Starting paid media efforts for your startup might feel daunting, especially if you’re working with tight budgets or haven’t tested on paid ads before. You want to make every dollar count, especially when every penny matters for early-stage companies trying to validate PMF or discover effective channels for both traffic and conversions. 

If you’re feeling hesitant about testing into paid ads due to the risk, the learning curve, or just feeling unsure where to begin, know that you’re not alone. As a startup marketing agency, we’ve partnered with countless founders and small teams who have felt the same way.

That’s why, in this blog post, I’ll share our approach to planning media spending for our partners. I’ll provide you with a template that we always start with, tailored specifically for early-stage brands with minimal paid advertising experience or data. Plus, I’ll offer some extra tips to ensure you’re fully prepared to succeed in your paid campaign efforts.

Establishing Your Campaign Goal

Before you dive into your paid advertising journey, it’s crucial to get clear on your campaign goals and set up proper tracking. This ensures you can link your paid efforts directly to your campaigns (we’ll delve into this later). With our partners, we like using Google Analytics, ad platforms data, and tapping into available customer analytics or CRM data.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be overly complex. For instance, if you run an eCommerce startup, your goals likely revolve around boosting revenue and ROAS. If you’re in the B2B realm, your focus might be on generating MQLs or SQLs. Regardless of your industry, having a clear picture of what you aim to achieve and measure will steer you toward crafting the right media mix and campaign strategy.

Creating a Media Plan 

Now that you’ve locked in your campaign goals, it’s time to craft your media plan. Start by pinpointing the channels that align best with your goals and allocating your budget accordingly.

If you’re unsure about which paid media channels are ideal for reaching your campaign’s goals, take a look at the tables below. They’ll serve as a helpful starting point for your planning:

PPC Channels:

Social Ads Channels:

Once you’ve honed in on the right paid channel mix, you can now begin planning your channel and budget breakout in the form of a media plan. 

Leveraging Our Media Plan Template to Forecast Potential Results

At Tuff, we’ve simplified media planning with our ready-to-use templates. We made these after crafting media plans for hundreds of startups and we continue to refine them. You’ll find templates for eCommerce, B2B, app acquisition, and brand awareness linked below. 

Grab the paid media planning template for startups here. And if you find this one useful, take a look at these other 13 free marketing spreadsheets and easy-to-use spreadsheets.

These templates simplify the media planning process. They’ve got columns and rows ready to go, so you can crunch numbers and estimate how your campaigns will perform. For example, you can adjust spending, CPC, and CVR to see where to allocate your budget to reach your goals.

If you’ve got past campaign data, great. You can use it to estimate CPCs and CVRs. If not, no problem. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush for CPC estimates, or check out your Analytics tool like GA4 for CVR estimates.

Every quarter, we gather paid media benchmarks for all the channels we use. We look at stuff like CPCs, CPMs, app install rates, and conversion rates. We break it down by industry so we can use the latest benchmarks for our planning.

Our templates aren’t just for the initial plan. We also use them for audience prioritization. Inside, you’ll find a tab for this. We figure out who we want to target and set priorities from 1 to 5. This helps us focus on the most important audiences first. Plus, we keep track of tested audiences and their status in the ad platforms.

I’ve also made a 10-minute loom video below, demonstrating how I use this spreadsheet for media planning. It’s a hands-on example to give you a clearer idea on how to best leverage these resources. Check it out!

Maximizing Your Paid Advertising: Essential Tips

Planning your media spend doesn’t have to be complicated, but there are a few more things you’ll want to make sure you’ve got covered before launching your campaigns, as well as some checkpoints to keep an eye on during the campaign run.

Configure Your Tracking

First, as I mentioned above, it’s crucial to ensure that before you even spend a penny on your paid media efforts, that you have goal tracking fully established and working properly. This doesn’t just mean having a GA4 or Hubspot account created. You need to first set up conversion events in your analytics platform or CRM, as well as within your ad platforms to ensure that you are tracking all necessary goals and events that you want to track and optimize towards. 

You also want to ensure that you are tracking all of the necessary parameters to be able to distinguish traffic from each campaign by providing each ad with a UTM link. This should include the source of the campaign, (Google, Meta, etc.), the medium of the campaign (such as CPC), and the campaign name, at a minimum. Additionally parameters like content help to distinguish between individual keywords or ad creatives which lead to your goals. All of this is important information and is necessary to properly attribute results back to individual campaigns.

Many CRMs and analytics platforms attempt to make this as easy as possible by providing direct integrations into the most popular ad platforms which can often automatically create UTM tracking links for you. However, be sure to test your links to ensure that the traffic is being properly attributed in your CRM or analytics platform.

Continuously Test and Iterate on Your Campaigns

While launching your campaigns is exciting, the work is only just beginning. To truly find success, it’s important to constantly be iterating on your campaigns to help improve the performance and move the needle closer to your goals.

While these could mean testing new channels or campaign types, it could also mean testing and optimizing within your originally launched campaign structure to find the areas of success that you can scale, as well as the areas that need improvement or should be removed if they are not helping you achieve your goal.

Some key areas which help you optimize your campaigns include testing new creative and using a creative testing framework to identify top performing assets, split-testing ad variations with unique ad copy to find what’s resonating best with your audience, and adjusting bidding strategies within the ad platforms to help you achieve more efficient results.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather provide a starting point of ideas that can be implemented to continuously test and improve on the performance of your paid media campaigns.

Get Ready To Make the Most of Your Campaigns 

If you’re new to launching paid media campaigns or deciding where to focus your budget, getting your media planning right is essential for reaching your goals.

Following a few simple steps will help ensure that you are on the right track:

• Begin with clearly establishing your goals and choosing the right channel and campaign type mix which will help you best achieve these goals. 
• Plan your media spend accordingly and create various estimates and scenarios to help provide a path forward. 
• Ensure that you are tracking your paid efforts and conversion events accurately to receive the correct attribution to optimize your efforts. 
• Continuously test and iterate on your campaigns to fine-tune your performance with new creative, ad copy, bidding strategies, and more.

If you’re eager to learn more or need some extra support, let’s chat. We can discuss teaming up on your paid efforts, going over the media planning templates, and giving you personalized recommendations.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post How to Calculate Paid Media Spend on Your Early Paid Advertising Efforts (+Free Media Planning Template) appeared first on Tuff.

Google Analytics has been a crucial component for countless businesses for the better part of 20 years now. It’s where you can see the traffic coming to your site. You can use this platform to understand the behavior of your customers. What are the most engaging landing pages? What channel are users converting from most often? Is it paid or organic? All of these questions and hundreds more can be answered by simply navigating through Google Analytics. 

In just this last year, however, massive changes were deployed to Google Analytics with the official launch of GA4. Things are different now. Virtually everything that was in Universal Analytics has been updated or changed in some way. With this being a much different platform than it used to be, it’s as crucial as ever for businesses and startups to get their footing on this new frontier. We will go through some of our best tips and tricks for how to use GA4 in 2024 and beyond. Let’s strap in!

Introduction to GA4 in 2024

Lots has changed. If you were used to how things were in Universal Analytics then you may be a little bit lost when you get into the new user interface of GA4. Even the important reporting metrics used to track performance are new in many cases. Before we get into all of the powerful benefits GA4 has to offer your startup or scaleup, here are a few of the most important changes when comparing the new to the old:

List of new metrics:

Reporting Updates

GA4 has revamped reporting almost completely. There are two different areas for reporting. The Reports Tab and the Explore Tab. 

Reports Tab

This tab features much of what was available in Universal Analytics. You can sort through multiple dimensions here including Traffic, Acquisition, Realtime reporting, Events, and Conversions. In GA4, “Events” are the new “Goals” when compared to Universal. Much of the reporting centers around Event Based metrics. This is the tab where a marketer or CEO will spend most of their time. Sort conversion metrics by source/medium or see how much time users are spending on the site with these reports. 

Looking at the screenshot below, you can see that one of Google’s priorities in the redesign was ease of access. Everything is organized and fits into movable “widgets” on the new Overview page. Each of these reports is customizable, which we will go into later in this article, but overall, the navigation is improved to make this an easier barrier of entry compared to Universal. 

Explore Tab

This is an entirely new area for Analytics, a tab to create custom reports. Now this is not as powerful as Looker or another data visualization tool, but this tab is more effective at slicing data than the standard Reports tab mentioned above. You can create custom Free Form, Funnel, and Lifetime reports to help you analyze user behavior.

This is where filtering comes in handy. If you would like to see the users coming from your Google Ads who converted on a specific conversion event, in let’s say, Chicago, this is the place to do that. This is by no means a perfect reporting option, but we recommend leaning on this to do some of your deeper filtering for data. 

Benefits of GA4 for Scaleups

GA4 is streamlined to allow anybody easy access to strong reporting and data, which is especially important for businesses that don’t have a lot of historical information to lean on. 

Enhanced Tracking

GA4 leans heavily on configured Events in the new platform. Each account comes with a standard set of events including a Purchase, Button Click, Pageview, and some additional standard page action events. These are just the ones that come with the account. The powerful part of GA4 encompasses creating custom events. 

You can create a custom Event or Conversion within the GA4 platform, or with Google Tag Manager. The most common forms of events are Form Submission and Page View events. We like to create a custom Pageview event when a Form directs to a Thank You page, for example. This is a really effective way to track the amount of users turning into a lead for many B2B or B2C brands.

Cross-Platform Integration

Since this is a Google Property you can easily integrate with all other Google properties, but can also track performance from paid social media campaigns, referral traffic, as well as integrate with a CRM like Hubspot. For example, we easily import data from all of these sources below using UTMs or direct integration: 

• Google Ads → Possibly the most powerful integration that includes Search, Youtube Ads, Shopping, and Google Display Network. Capitalize on Google Ads performance within the GA4 account to optimize campaigns. 
• Firebase → For any App data.
• Social Media → Apply UTMs to social media campaign links to easily pull in Source, Campaign, and Content data for Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter.
• Merchant Center → For eCommerce brands.
• BigQuery → For advanced tracking. 

All of these platform integrations can be utilized in reporting throughout GA4. We recommend making custom tabs in the Reporting section for each channel you may want to track and isolate. This can be done using the Library Tool, explained best via Google here. 

User Journey Mapping

Understanding the user is one of the most important aspects to any business. Knowing where a user enters, leaves, and converts on your site is key to success. An ideal way to track this involves full funnel tracking. GA4 can help with that, albeit somewhat limited.

