
For better advertising, you need accurate measurement and tracking.
Your ultimate target as a business is getting conversions and hence it becomes important to use smart tools to accurately measure and optimize conversion rates.
What is Conversion?
When a website visitor clicks on something, which is a desired activity, such as downloads (apps, ebooks and whitepapers), phone calls, website purchases, or newsletter sign-ups, etc., it’s known as conversion.
So, when you’re successful at directing visitors for the predefined conversion, you’re on to the path of success with your Google Ads campaign account. All you need to do it successfully is accurate data.
Accurate data guides you everywhere in the field of marketing and therefore paid search marketers are always in search of tools that provide accurate data.
Are you Losing Out on Your Marketing Spending?
We have found that majority of businesses aren’t measuring conversions. Some of them do not have any mechanism in their website to convert their visitors and others don’t have the required expertise and time for this important activity. Either way, you’re losing out on your marketing spend, if you’re not doing it properly.
How to Track Highest Quality Visits for Conversion?
When you start tracking the visits to your website, you realize that every visit is not a quality visit, at least in terms of conversion. Marketers generally use Imported Google Analytics Ecommerce transactions or Google Ads Conversion Tracking. But, if you’re not doing that, Smart Goals from Google Analytics (highlighted in the information image box below) can be your best bet to measure conversion.
With Smart Goals, you can easily track highest-quality visits to your website and improve the performance of your Google Ads account using this data. Many businesses have reported registering higher sales using Smart Goals.
Addtional Read: Improve your Google Ads Campaign Performance
How it Works?
Google uses credible conversion data across millions of websites that use its Analytics. These computer-generated signals filter important factors that lead to conversion. These indicators include location, visited pages per session, session duration, browser and device being used. Visits are assigned specific scores that indicate their likelihood of conversion. In the light of the above signals and insights, Smart Goals (which can be imported into your Google Ads account) identifies the visitors, who are likely to convert. It works on the same model as Smart Lists (also from Google Analytics) work for remarketing campaigns.
To bring you the best results, Smart Goals only uses the top 5% of the traffic from Google Ads. Then it starts tracking all the visits to your website including visits from organic searches and other resources.
In order to use Smart Goals, first, you need to enable Smart Goals and then you can import it into your Google Ads account.
Requirements to Setup Smart Goals
The first requirement of Smart Goals is that your linked Ads account should have generated at least one thousand clicks in the preceding month in your Google Analytics view.
The second requirement is that the reporting view must not be getting more than a million hits /day.
Data Sharing Settings
In your Google Ads account, go to “Google Products and Services” and turn it “on”.
How to Setup and Optimize Smart Goals?
It’s easy to set up and optimize Smart Goals in your Google Ads account. You just need to follow the three simple steps given below:
Step 1: Activation
To activate Smart Goals, follow these four steps.
A. Find the “Admin” section
B. Click “Goals” (under “View”)
C. Select “Smart Goals.”
D. Click + New Goal
Your Smart Goals are activated now. This will enable you to start receiving the details of your best quality visits through Smart Goals. No extra effort is required here.
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Step 2: Importing Smart Goals into your Google Ads Account
Link your accounts and then wait for half an hour so that the imports are ready. Then import Smart Goals through these 8 steps:
1. Sign in to your Ads account,
2. Click Tools tab
3. Select Conversions > Google Analytics
4. Select the checkboxes next to the goals
5. Click Continue
6. Go to the next page, go to Settings. Change it according to your choices and then click Import goals.
7. Click Close
8. If you wish to import even more goals, Click Import more
Step 3: Optimization for Smart Goals
When you start measuring conversions, you can optimize your campaign around a target cost per acquisition (CPA). CPA (as compared to CPC) is a much better indicator of how our paid advertising campaign is performing.
So Smart Goals allows you to optimize your ad-spend, as it focuses on conversion.
Link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics property in order to start using Smart Goals.
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