Funnel Exploration 

This is where we can start with this analysis. This is a custom report in the Explore tab that allows you to see a User’s Journey. For example, User 1 entered through the Homepage, clicked to 3 more pages, then left an abandoned cart. Each user is different, but patterns start to emerge when data starts to collect around behavior. 

For example, if you see that 30% of users abandon the cart after browsing your products, this may prompt the team to look deeper into the checkout process. Why is this happening? How do I identify and fix drop off points in a conversion funnel? Is the flow of checkout quick, or do users have to upload any unnecessary information? All of these questions can find answers starting with the User Journey reports in GA4. 

Path Exploration

Another powerful reporting option in GA4, the Path Exploration report leans on a tree graph in order to better visualize the user journey. This is where you would want to start if you were used to the visualization in Universal Analytics. It is a very similar report that can be customized and filtered in any way you would like. 

We spend a lot of time thinking about conversion rate optimization (CRO) at Tuff. Improving conversion rate on a website by small percentages could translate into quadrupled revenue in the long term.  If you find yourself unsure of how to kickstart your CRO initiatives, these GA4 reports can serve as a valuable starting point.  Lean on them to help ask your user journey questions and improve from there!

Practical GA4 Implementation Tips

We have learned a lot over the last year while setting up countless GA4 accounts for clients in a wide range of industries. There will always be hiccups when it comes to data and tracking, but our aim here is to make your life a little bit easier so you can worry about one less thing when it comes to growth marketing. 

Setting Up GA4

Setup has actually gotten a lot easier since the transition has officially been made from Universal Analytics to GA4. Google uses a “Setup Assistant” to help guide this process. It is broken out into 7 different steps that look like this:

Let’s take a look at the two most important steps in a bit more detail:

• Set Up Conversions → We have talked a lot about events and conversions in this article, and for good reason. Conversions are paramount to your success, and they are different for every business. 
  • To configure a new conversion in the GA4 platform itself, you have to start with configuring an Event. This can be done with multiple parameters including page_location or event_name. Set your parameters, give it a name, and you will be good to go. You can then check it off as a conversion in the Events tab. 
  • You can also migrate your conversion from Universal Analytics. This is not a perfect 1 to 1 in many cases, depending on how complicated your conversion setup is, but it can be helpful in the early stages of GA4 setup. (Get more support here!) 
  • Lean on Google Tag Manager to configure your conversions using the GA4 Events Tag. This can be configured with set parameters, HTML, or a slew of other options. Once configured in GTM, they will automatically populate in GA4 after 24 to 48 hours. 
• Define Audiences → This is fairly self explanatory, but defining the target audiences you want to track throughout GA4 goes a long way in helping you make strategic business decisions. These can be custom configured using any parameter you choose, such as users who entered the site via Facebook Ad. You can also use one of these Google templates:

Quick GA4 Tips for All Accounts

GA4 can be overwhelming when you first get in there. SO much of it is brand new with a different layout and overall look. Let’s go through some rapid fire tips and tricks that the Tuff team has been compiling over the last year:

1. Data Retention → This is a setting in the Admin section. Default data retention is set to 2 months. We recommend changing that to 14 months. This will allow you to store more data for longer. Never a bad idea in our eyes!
2. Reporting Customization → Want to see some of the metrics you were used to in Universal Analytics in your standard reports? Click on the “pencil” icon in the top right of any report. You can then add new columns to your tables for metrics such as Bounce Rate and Average Session Duration.
3. Link to Other Accounts → Navigate to Admin and link to any account you are currently active on. This is particularly important and valuable for Google Ads accounts:
4. Change Conversion to Fire Once per Session → This is a tip for anyone who wants to isolate potential double-counting of conversions, mainly those that don’t have a dollar amount associated with them. If you want to make sure a user is only being counted one time when filling out more than one form, turn the Counting Method to Once Per Session for your conversion event. 

Leveraging GA4’s AI-Powered Insights

One new area of GA4 that comes in handy weekly is the Insights tab. This is powered by AI, which makes it an incredibly powerful tool, especially for those who don’t have the time to sift through raw data. Let’s see what this looks like in practice. 

In the screenshot above, we can see that this client had LinkedIn traffic increase during a recent time period. Having quick, digestible insights like this in front of you at all times sends a signal for where you may want to dig in deeper. If LinkedIn traffic spiked this week, that could be indicative of a successful post, mention, or event. Now you know to look further. 

You can even configure your own insights to ping you when certain things happen in the account. Want to always know when you have an abnormally slow sales

 day? How about a large increase in page views over a holiday? Well, it’s now easier than ever to have these alerts sent right to your inbox, as well as on the front page of your Reporting Overview. 

Navigate to the Insights tab, click Create in the top right hand corner, and there ya go! Set the parameters that work best for YOU. This is a theme of GA4. Tailored to you and your specific needs and goals.

Future-Proofing Your Analytics Strategy

GA4 isn’t just the future – it’s the present and beyond! While it may differ from Universal Analytics and isn’t without its imperfections, embracing its full potential can be an absolute game-changer for your business. Mastering GA4 isn’t just about staying ahead–it’s about securing your growth into the distant future.

Ready to supercharge your business growth? Don’t wait – get in touch with Tuff Growth today or grab a sample proposal here! 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post How to Use GA4 in 2024: Tips for Marketers appeared first on Tuff.

The term “full-funnel” has been a buzzword for years in advertising circles. It’s something that is referenced but not always put into practice. Full-funnel approaches to media planning are all hands on deck. You cannot silo each marketing channel into their own lanes, especially when it comes to paid media. 

Advertising on social platforms influences branded search volume on Google Ads. Implementing a retargeting strategy with strong remarketing audiences on Youtube, can be repurposed for the likes of Meta. Forecasting budgets need to be done in conjunction with all paid channels in order to accurately estimate traffic, conversion volume, and overall customer acquisition costs. 

Without a coherent objective across all channels, your marketing strategy is hindered before it even has a chance to start the race. Here’s how Tuff looks at owning every stage of the funnel with paid media. 

Table of Contents

• A look under the hood of paid media
• Create a full-funnel paid media plan
• Forecasting a paid media strategy
• Full-funnel measurement

Full-funnel approach to media planning 

When creating a full-funnel paid media plan, we think about three key areas of focus:

• Optimizing performance on each platform
• Setting up campaigns to work together in sync
• Balancing and integrating priorities 

Our focus is long-term growth, not just one-off wins. We use data to weed out underperforming assets, optimize the best ideas, and build on what’s working. Every part of a paid media strategy should relate somehow back to the overall business objectives. If marketing dollars are being allocated somewhere, stakeholders should be rest assured knowing that these dollars tie into specific goals. How do we go about this?

We use these these 3 things to continually tie our paid media planning into a partner’s business objectives:

1. Quarterly planning sessions – These are used on a quarterly basis to align all business objectives to actional tasks and projects for the upcoming quarter. This would also include all owned media planning in order to create a business strategy that is all encompassing. 
2. Executive summaries – During weekly external meetings with partners, our Growth Markets will include what we call executive summaries at the top of any notes involved in the week. This may include to do lists for internal & external teams, approvals, and high level reporting. 
3. Project retros – This may sound obvious, but after a project the prioritization of a recap can be incredibly beneficial when relating back to business objectives. What went well? What went wrong? Did we further our goals? How can we learn from the data for the next project?

Now, from a platform perspective, we manage campaigns across all of the major channels and lean on that knowledge to decide what and how we want to test and allocate resources to drive growth across brand and performance objectives. We find the perfect mix of channels specifically tailored to each partner. Not every channel is necessary, but the right channel mix can be instrumental for setting yourself up for success. 

We will dive deeper into how to find the right channel mix below, but the next step to creating a full funnel paid media plan is audience segmentation. 

Targeting top, middle, and bottom funnel users

Proper audience utilization can be the catalyst for a successful paid media plan. They are an abundant resource with virtually unlimited variations when you factor in the different options on every channel. There of course is some overlap since most users tend to be active across all kinds of marketing channels, but this can be used to your advantage. 

Targeting the same users on Google, Facebook, and Tik Tok for example is one way to set up campaigns to work in sync with one another. This allows you to keep a thread throughout multiple touch points as well. The same message on multiple platforms amplifies its effectiveness. Here are a few of the audience buckets we consider when focusing on creating & capturing demand:

• Awareness – These are the users that are furthest away from converting. The top of funnel audiences are not familiar with your brand and not actively searching for your product or service. Brand campaigns on Youtube, Display, Facebook, or Spotify are effective with this audience type. Some examples of the audiences available include Affinity audiences and Interest Audiences. Focus on views, impressions, and reach when evaluating performance.
• Consideration – This is the stage of the funnel where users start to become leads. They are starting to actively search out your brand or brands similar to yours. Some audiences include In-Market, Lookalike to website visitors, and Competitor Keyword audiences. Campaigns on Google Search, Facebook, and Tik Tok work really well in this stage of the funnel to capture high intent users. They are in the research phase and ready to make a decision sooner than later. 
• Intent – The bottom of the funnel where users are the highest intent, most likely to become customers, or repeat purchasers. Retargeting audiences are a great user base to lean on in this stage of the funnel.  Google Search is a top quality platform for this audience type. Target the highest intent keywords where a user is ready to buy immediately. They are familiar with the product or service and tend to convert quickly. 

Strategically retargeting users across multiple channels

Retargeting is something that we constantly find ourselves talking about. When done well, retargeting campaigns are highly impactful, easily scalable, and cost efficient. These can be utilized by any business in any industry. A truly impactful retargeting strategy combines all paid channels into one umbrella. Of course each channel will have some quirks of their own, but thinking about retargeting as a full channel mix is paramount to finding success. 

Lean on website traffic to target users who have not converted across multiple touch points. Crafting a similar message for website visitors on Facebook and on Youtube for example helps reinforce your value props and allows you to further stand out from competitors. 

Building performance creative to maximize media

What is the backbone for success in almost all paid media campaigns? That’s right – Performance creative. What is performance creative and how is it different from “regular” creative? Great question. Performance creative closes the gap between data and creative. 

Putting it simply (read more here!), we approach performance creative by developing assets quickly and by diversifying the look, feel, messaging and ad archetype to get a speedy but data-backed idea of what is providing the most value. Then, we launch ads in a strategic way, measure performance and assess high-level trends, findings and hypotheses to help to develop our next tests and ideas. 

Backing up to one of the most important parts of this – Measuring performance and gathering the findings, hypotheses around these findings and recommendations for the next round of creative. The intention behind this exercise is to closely collaborate across paid media <> creative at Tuff to put all of our brains together and develop a new round of creative assets that are fueled by data-driven insights. 

We structure this conversation like this – where we discuss paid media spend throughout the funnel, notable audience insights, relevant competitor creative focuses and then move into talking through the performance from the previous round grounded by historical benchmarks to provide context and then collaborate on the key takeaways from all of the above. All of these variables help inform the creative brief which ultimately connects directly back to paid media performance.

One last take away from performance creative is the ability to apply learnings across multiple paid channels. Repurpose creative for different channels. Simply resizing graphics or videos from Meta to fit on Youtube or Display will help you get more out of your creative workload. That same “resizing” can be applied to general success. If a certain video resonates with an audience on Facebook, test it on Youtube. Maybe a specific CTA works really well for Display. This is a great place to start when designing the next Facebook ad targeting a similar audience. 

A look under the hood of paid media planning

At Tuff, we have a full-funnel approach to paid media. What does that mean to us exactly? 

We prioritize performance across all channels to make sure your paid efforts are working their hardest for your brand. We think intentionally and deeply about how we can generate demand at the top of the funnel and capture it in the mid and bottom of the funnel, designing a clear plan  for which channels best relate to your brand, audience and product from Google and YouTube to Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok (and beyond).

Investing in paid social channels

Similarly to how we prioritize your brand, audience and product when we think about your full-funnel approach to media, we do the same when digging into specific paid social media channels. Not every brand is right for Facebook – or TikTok – or LinkedIn. Prioritizing what your brand represents, who your audience is and what problem(s) your product solves helps us get a clear picture of which social channels you should be investing in. 

A few years ago, the go-to social advertising platform was Facebook/Instagram across brands and industries. There was rarely any consideration of the above factors – The decision was more-so based on, “Facebook and Instagram have the most daily active users so we should invest there.” 

While the number of active users has continued to grow on Meta over the years – So have the number of active users across other platforms, like TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest. These platforms have continued to elevate their offerings for advertisers, and there are unique and incredibly valuable audiences to speak to here. 

Breaking it down by audience size alone:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): 3 billion active users
• TikTok: 1 billion active users
• LinkedIn: 675 million active users
• Pinterest: 475 million active users

And now by what the user’s mindset is on each:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Connection & Idea Sharing – While this is still the largest social platform in the world, people are coming to Facebook and Instagram for connection with their circle and to share their own ideas, thoughts and experiences.
• TikTok: Entertainment — When people visit TikTok, they’re distracted from reality and are aiming to be entertained whether that’s through a viral dance, a new trend or item to purchase or for a teaching moment. 
• LinkedIn: Growth – When people visit LinkedIn, they’re more than likely looking for new professional and or educational opportunities.
• Pinterest: Inspiration – When people visit Pinterest, the whole idea is to pin things to your board and share ideas and pins.

Marrying what each platform is good for, who is on them, what the user’s mindset is on each with your business’s goals and ICPs, we’re able to customize a strategy that makes sense and allows us to not only effectively invest your advertising dollars but also show up where your audience is.

Allocating budget to PPC

PPC, or Pay Per Click, usually refers to all other paid media platforms outside of social media. The main player in this space is Google Ads of course which also includes Youtube and Google Display Network. They certainly have a chokehold on much of the PPC industry. Options don’t stop with Google though. PPC would also include all Microsoft advertising, Programmatic platforms such as StackAdapt or TradeDesk, or even audio ads! 

Similarly to social advertising, not every PPC channel is perfect for every business. Youtube may work much better for a fintech company than it does for an ecommerce clothing company. Audio Ads might be more effective for your local therapy practice than it would be for the highly visible sunglasses seller. Part of the initial Paid Media strategy we develop is choosing which channels work best right away, then choosing which ones are up next to test. 

Let’s get into what some of these channels work best for before we tackle the nitty gritty of developing the full funnel strategy. 

Common PPC Channels

• Google Search: High Intent – It’s no secret that Google Search tends to have some of the highest intent users on the internet. Ads targeting search terms are hitting users when they are actively looking to buy or sign up. Finding a mix of Branded terms, Non-Branded terms, and Competitor bidding makes way for the most effective strategy with Search ads. 
• Google Shopping Ads: Ready to Buy – Shopping is similar to Google Search where ads can show up when users are in the decision making process of what product to buy. These ads are highly visible and tend to bring in a high number of impressions. If you are selling a product, Google Shopping is an absolute must. 
• Youtube: Visually Compelling – 2 billion monthly active users constantly watching videos surrounding all kinds of content. The options on Youtube are endless, but it is key to have quality video assets at your disposal. Whether you’re targeting content, keywords, or in market audiences, Youtube can be a viable platform regardless of your business goals. Industries that have lots of organic video content on the platform tend to translate well to Youtube Ads. 
• Display Advertising: Retargeting Maximization – Display ads can be run in the Google Ads platform or on a separate programmatic platform such as StackAdapt or TradeDesk, but they tend to work pretty similarly to one another. These ads serve all over the internet while you are browsing articles, reading recipes, or playing games. Although it is certainly viable to create a robust prospecting strategy through Display ads, retargeting is one of the strong suits of this kind of platform. Focus your Display ads on users who have been to your site but have not converted. This effectively helps push customers further down the funnel. 
• Microsoft Ads: Incremental Conversions – Advertising on Bing is not nearly as robust as Google, but it can be truly successful at bringing in incremental conversions. Microsoft makes it really easy to import existing Google Ads campaigns directly into Bing, so you can easily run the exact same ads targeting the same keywords on both platforms. Bing has around 10% of the search volume that Google does, so it’s a much smaller pond, but costs tend to be lower and competition tends to be less aggressive. 
• Audio: Highly Local – Another channel that can be effective in all kinds of strategies, but audio ads are especially effective on a local level. Ads can be put on certain radio stations in the geographies your business operates for example. You can also go more broad and use Spotify Ads or StackAdapt to target the full US with ads while users are listening to music, podcasts, or audio books. 

With the right budget allocation, all of these PPC channels work beautifully together. LEarning from one platform can easily be translated to another. Creative can be repurposed. Audiences can be shared. This is the simple idea behind creating a full funnel plan. Now it’s time to merge Social with PPC.  Full-funnel media plan here we come!

Media planning that forecasts revenue

At Tuff, we lead with transparency in everything we do – especially when it comes to forecasting. 

We aim to have continued dialogue with our partners around, “what does growth look like for your business?” so that we’re pivoting as much as needed while remaining true to our established growth expectations and goals. We understand that clarity walks hand-in-hand with vision – understanding all of the levers that can be pulled to reduce costs helps us align across teams to put together a clear, action-packed game plan that ultimately allows us to strategize, prioritize, link up cross-channel insights, and, ultimately, grow.

What does all of this actually mean?  Well, here’s an example of what a Paid Media budget plan looks like:

Leaning on benchmarks like the ones we put together for 2022 here for example, we can create an accurate forecast of campaign performance solidified through recent data. These are living breathing documents. When spend, CPC, or conversion rate is changed, all other metrics shift with it. Those are the main metrics that can be influenced by a marketing team. Additional budget changes performance. Optimizing ads to lower CPC allows for additional traffic. Utilizing conversion rate optimization creates all sorts of efficiencies. Focus on these data points when testing on a regular basis. 

Creating a simple Google Sheet like the one above allows us to work with an accurate forecasting model when developing a paid media plan. We want to be able to show partners what they can expect from their paid media dollars. Expectations are different depending on the campaign type, so that’s why we separate measurement out between Brand and Performance campaigns. 

Did somebody say measurement! It is about that time, let’s jump in!

Measuring success across the full funnel

Measuring paid media effectiveness is a key component of a successful growth marketing strategy, but there are many ways to go about this. Just as there are several platforms to run ads on, there are just as many platforms for reporting, measurement, and tracking. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important things to keep in mind when measuring the success of your full funnel paid media plan. 

Brand vs. performance campaigns

Measurement varies heavily depending on the objective of the campaigns in hand. Performance campaigns are easy. At least on the surface. Data is readily available to prove the success of campaigns and easily compare that success to other channels. Here’s some of the easy metrics we use to evaluate conversion campaigns. 

• Clicks
• CPC
• Conversions
• CPA 
• Conversion Rate

Seeing a lift in conversion volume or a decrease in cost per acquisition tells us a story of success and we can point to the who, where, when, how, and why fairly easily. Sorting by audience or creative. Breaking down KPIS by geography or time of day. Segmenting traffic by landing page behavior. All of these things can be utilized to help paint a fuller picture of the success of performance campaigns, but at their root, the numbers are simple. Costs go up or down. Conversions scale or they don’t. People convert more or less often on a landing page. 

All of this thinking applies to all paid media. Now, Google Ads will have different benchmarks than Facebook for example, but comparing performance campaigns on Google to Facebook is easier than a comparison for Brand campaigns. We actually wrote a whole article about measuring brand campaigns, but here is the TLDR. 

Measuring awareness campaigns

First and foremost, the metrics that you want to track are going to be different. Direct conversions from these campaigns means much less when the goal is Brand Awareness and the audience is mostly top of the funnel. Here’s what we look deeply at optimizing constantly:

• Impressions
• CPM
• Traffic
• CPC
• Impression Share
• Lift in direct / organic traffic

Brand campaigns are all about improving the recognition of the brand. More traffic from other sources. Cheaper traffic from campaigns. Higher impression share. All of these things are what we are looking to achieve when running a Brand campaign. They all indicate success. If you chose to only look at the last click conversions from a Display campaign for example, it may look like the campaign is not working when compared to Paid Search. But zooming out on the whole paid media mix lifts the curtain to tell a different story. Here are a few tips for measuring Brand campaign performance:

• Track branded search volume – This can be done on Google Ads or Search Console. Measure the volume before and after campaign flights to understand the impact of campaigns.
  
• Segment by geography – Launching campaigns in only a few states or locations allows for an easy form of measurement when looking at the data. If your Youtube campaign only ran in Dallas and Dallas saw a 3x increase in new users from Direct traffic, that is a very strong correlation to the ads. 
• Compare overall conversions/revenue – Once your Branded campaigns are running, use month over month, quarter over quarter, or year over year lookback dates to monitor the overall performance lift from all sources. Brand campaigns can sometimes pay dividends months down the road. 

Relying at multiple forms of attribution

Attribution for Paid Media has always been tricky to nail down perfectly. After all, there are so many ways to attribute conversions across a full media mix. Tools like Google Analytics show multiple points of attribution across a conversion journey. Looking at just one of them doesn’t paint a complete picture. Measuring the success of a Display campaign for example by Last Click Attribution can send a misleading message when compared to a First Click model. Here’s a quick summary of attribution methods we use in tandem with one another.

Common Types of Attribution

• First Click Attribution – As the name suggests, conversions would be attributed to the channel with a user’s first click for this attribution model. This is incredibly useful when running brand campaigns that are used for visibility. Many times paid ads tend to be the first click on a conversion journey while the last click falls to Direct or Organic traffic. This method widens the lens of reporting on paid media effectiveness. 
• Last Click Attribution – Possibly the most common form of attribution, Last Click gives full conversion credit to the last click a user makes before converting. This is defined slightly differently depending on the platform you use, so be sure to read the fine print. Last Click on Google Analytics for example defaults to Last Non-Direct Click. This attributes a conversion action to the click before a Direct source. 
• Data Driven Attribution – Google’s newest attribution model that is rolled out in Google Ads and GA4. This model uses an algorithm to share the attribution across multiple touch points on a conversion journey. It is backed by data as the name suggests, but can 
• Assisted / View Through – These conversions can be seen in multiple reporting or ad platforms such as Google Ads and Analytics. They are defined as conversions that had more than one source touch point in the conversion journey. A very common example of this is a user clicking on a Google Search Ad, then later typing a website name directly into the internet browser. Google Search would receive an “Assisted Conversion” here because it was on the conversion path. Even if you are using only one attribution method, these conversions are a good way to prove out the effectiveness of specifica paid media channels. 

Reporting with various forms of attribution may require some additional work, but it will be worth it in the long run for the health of a business. Understanding user behavior is invaluable information, regardless of the industry. Especially when there are multiple marketing channels in the mix, having more than one form of attribution to report on can give you the upper hand. 

Test, learn, report, repeat!

When it comes to Full Funnel Measurement of paid media campaigns, testing and reporting are where everything starts to come together. We already tackled creating a paid media plan, forecasting a strategy, and measuring success with different campaign types. These are the last pieces of the puzzle and they go hand in hand. 

With all of the work that goes into a full funnel approach like this, testing and proper reporting must be top of mind. Testing to ensure that performance is constantly improving and reporting to make sure the most accurate data is readily available when making decisions. 

Reporting on a full-funnel media plan

Reporting can of course take many shapes and there are endless platforms you can utilize to get from point A to point B. Here’s just one very simple example of a way that Tuff reports on campaigns, using Google Sheets. Reporting doesn’t have to be complicated to be impactful. A simple weekly reporting table broken out by marketing channel, audience, or campaign type can go a long way.  

Once there is confidence behind the reporting associate with your paid media mix, lean into testing. All successful digital marketing requires some form of testing to be the best it can be. Here are two tips on what to focus on from the jump:

• Creative, creative, creative – Did we mention creative? This is one of the biggest opportunities to test for all paid channels, audiences, and placements. This is where you can test different messaging or ad copy. Video ads vs. static ads. UGC content or animation. We recommend 2-3 different assets for any marketing channel that requires creative as its main driving force (Meta, Youtube, Display)
• Landing page optimization – This is where CRO can come in to save the day. Paid media is only as effective as the landing page a user comes to from an ad. Focus on improving the conversion rate, exit rate, and overall TOS. These metrics indicate ad effectiveness and user quality. 
• Audience sourcing – Different audiences work well for different platforms. Depending on the stage of the funnel you want to target, there are countless user segments on each platform to experiment with. Lean on In Market audiences for Youtube campaigns. Lookalike audiences on Meta. Take advantage of remarketing lists for Display networks. Not every audience is going to be effective, but after a few weeks of gathering data, you can pivot, expand, or retest.

Media strategies in perfect harmony 

There you have it. Paid media planning, forecasting, measurement, and everything in between. Digital marketing is an ever changing landscape with endless potential. Combining all paid efforts under one umbrella is your head start at unlocking that potential and building upon it. There’s not a one size fits all approach, but working with the information laid out above brings you closer to finding that approach that fits like a glove. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post The Art of Media Planning: Data-Driven Decisions to Own Every Stage of the Funnel appeared first on Tuff.

With over 2 billion monthly active users and over 1 billion hours of video watched daily, YouTube offers an enormous potential audience for brands to reach. The platform’s global reach, targeting capabilities, and diverse content make it a highly viable ad channel for brands of all sizes and industries.

One of the main benefits of advertising on YouTube is the platform’s advanced targeting options. Brands can reach their desired audience accurately and efficiently with sophisticated targeting features like demographic, location, interest, and custom audience targeting. YouTube allows targeting based on user behavior, including engagement with brand content or similar videos.

While advertising on YouTube offers a wide range of benefits, one of the main challenges is measuring the impact of your campaigns. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, measuring the effectiveness of YouTube Ad campaigns requires a more nuanced approach. It involves tracking a variety of metrics and considering factors such as audience engagement and brand perception. Additionally, the complexity of YouTube’s algorithms and ad targeting options can make it difficult to accurately gauge the success of a campaign. As a result, businesses must take a strategic approach to measuring the impact of their campaigns, leveraging a range of quantitative and qualitative YouTube ad metrics to gain a comprehensive understanding of their performance.

This post will provide guidance on how to set up your YouTube campaigns for success, and explore various measurement frameworks to validate the results based on our experience running hundreds of YouTube campaigns. 

What role does YouTube play in your funnel? 

YouTube advertising provides an array of campaign objectives that cater to diverse marketing goals. Before using YouTube for advertising, the most important decision for any advertiser is to choose whether to leverage the platform for driving top-of-the-funnel brand awareness, bottom-of-the-funnel conversions, or both. Utilizing every stage of the funnel for any growth marketing strategy is key to success and Youtube Ads are no different. 

Using YouTube for top of the funnel campaigns 

Investing in top of the funnel (TOFU) ad campaigns is important for countless reasons.

First, TOFU campaigns focus on building brand awareness and generating interest in your products or services with a specific audience. By focusing on TOFU campaigns, brands can increase website visibility, brand awareness, and organic traffic. This is particularly important for startups or scaleups with a limited customer base.

Secondly, investing in TOFU campaigns can help brands to build a larger retargeting audience for more focused campaigns later on. By capturing the attention of a large number of people with your TOFU ads, you can then retarget those who have shown interest in your brand or products with more specific and targeted messaging. This can lead to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment for your overall ad spend.

It is also important to note that Youtube Ads can be very cost efficient. Average cost per view can be as low as $0.02. This means that you can receive thousands of views with a limited budget, making this a viable platform for all business types. Youtube Ad costs vary between industries, but no matter the business, it is an effective channel at reaching virtually unlimited eyeballs. 

Leveraging YouTube to drive large-scale brand awareness is a worthwhile strategy provided that:

• Your target audience can be effectively reached on the platform through targeting options such as In-Market Audiences, Youtube Video Content, and Remarketing Lists
• You possess high quality video assets that are suitable for YouTube’s format
• You have a well-rounded media mix that complements your YouTube advertising efforts

Using YouTube to drive last-click conversions and view thru conversions 

Investing in bottom of the funnel (BOFU) ad campaigns is important for businesses to drive revenue, build customer loyalty, and gain insights into their customers’ behavior. BOFU campaigns target audiences who are already familiar with your brand and have shown intent to purchase your product or service.

By providing targeted messaging and incentives to those who have already shown interest in your product or service, BOFU campaigns can help push them towards making a purchase and ultimately drive revenue. Targeting audiences who have shown intent to purchase allows businesses to maximize their ROAS and grow their customer base.

This is where Retargeting audiences come in most effective. Users who have been to your site but have not converted yet are a great audience to tap into. They tend to be higher intent, familiar with your brand, and ready to buy! These users also are more likely to be the most cost effective when looking at CPCs, CPM, or CPV. 

In addition to boosting results, BOFU campaigns also help businesses to better understand their customers’ behavior and preferences. By analyzing the data from these campaigns, businesses can gain valuable insights into what drives their customers to convert, what barriers they face in the purchase process, and how to improve the overall customer experience.

Leveraging YouTube Ads to drive conversions can be a viable strategy provided that:

• Your target audience can be effectively reached on the platform through targeting options
• You possess video assets that are suitable for YouTube’s format
• You have other channels actively driving awareness for the brand 
• You can achieve results within you CPA targe
  

Measuring success with different YouTube ad metrics

Once you’ve decided how you want to use YouTube strategically and the role it will play in your media mix, you need a measurement framework that allows you to validate the success of your efforts. Measurement is not a one size fits all approach. There are countless ways to prove the success of your campaigns that do not rely on the standard data available in the Google Ads platform. Let’s take a look at how we do this with different campaign types.

Measuring impact of Brand Awareness campaigns on Youtube

When it comes to measuring the success of a brand campaign, performance can be challenging to hone in on because it involves tracking intangible factors such as brand awareness, perception, and loyalty. However, there are still several metrics and techniques that businesses can use to gauge the impact of their brand campaigns. Here are some methods to consider:

1. Surveys: Conducting customer surveys before and after the campaign can help measure changes in brand awareness and perception. You can use metrics such as aided and unaided recall, brand favorability, and purchase intent to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
2. Correlation between branded search volume / direct traffic: While brand campaigns are not directly focused on driving sales, an increase in traffic and conversions during the campaign on organic, direct, or paid branded search can indicate its effectiveness in building brand equity and loyalty.
3. Cost per acquisition: Measuring the cost per acquisition of new customers following a brand campaign can provide an indication of its impact on driving customer acquisition.

Ultimately, measuring the success of a brand campaign involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics that track changes in brand awareness, perception, and customer behavior. By utilizing these methods, businesses can effectively gauge the effectiveness of their brand campaigns and validate the success of these efforts. 

Here are two specific ways we’ve measured the success of brand campaigns on YouTube using elements of the framework above. 

Implementing post-purchase surveys with Akko

One way to help prove out the success of a Youtube Ad Campaign is by conducting a post purchase survey. Something that asks “Where did you hear about us?” is the most common version of this type of survey that we’ve all taken while online shopping. This was our strategy for the phone insurance company, Akko. 

We ran Youtube Ads for Akko both before and after this survey was put into place on the site. This made it really easy to measure the success of these campaigns. Sometimes standard attribution doesn’t tell the full story, but flat out asking your customers can! It’s as simple as that. When looking at Youtube CAC numbers for July (before the survey) and then September (using survey results) we were able to see a CAC decrease of over 40%. 

Internal reporting was not telling the full story, but the users were. Overwhelmingly, users chose Youtube as their source of information when prompted post purchase. This seemingly simple metric isn’t available in the standard Google Ads or Analytics reporting. Relying on first person data like this signaled to us and company stakeholders that we could continue to run Youtube Ads for much longer than if we didn’t have this information at our disposal. 

Scaling Branded search volume with Genomelink 

With our partner Genomelink, a DNA service counterpart to the likes of 23andMe, Ancestry, and MyHeritage, we have found Youtube to be one of the most effective channels for all of digital marketing. On a conversion level, we have been able to rival the likes of Search when it comes to CPA, something that is very difficult to do for virtually all industries. CPA has been between $20 – $25 on Youtube and just under $20 for Search. A large win, considering Youtube is focused on Prospecting audiences instead of high intent keywords. 

The main success here for Genomelink is not the fantastic conversion metrics. It’s actually the Brand lift that we have seen since launching our Youtube Ads. As mentioned above, measuring Brand search results is a key way to track performance outside of standard Youtube metrics. Here is a chart showing the amazing correlation between Youtube and Genomelink’s Branded Search volume. Can you guess when we launched Youtube?

We saw IMMEDIATE results as soon as Youtube went live as an ad channel. Search volume rose drastically while we continued to lower CPA. Scale AND efficiency. The name of the game. This one chart shows the importance of approaching Youtube Ads with a zoomed out view point. Google Ads metrics wouldn’t be able to easily show the impact of a Youtube Ad as easy as it is to see it when looking granularly at Branded traffic. A cherry on top for this kind of success is that it can have long term effects on Brand Awareness as a whole. Google favors websites with high quality traffic and lots of search volume. It is only up from here. 

Maximizing direct traffic volume with Youtube Ads for Koji

We love charts and graphs, so we have another one to show off here for our partner Koji, a digital storefront that makes it easy to sell to your audience through social media. Focusing on a Brand Awareness campaign optimized for efficient reach, we wanted low CPMs to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible targeting our Custom Intent audiences we built around keywords and other factors. Here are the results below after just TWO weeks of performance:

When looking at traffic numbers period over period and month over month, we saw some astonishing results. Both New Users and overall Sessions increased by over 40%. Compared to the previous month we drove 70% additional New Users to the site. These are the exact users we were going after and they came to the site in excess. These are users that are not directly coming to the site via the Youtube Ads. That is why this data is so significant. Youtube helped drive thousands of more users to the site via Organic and Direct channels. This is exactly the kind of results we were looking for. 

The buck didn’t stop there. Organic leads saw an 81% increase compared to the average volume for the previous 4 months. We saw both brand lift and conversion lift. Ah conversions! A perfect segway into measuring conversions in Youtube campaigns.

Measuring impact performance campaigns on Youtube

Measuring the success of a conversion campaign is relatively straightforward. Its main goal is to drive specific actions from potential customers, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a service. Here are some ways to measure the effectiveness of a performance focused campaigns, no matter the industry you’re operating in:

1. Conversion rate: The most direct measure of success for a conversion campaign is the conversion rate, which is the percentage of website visitors who complete the desired action. This metric can be tracked using website analytics tools like Google Analytics.
2. Cost per conversion: By calculating the cost per conversion, you can evaluate the efficiency of your campaign and optimize your budget accordingly. This metric is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions.
3. Return on investment (ROI): Calculating the ROI of your conversion campaign helps you understand how much revenue you generated in relation to the cost of the campaign. To calculate ROI, subtract the cost of the campaign from the revenue generated, then divide that number by the cost of the campaign.
4. Customer lifetime value (CLV): By calculating the CLV of customers who converted through your campaign, you can determine the long-term value of your campaign. This metric takes into account the revenue generated by customers over their lifetime with your brand.

Here are two specific ways we’ve measured the success of conversion campaigns on YouTube using core Youtube ad metrics. 

Turning Youtube into the most successful Performance campaign for Sabio

YouTube is arguably the most important channel for our partner, Sabio that offers a highly regarded coding bootcamp for people looking to break into the tech space.  It drives conversions. High quality conversions that easily compete with every other channel we are active on for Paid Media. Let’s look at the numbers. 

Rather than focusing on brand awareness, we’ve tested Video Action campaigns on a variety of prospecting and retargeting audiences to drive applications from YouTube ads.

On the prospecting side, we leaned into using Custom Segment audiences to target Sabio’s competitors’ brand names. We did this to drive clicks at a much lower cost compared to targeting competitors on search. For example, on search campaigns, clicks on competitor keywords in this industry cost over $20 each. But with Youtube Ads, using a Custom Segment audience made up of the same keywords, we are seeing CPCs of just $2.01 in 2023. A tenth of the cost for the same traffic. That’s hard to beat. 

This has had further ramifications down funnel,  leading to much more affordable CPAs. With a $22 cost per application for 2023, efficiency has drastically improved once shifting additional budgets in Youtube. The average CPA on Google Search for reference is around $100. With drastically cheaper traffic and 1/4th of the cost per application, Youtube continues to dominate for Sabio and there’s no slowing down. 

Splitting conversion metrics out by targeting tactic with TAC 

Tony’s Acoustic Challenge is a web-based guitar instruction platform that provides its users with daily, bite-sized guitar lesson videos. Designed to take the average dabbler and transform them into an actual guitar player with a redesigned instruction format that doesn’t feel like traditional guitar lessons.

The foundation of any sound YouTube strategy is creative, but an equally important part of the equation is targeting. Finding the most effective way of reaching your target audience depending on your goals. These are the building blocks for effective conversion tracking, scaling, and optimizing. 

Historically, Tony’s Acoustic Challenge relied heavily on content keyword targeting, primarily in YouTube Conversion campaigns, which drove a very efficient CPA compared to other campaigns. This accounted for 40% – 50% of the overall conversions coming from this channel. Breaking conversion data down by a targeting tactic is just one key way to measure conversion success on Youtube. Example below:

(all date January – February 2023)

After seeing Google / YouTube discontinue content target for YouTube conversion campaigns in early March 2023, we went back to the drawing board to see what targeting options and campaign types we could use to fill the void left by the removal of content keyword targeting.

Pivoting to YouTube’s in feed video ad type

After testing a handful of different tactics, we began to see traction using the in feed video ad type, which still allows content keyword targeting, but does not allow for an automated, conversion focused bidding strategy. The in-feed video ad serves as a thumbnail on YouTube, It invites users to click to watch the video instead of clicking a Video ad that directs them to an external landing page.

After a brief learning period, we found incredible efficiencies in the ability to target single keywords and to match them up with a thumbnail including that same keyword.  For example, a user searches YouTube for “how to play guitar” and then sees the following thumbnail:

Based on this finding, we developed thumbnails for other high value keywords. Then, we built new campaigns, each with a single keyword and corresponding thumbnail:

So how does this all relate to measuring conversion success? 

After a learning period in March, we saw this tactic explode in April. Conversion volume stemming from these campaigns increased 429% and CPA dropped 29%. This tactic accounted for 67% of all April YouTube conversions. Again, we saw efficiency AND scale here by tackling conversions in a different way than before. Breaking things down by tactic, keyword, or audience type helps us tell the full measurement story while we are reporting. From there we optimize, test, and scale. Constantly moving forward. 

Finding different ways to measure success with YouTube ad metrics

Ultimately, measuring the success of a YouTube ad campaign requires a commitment to data-driven decision making and a willingness to experiment and iterate. With the right focus on key metrics, businesses can successfully measure the impact of their YouTube ad campaigns and achieve their marketing goals.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Beyond Views: Understanding the Different Metrics for Measuring YouTube Ad Success appeared first on Tuff.

For so many businesses, Paid Search Ads are one of the most profitable and reliable marketing channels to activate. This makes sense. Users tend to be high intent and ready to make a decision. You’re looking to buy a new pair of shoes? Google is one of your first stops. We are limited however, in how much search volume is out there. Ads can only serve as much as users are searching. Of course there is seemingly unlimited volume for our shoes example, but that isn’t the case for most products or services. As a growth marketing agency, we’re constantly evaluating how to use conversion rate optimization to grow the right channel mix. 

To make the most out of the search terms that are relevant to your business, there are a few things to keep an eye on. For starters, budget plays a big role. Scaling can be as simple as allocating more spend. How about additional Keyword Research? That will certainly help when you are looking to scale and create efficiencies with your ads. What Tuff has found is that the main driver of success on Google Search Ads is leaning heavily on CRO. 

When we talk about CRO, it means much more than just Conversion Rate Optimization. A/B landing page testing? Check. Ad Copy development? Definitely. Expert web design? Of course! If budgets are appropriate and keyword research is robust, CRO is your next step to success as a Google Ads agency. Let’s dive head first into what this looks like.

What is CRO? 

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is taking action to directly impact the amount of users converting on your website or within your applications. The intent is to increase the amount of users taking desired actions. 

What usually comes to mind when thinking about CRO are forms and CTA buttons but when put into practice, CRO goes well beyond this. When you’re going to launch CRO efforts, you need to start with your audience. Understanding what your audience needs and what you have to uniquely offer helps to determine the journey your website should offer and what the ultimate goal is. 

Understanding your audience and their needs

To better understand your audience, CROs leverage 4 key data points: behavior metrics, path exploration/user flow, heatmaps, and surveys. 

Behavior metrics

• Bounce rate: This number tracks the percentage of users that enter the site and don’t go beyond that one page. High bounce rate can be a key indicator of whether your site offers the right information at the right time to keep the user on your site. If you’re visible for the wrong searches or possibly serving content that doesn’t align with the answers the user needs, you will see a high bounce rate.
  *Note: Some pages may be built for higher bounce rates like a Contact Us page. Consider the intent of the page itself before determining if optimizations are needed.
• Exit rate: This is the percentage that defines how often a page is the last page in a user’s visit. Again, depending on the intent of the page, you’ll want to make a hypothesis around why a user might exit (slow loading, navigation/linking faux pas, etc.). From there you can create informed tests to keep the user there and ultimately push them to convert. 
• Time on site: The length of time a user spends on your site. This can inform you of the quality of the users coming to your site.
  *Note: Account for how much of your audience is mobile. Mobile users tend to have quicker sessions but it can also indicate mobile speed or usability issues.
• Pages per session: The amount of pages users visit per session. The more pages, the more we find a user is getting what they need and is being served an optimized user journey on your site.
• Conversions (obviously 😏): We often like to review conversion patterns, pages with high or low conversions, and what (if any) micro-goals are excelling (micro-goals = Newsletter sign-ups, webinar attendance, etc.). These things can help us determine the time a user spends in the funnel and underperforming pages to find where we should focus on a site first.

Path exploration

Above we discussed more of a birds-eye-view of your overall site data. The metrics above will lead us to individual pages that will require a more granular analysis. At page-level for data, we look at things like where the user usually enters the site and where they go next.

Looking into where the user often lands can tell us what pages have the best visibility and make the first impression with the user. 

The next pages a user visits can help us determine where a journey might be broken and give us insight into what the user really needs during their time on your site. 

Heatmapping

Leveraging a tool like Hotjar, we can get a better look into user behaviors page by page. Heatmaps can show us where users are clicking, how much of your page is actually seen, and we can even watch live recordings of a user’s journey and how they engage throughout your site. 

These 3 heatmap features allow us to determine things like page layout when we see most users drop from a page after viewing only a third of its offerings. Or, we can see points of friction during user recordings to truly pinpoint why someone may have dropped from your site without converting. 

Heatmaps are the real crystal ball. 🔮

Surveys

Surveys are given to both new, potential customers or current customers. This is something we usually recommend for brands that see a good amount of traffic and/or have a stable customer base. 

Within CRO, surveys lean more qualitative and serve open ended questions to receive honest feedback we can’t get from the data. They can be leveraged post-purchase/sign-up or when a user shows intent to exit so we can better understand the ‘why’ behind winning or losing conversions. We can even serve them according to time on site or pages per session depending on what the goal is. 

How to do CRO on low-traffic sites

Thinking about how to test on a low traffic site is tough. How can we get impactful results when there’s not a lot of traffic going to a site? Without traffic, we won’t have enough folks to split to gain true insight in an efficient timeline. But, as you now know, CRO isn’t just CTA buttons and form fills. 

Here are some strategies we recommend for low traffic sites:

• Improve the customer journey. A major part of conversion rate optimization is user research. This is the area of CRO where surveys can be introduced to a site to better understand the audience. These surveys can inspire big changes to navigation, user flow, and even language on the site. It may not be traditional testing, but it can be a big win for younger companies who haven’t had the time or resources to define their brand and its relationship to their audience.
• Include “micro-conversions” into the testing process. Define other ways your company names success in the funnel beyond form fills to chat with a sales team. Can we improve newsletter sign-ups? Can we get more engagement on a webinar? Some companies have excruciatingly long sales processes. So, highlight the success of getting folks into the funnel even if they’re not ready for the hard sell just yet!
• Create tests that make a big splash! If you don’t have a ton of traffic, a small CTA button test might not be the most lucrative. Go for a big layout change. Make sure there’s a stark difference in the control and the variant that has a major impact on the experience. 
• Focus on a match made in heaven ♥️ Paid & CRO. When Paid Media is being leveraged, it can be a big traffic booster. Focus on creating a landing page that will win big with the audience. Go into testing your CTA copy or keywords! There’s a lot you can do to improve how you serve your ads to your audience.

Leveraging conversion rate optimization efforts on Paid Search

Tuff audits accounts for incoming clients. It’s one of our first steps when working with a new business. During this process, we take a look at every level of a Google Ads account. Keyword targeting, ad copy, bid strategies, etc. Here are some findings we discovered for a prospect recently that are VERY common to come across during our Audit process: 

• 71% of ALL ads Ad Strength can be improved with additional Ad Copy.
• In the last 30 days, $43,000 was spent on keywords with 0 conversions. This is over 20% of the total budget spent during this time period.
• 30% of all active keywords have a below average Landing Page Experience

We see numbers like this all of the time, across all sorts of industries. Thousands of dollars of wasted spend for low quality ads, keywords, or landing pages. All of these things, with the right intentional effort, are fixable and will have long lasting effects on performance. Utilizing conversion rate optimization to focus on Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Landing Page Experience, will yield cheaper clicks, higher conversion rates, and many other long term benefits. Let’s dive in!

Quality Score

The ever mysterious Quality Score is first up in our assessment. This is one of the main tools Google uses to compare your ads to your competitors. Influencing everything from CPC to where you show up in search results. Here’s how it’s calculated, according to Google:

• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance + Ad Strength: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search.
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

Even though it seems fairly straightforward, improving your Quality Score is harder than it looks. There are lots of factors to consider when testing. All of which are important to focus on. 

Ad Strength

This is a metric that has become paramount in the last year where Google Ads removed extended text ads and replaced them with Responsive Search Ads. Now, all ads have the ability to include 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for Google to optimize towards. Combinations will be created based on what works best for the users. This allows for the algorithm to assign a “strength” based on the perceived quality of the ad. 

Google uses 4 areas to determine the Ad Strength:

1. 1. Add more headlines – Make sure you utilize all the options available to you. This helps with the ability for Google to test and experiment with what copy works best for your audience. 
   2. Include popular keywords in your headlines – This is the most important of the 4 variables. It is important to match your ad copy to the keywords being targeted. For example, if you are targeting the keyword, “financial advisors near me,” this phrase should be directly in one of your headlines. This gives a signal to Google that your ad is highly relevant to the user searching for that phrase. Tip: Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to automatically insert users’ search terms into your ads. 
   3. Make your headlines more unique – Unique headlines that are varied throughout will drastically improve your Ad Strength as well as the ability to test and learn what language has the best performance. Tip: Give your users value props, competitive differentiators, and all relevant information about your product or service. 
   4. Make your descriptions more unique – Similar to the above with headlines. Descriptions have a 90 character limit so you will be able to tell a more detailed story here. Tip: Utilize all 90 characters and include a CTA in this section. 

Ad Strength has 4 tiers: Poor, Average, Good, and Excellent. The aim is to have ALL ads achieve a Good or Excellent rating by implementing all of the best practices above. 

Landing Page Experience

Landing Page Experience may be the most impactful metric to look at through the lens of conversion rate optimization. As the name of the metric suggests, this is a measure of how a user experiences your webpage once landing on it through a Paid Search ad. We can see a score for this on a keyword level, which means each keyword will have a specific landing page experience. There are three scores here:

• Below Average
• Average
• Above Average

We aim to have every keyword in an account reach an Average or Above Average score here. It is one of the first things we focus on when onboarding a client. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but Paid Traffic is PAID. It is paramount to be as efficient as possible when targeting these users. You can truly affect a business’s bottom line with the right conversion rate optimization.  

Simple enough right? Well, it may seem simple on its face, but there are so many variables to keep in mind when looking at landing page experience. Here’s how Tuff utilizes our CRO team for creating highly converting landing pages for paid media traffic. 

Building landing pages for high quality keywords

When we think about scoping CRO to build new landing pages, we do this by narrowing down which keywords we want to focus on. Landing pages are resource heavy. Of course we cannot build a landing page targeting every single keyword relating to the business. So we have to prioritize. We categorize the keywords we want to focus on in two main buckets:

1. High value keywords that are converting, but have room for improvement
2. High volume keywords that historically have converted poorly, but have room to scale

Let’s start with keywords that have been converting, but have room to improve. It’s incredibly important to maximize the performance of these terms. If they work for you now, there is typically a way to supercharge them. Improvement can come through all of the quality metrics mentioned above by implementing a proper landing page. 

Since these keywords are already converting somewhat frequently, we focus on adding additional CTAs and including more copy that matches the targets. When Google deems the landing page is more relevant than your competitors, in turn impression share, CTR, and all other metrics can see a lift. 

The other keyword bucket is what we like to refer to as “tier two” keywords. These have volume, but historically have high CPAs. These may be broader in nature and tempting to go after because of the volume potential. Lots of partners run into high costs here though. This is where a CRO landing page comes into play. It is a perfect opportunity to lower costs and ultimately scale. With these keywords we focus on website copy, path exploration, and exit rates to see what may be driving traffic to leave before converting. 

Here are some general tips we recommend when aiming to improve Landing Page Experience with your CRO team:

1. Use a CRO tool like Hotjar to heatmap paid traffic → As mentioned above, this tool can help you understand the behavior of your users. Specifically for Paid traffic, use this technique to gain insight into the most compelling areas of your landing page. Paid traffic tends to behave differently than organic or direct traffic, so keep in mind the stage of funnel your paid users are coming from. For example, lower funnel traffic may be more inclined to read competitor comparison sections or value props. 
2. Conduct an in-depth path exploration → Paid traffic by nature will behave differently than other sources. A deep path exploration to follow Paid users across your site gives you valuable insight into where you can improve. For example, if paid users tend to navigate to blog content after landing on the site, this can indicate that it’s worth testing additional content links on your paid landing pages. 
3. Lean on a/b testing to properly test Landing Page Optimizations → We can use tools such as Google Optimize to 50/50 split test all sorts of variables on a new landing page. Maybe this is as simple as the color of the CTA button. It could be something more drastic like a hero section change. Regardless of the variable, a/b tests are invaluable when combining the power of CRO with Paid Traffic. Google Ads has the ability to a/b test landing pages right in the platform with their experiment function. Tuff uses this function on a weekly basis to continually optimize our paid search campaigns. 

How to measure the effectiveness of CRO efforts on Paid Media

There are multiple metrics, not just conversion rate, that are indicators of success between PPC and CRO collaboration. Of course conversion volume and conversion rate are large components of all testing, but we can go further with our evaluation. Here are some additional KPIs we track when we are making changes to landing pages, testing ad copy variations, or anything else CRO related for Paid Search. 

• Cost per Click – Seeing a decrease in CPC can be a sign that your Quality Score has improved. Google favors the most relevant ads and landing pages, so if there were changes to a landing page that made it more relevant to your users, CPC can decrease.

• Average Session Duration – This metric is one of the strongest indicators of Quality we have at our disposal. The longer a user spends on your site, the higher quality they are to your business. All CRO efforts look to improve this metric if possible, especially when looking at Paid Media. 

• Pages/Session – Similarly to Average Session Duration, this metric indicates a highly engaged audience. More relevant landing pages, optimized for conversions and SEO, will have a high likelihood of improving pages/sessions for each user. CRO testing that includes additional internal sitelinks is one way to improve this KPI.

• Bounce Rate – Another site metric that we use to measure the success of landing page content. This is calculated by looking at the people who land on your website, take no action, then leave. The lower the Bounce Rate the better. CRO efforts based on optimizing landing page copy and function help lower Bounce Rate by engaging users with more CTAs, additional content to read, and helpful internal links. 

• Click Thru Rate – Any improvement in CTR can be an indicator of a successful conversion rate optimization test test. Ads that are most relevant to your audience receive a higher expected CTR, improving Google’s Quality Score. 

1. Impression Share – This KPI is one that many marketers might not directly associate with conversion rate optimization testing, but it is very helpful at defining success for Google Ads. Conversion Rate improvements made on a website can indicate to Google’s algorithm that your business is higher quality than other competitors, therefore allocating more impression share to you when users are searching. 

When you can match the intent of the search with the right destination, not only will your CPC go down and CTR go up, but you will see engagement metrics improve along with conversion metrics. Measuring success is never linear though. That’s why Tuff looks at data using multiple forms of attribution. This gives us a holistic view of all Digital channels. Social, Organic Traffic, or direct traffic, all can see lifts from improving the quality of your paid ads. 

Supercharge Paid Media with CRO opportunities

Remember, Google, and most other advertising channels, want to serve their users the most relevant and high quality ads possible when they are searching for something or browsing the internet. Paid traffic is paid. Nowhere in your marketing mix is it more important to be as efficient as possible. This is why we keep conversion rate optimization top of mind when creating a Paid Media Strategy. Improvements in website navigation, relevant content, and calls to action have long lasting effects. Ready to accelerate your paid media budgets with CRO? Let’s talk. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Using Conversion Rate Optimization to Maximize Your Paid Media Dollars appeared first on Tuff.

With every passing year, brands are changing and adapting to the new growth climate. Automation is changing the game for most PPC channels, especially Google Ads. Data-driven creative is increasingly influencing all ends of the marketing mix. Video ads have been a staple for many years at this point, but continue to dominate our screens more and more each day. 

YouTube has gone from an advertising channel that is a “nice to have” a few years ago and has morphed into a channel that is a must. With this opportunity though, comes lots of questions about strategy. What’s the right approach for this behemoth of an ad channel? What stage of the funnel does this play a role in? How is success measured?

We all use YouTube, at least 2.6 Billion of us that is, but here’s how Tuff thinks about YouTube fitting perfectly into every growth marketing strategy we develop. 

YouTube Ads as a 2-Pronged Marketing Strategy

Typically, we utilize YouTube Ad campaigns by having one of two core goals – awareness or performance. Awareness campaigns are optimized to drive as many views and impressions as possible to a targeted audience in order to generate interest in the brand, while performance campaigns are optimized to drive action on the site with users taking a specific conversion action. 

Both of these have their place in an overall Marketing Mix, but depending on the stage of your business, one may be more favorable than the other. Let’s dive in!

YouTube Advertising for Performance Marketing 

Performance is the key word here. When utilizing YouTube Ads for performance marketing, the goal is to drive conversions. These may be leads, sales, or any other specific conversion event configured on your website that you’re looking to drive. 

Choosing a Campaign Type

When launching YouTube campaigns for performance, we recommend using the Video Action campaign type. This campaign type is optimized to drive conversions on site. We would consider this to be the most similar to many Google Search bidding strategies that you may be familiar with: Target CPA, Max Conversions, Target ROAS. 

While this campaign type will typically have higher CPVs than a Brand Awareness campaign, it will provide more conversions and should be measured by CPA and conversion volume. Optimizations should be based on the top performing creative and audience segments which are driving the lowest CPA possible.

Audience testing

So much of a Growth Marketing Strategy hinges on proper Audience testing. During a campaign launch, these should be continuously tested with the core KPI, CPA, being used as the north star when making optimization decisions. A very simple way to go about this is: audiences with the lowest CPA receive larger budgets over time and audiences with the highest CPAs should be removed from campaign targeting.

For performance based campaigns, we recommend choosing audiences that are higher intent and more likely to convert. For example, an Affinity audience for “Avid Investors” may be higher intent for offering financial services than a “Business Interest” audience may be. 

Audiences can include Custom Segments, Affinity, In-Market, Interests, or retargeting lists. Retargeting will usually prove to be the highest intent group since they are familiar with your brand, but this is why testing is so useful. You may be surprised at how powerful some of YouTube’s audiences are. 

Video Marketing

While selecting the correct campaign type is necessary and audience testing is a must, you have to also leverage creative testing to ensure that you are testing various messages that align with each stage of the user journey. The impact of data driven creative cannot be overstated here. It can make or break a campaign of any type, but this is especially true for video ads. 

Conversion optimized campaigns targeting prospecting audiences are introducing the brand to new users. There is still plenty of room to test which message resonates best with this new audience, but the main focus is on introducing your brand or product. We like to test variations that include user generated content, bold animations, or strong explainer videos. These users are unfamiliar with you, so focus on engagement as well as conversion metrics once they are on the site. High engaging ads should get a larger percentage of your budget. 

For retargeting, we can leverage more specific features or even put forth promotional messages that will appeal to users who are already familiar with the brand or product, but are still in the decision making stage.

Creatives should be optimized for specific devices as well. With the introduction of YouTube Shorts, there is another focus besides a standard 9×16 YouTube video ratio. Desktop and Mobile placements will behave differently, so this is important to keep top of mind when optimizing video ads. 

We put together a list of YouTube Ad Examples you can check out here. 

Evaluating Success

There are a few key metrics and KPIs that will be the main focus for a YouTube performance campaign. These are:

• Conversion volume
• CPA
• Conversion Rate

Performance based campaigns are just that, based on performance. This makes measuring success pretty straightforward and tied directly to leads, sales, or revenue. Since these conversion metrics are relevant for any ad channel, these YouTube Ads can be put up side by side to other channels for direct comparison. 

One benefit of running a performance YouTube Ad campaign is that you can lean on CRO to help improve results. Small changes in conversion rate on your landing page can pay huge dividends in a short period of time. We always recommend integrating CRO wherever possible when testing and evaluating KPIs. 

Utilizing YouTube As for Brand Awareness

YouTube truly excels at getting a brand in front of new faces. Remember, 2.6 BILLION active users. Basically endless opportunities to grow your audience. Here is how we tackle a brand play with YouTube Advertising. 

Campaign type

In addition to optimizing YouTube campaigns for direct conversions, you want to leverage YouTube strategically to generate brand awareness. This is done by creating prospecting campaigns optimized for reach. The goal is to drive low CPMs and low CPVs. Traffic, traffic, traffic. 

The two main bidding strategies for a Brand Awareness campaign on YouTube, are Manual CPV or Target CPM. One focusing on Views and the other on Impressions. Even though the main target is different, they are both focused on  driving as many eyeballs to your ads as possible. We tend to start with a Target CPM and test throughout the campaign, but both are incredibly effective at driving views, impressions, and traffic to your site. 

While these campaigns typically do not result in direct click-thru conversions, these campaigns can play a vital role in introducing the brand to as many people as possible. 

What kind of Audiences are available?

In the Google Ads platform we have access to a plethora of prospecting audiences to work with. As mentioned above, these include the likes of Custom Segments, Affinity, In-Market, Interest, and Retargeting lists. The difference between Brand and Performance audiences is that with a Brand campaign, the goal is to go broad. You will want to focus on audiences that drive low CPMs and CPVs. 

As we have continued to hammer home, testing audiences is a major key. Focus on audiences driving the cheapest traffic. Remove the ones that are expensive outliers. Besides the standard volume metrics, we recommend monitoring Time on Site metrics as well once users land on your site. Quality always matters, so remember to optimize towards the users who are the highest engagers. 

For a full list of available audiences, check out this list from Vid Hoarder. 

How is success measured?

Measuring success for a Brand campaign is not as straightforward as Performance campaigns. Brand KPIs are harder to both measure and communicate results. These campaigns are more of a long term play. Data does not necessarily roll in over night, but instead has lasting effects that can potentially affect all marketing channels months down the line. 

When looking at daily and weekly data we monitor some pretty standard volume metrics. Optimizing copy, creative, and audiences lean on the data that comes in using these KPIs. If one creative has a much cheaper CPM then maybe shifting budget to favor that video ad is the right play. Sometimes certain audiences are more likely to click a YouTube Ad. In that case, we may tend to add more focus to those users over others. Here are the metrics in question:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CPC
• CTR
• CPM
• CPV
• View Rate

Now when we are aiming to measure the long term, true impact of a YouTube Brand campaign, we dive a little deeper. Let’s use a financial planning client as an example. 

Search campaigns are driving leads at a $20 CPL. Really efficient and abundant. Now, a YouTube Brand campaign may be only bringing in leads at a $200 CPL. At first look, it would be easy to decide that this campaign is just not working for you. When measuring with ROAS or CPL, the numbers do not lie. 

The problem here is that these campaigns are not meant to be compared to one another. These numbers do not account for the thousands, or potentially millions of eyeballs that are exposed to your brand through a YouTube Brand campaign. Average Cost per View can easily be as low as $0.05. A single $1 can go a long way to reach new users. 

This kind of exposure trickles down to Organic, Direct, and all other sources of traffic when measured over an extended period of time. Measuring lift in these other channels is imperative to evaluating success of a brand campaign. 

During the campaign flight, is there a lift in Branded Search? Are more users coming in through Direct while this campaign is running? Has the percentage of New Users entering your site higher than before the YouTube campaign launched? All of these are questions that can be answered when evaluating your success. One of the best ways to do this is through isolated testing. Queue the next section please! 

Isolated testing

For the cleanest possible measurement, these campaigns can be launched in isolation, meaning there are no additional top of funnel/brand awareness marketing efforts being added shortly before, during, or after the campaign run. Testing in isolation like this will help tremendously when communicating the data that rolls in. 

One of the easiest ways to test in isolation is through specific Geographic targeting. This can be any GEO relevant to your business, but our recommendation is to focus on what we call 2nd tier geos. These are usually cities or states that rank in the top 10 of total users for your business, but are not the absolute highest traffic sources. 

For example, New York might drive the most users on a monthly basis for your website. Instead of testing in your most important market, move down the list to another city, let’s say Chicago. Chicago has more than enough volume to bring in significant results, but is not the highest value market available. Once you find success in a market like Chicago, that gives you the go ahead to test in larger markets such as New York in this example. 

The key here is to focus on a DMA that has significant volume. A smaller city such as Knoxville, won’t be able to provide abundant data nearly as quick as a city such as Chicago. 

Campaigns are isolated, and have been running for 3 months. Now what? This is when you can utilize tools such as Google Analytics to accurately measure the impact of your flights. Focus on three areas of performance:

• KPIs before a campaign launch 
• KPIs during the campaign
• KPIs after the campaign is over

Using data from all three of these timetables will help paint the picture of the effect of your brand YouTube campaign. 

Back to our example of Chicago, if you saw 10,000 new users a month coming through Organic traffic before a campaign flight, and then saw an increase to 15,000 average monthly users coming in from Organic, this is a great sign that your brand efforts have had a positive impact. If now measurable lift is evident, this indicates potential creative or audience issues. Creative may not be resonating with the audiences you are targeting. 

YouTube Advertising is not going anywhere anytime soon. No matter the business objective, hop on the train to get instant access to over 2 billion users. We have found Brand Awareness and Performance campaigns work well across all kinds of industries. It’s all a matter of testing and patience. Find the right mix between the two and great things are bound to happen. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Developing A Youtube Ads Strategy for Brand Awareness & Performance appeared first on Tuff.

Understanding the avenues users enter your site through is invaluable. Maybe social channels drive quality traffic to the site. For well-known brands, direct traffic may be the main driver. A large percentage of most businesses however are fueled by search terms targeted via organic or paid channels. Both of these channels play an incredibly important role in attracting users, but not just any users – quality ones. 

High-intent audiences are more likely to take the actions you want them to take on your site. Both PPC and SEO offer ways to attract these ideal users.

But how do we bring these efforts together to formulate efficient, actionable insights? What things can a brand do to capture as much existing demand as possible? Are there ways for your business to create demand? Can we increase efficiencies and drive more conversions in tandem?

We set out to answer all of these questions to give a look into how our team and growth marketing agency thinks about Keyword Research through the lens of PPC Management and SEO. They can sometimes be seen as two different worlds, but when you combine forces, powerful things start to happen.  

Dominating All Stages of the Funnel with Paid Keyword Targeting

Let’s start by taking a look at Paid Keyword Research, the bulk of which relates to Google Ads specifically. Every partner is in a different stage of their business. Some are more established, looking to scale Paid Search efforts with new keyword targets. Some are brand new and are not even sure what kind of volume is available for a PPC channel. Many, though, are somewhere in between. At the crossroads of maximizing existing volume & creating new demand. 

Capture Existing Search Volume within Your Growth Strategy

What demand is already out there that you can capitalize on? Is Paid Search already running with any success, and if so, can you expand on the current high value keywords? Answering these questions is the first step in Tuff’s research, regardless of the industry. Although there are many tools available, we mainly use two for this step of research; Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Both of these give us a holistic view on volume as well as deeper looks into the industry at large. 

First let’s take a look at the current Google account, if there is one for our partner. We set out to identify what we call High Value Keywords that exist in the account already. These keywords, as the name suggests, are the targets that are working best for the partner. Maybe they have the most efficient CPA. Or an incredibly high Conversion Rate. No matter the KPI, the most important metric to look for in these High Value Keywords is Impression Share. If Impression Share is below 70-80%, there is room to scale immediately. This can be done by simply allocating additional budget, or focusing on making optimization changes that affect Quality Score. The goal is to maximize the success of these keywords. Find the top performers and become the industry leader for all users searching those out. Capture existing demand. 

After we see the areas of what is working already, we go to the true depths of Keyword Research, and this is where Keyword Planner comes in. Below is an example of how it works. We provide a few keywords relevant to the partner, in this example we provided a few phrases surrounding financial advice. The key is to start with high intent keywords. These give the best indication into how much demand is available at this very moment. Evaluating performance at this stage of the funnel is based on revenue and last click conversions. 

Google then spits out hundreds of keyword ideas that are related to what we are looking for. We can get a gauge on monthly volume immediately, as well as an idea of how competitive these keywords may be. Much of our time is spent in this stage. Sourcing the right keywords to start bidding on takes some time. Not every keyword available is going to be relevant. Again, our focus at this stage is to maximize the use of high intent keywords. This is where Paid Search excels the most.

The highlight of Google Keyword Planner is its forecasting ability. Once you choose the keywords that you would like to target, you have the ability to see a general forecast based on a certain daily budget. This helps paint a picture of the existing demand volume available, but more importantly, how much it may cost. Tuff uses a report like this as an immediate jumping off point with a partner. “If we spend x amount on these keywords, this is the performance we can expect.”

Perform Keyword Research for the Competitive Landscape

An invaluable part of the keyword research process, that has implications across all Paid and Owned Media, is Competitor Keyword Research. What are the top competitors in your industry spending money on? Where is their focus and how can you tailor your growth marketing strategy to capitalize on that? SEMrush is our go to for this lift.

We could write multiple posts about the capabilities of SEMrush, but for right now we are going to focus on the Advertising Research tab under Domain Analytics. Here we can input any URL to see information regarding spend on Paid Search platforms. We start with totals. The monthly estimate for spend, traffic from that spend, and then available volume associated with the keywords that are being targeted. 

Digging deeper, we can then export the full list of keywords that are being targeted. This is where the true value comes in. Not only are we able to see what the competition is bidding on, we can even take a look at the ad copy they are using. This data can be utilized across all growth marketing aspects. PPC, SEO, Social, CRO, and Creative. If you can better understand the competition, you can better understand how to beat them. 

For businesses that don’t exactly know who their competitors are, we can use SEMrush to find them. Below is a list of competitors we found for Amazon. This is a high level glimpse into the industry. All of this information surrounding competitors is taken into account when developing a Growth Strategy across all channels. 

Create Demand With Brand Strategy and Broad Keyword Targeting 

The third and final pillar of Paid Keyword Research is demand creation. We have now maxed out the existing demand for high-intent terms, let’s expand. The main thing to keep in mind with this stage of strategy is that this is a long-term investment. Users are not going to convert immediately through keywords that fall into this Top of Funnel bucket. This would fall under Brand Awareness instead of Performance marketing. 

These are a few steps to how we go about a demand creation strategy for Paid and Organic keyword targets alike:

1. Identify low intent and long tail keywords. Look for terms that are easy to rank for organically and terms that have low CPC’s on Paid channels. Some tactics you can utilize on Google Ads are Dynamic Search Ads and Broad Match Keywords. 
2. Develop a content strategy focusing on these keyword targets. Content built around keywords that have low competition, but are still relevant, are an easy way to improve Organic performance. 
3. Allocate a low percentage of overall Paid budget to targeting broad and long tail keywords. These are to improve Brand Awareness and are not to be evaluated on last click conversion metrics. Instead, impressions, CPCs, and volume is what to monitor. Tip: Set a Max CPC on Google Ads to better control costs. We aim to have CPCs around 10% of high-intent keywords. 

Tactics like this have long lasting effects across all channels. Performance and Brand tactics work hand in hand this way,  pushing users in the right direction. A full-funnel approach takes time, but the upsides are certainly worth the effort.  

A Full-Funnel Approach to SEO Keyword Research

Both paid and organic search aim to drive traffic and conversions using keywords. But the nature of the two channels influences the best way to capture demand. Organic search offers the ability to target users at multiple stages of the buyer journey with a mix of informative and commercial-focused content. 

Here’s how we approach SEO keyword research for a holistic strategy that supports PPC efforts. 

Examine Current Keyword Rankings

To lay the groundwork for a solid strategy, It’s important to understand where we’re starting from an organic search perspective. To do so, we’ll take a look at current keywords rankings to:

• Learn what keywords are driving traffic to the site 
• Find keywords that are being incorrectly targeted (misaligned search intent)
• Uncover low-hanging fruit keywords on pages 2 and 3 

Often, a brand has some visibility for keywords around a core service but is not maximizing traffic and conversion potential. Common mistakes include not covering the topic in-depth, creating content that does not align with searcher intent, and creating pages that don’t target specific, high-value keywords. 

At this stage, we can pull a list of top-performing non-branded keywords to identify areas to capitalize on in our strategy. For example, say a financial advisory company is ranking well for the term wealth management on a service page. 

A top spot on page one is great. But if the brand is not targeting terms higher up in the funnel, they are missing out on the higher traffic volume and increased brand awareness that comes with speaking to people earlier on in the journey. Using the questions filter in a keyword research tool, we can filter to find common queries around wealth management. 

Questions around what wealth management is and what a wealth manager does would make for informative top of funnel content in our organic strategy. These keywords don’t have immediate commercial intent so we won’t dedicate a large amount of the PPC budget towards them. 

While paid is great for hyper-targeting ready-to-buy users, organic offers the perfect opportunity to target those earlier in the journey, getting your brand in front of users early on so they are familiar with it when they reach the decision phase. This way, you don’t spend a large portion of the PPC budget on terms that are not immediately profitable.

Conduct Competitor Analysis

No SEO strategy is complete without competitor analysis. Here, we’ll take a look at what pages and keywords are performing well for competitors. 

The goal of a holistic SEO strategy is to drive relevant, high-value traffic to a site. So we need to look at multiple metrics to determine which competitor keywords are worth going after. These include search volume, difficulty, top 10 ranking pages for the term, and user intent. 

There are multiple components to this portion of SEO keyword research One helpful step is to perform a keyword gap analysis. This essentially uncovers relevant keywords that: 

1. Your competitors are ranking for and you are not

or

2. Your competitors are outranking you for 

In our financial company example, the firm has no rankings for “term deposit calculator” which generates almost 2000 searches a month while the competitor firm is in position 1.  

In instances like this, creating new content to fill in this gap is the way to go. Yes, new content will take a while to rank organically. But the upfront effort results in ranking for a keyword that is proven to drive relevant traffic to businesses like yours. This approach allows you to siphon off traffic from competitors. 

In other cases, competitors are outranking a company  for high-value keywords. Take for example, the keyword “smsf administration”. The brand is in position 7 on the SERP spot while its competitor is in position 1, meaning it’s garnering the lion’s share of clicks and impressions. Since this topic is core to the services offered, it makes sense to target it in an organic strategy. 

In this instance, the best strategy is to optimize existing content to better match search intent and compete with top-ranking pages. Fortunately, content optimizations typically see faster movement in rankings than new content. 

This step also offers a chance to collaborate with the PPC team. Say, for example, that the PPC team has been A/B testing ad copy and CTAs for the service that the SEO team is updating a page around. Use this data when creating content on the new page. Leveraging test result data  creates cohesive messaging for a better user experience across multiple touch points.

Target Keywords at Multiple Stages of the Buyer Journey

A well-rounded organic strategy should include a mix of informational keywords and high-intent ones to satisfy queries at multiple stages of the buyer journey. 

Using Organic Search to Build Awareness

What are people searching really early on in the journey? While these users won’t convert on the spot, the search is related to the offering so getting in front of them before they are in the decision mindset is beneficial. Generating awareness with those who are high in the funnel is a smart long-term play. This portion of the strategy focuses on driving traffic and building brand authority rather than generating conversions. 

Armed with questions from competitor research, internal customer information, and our keyword research tools, we can map the questions we find to different stages of the user journey.

The PPC Play: Since these keywords won’t lead to immediate conversions, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of paid budget on them. But, building brand awareness is still important. Delegate a small portion of your budget to this and mark it as a visibility play. Evaluate success based on Impressions, CPCs, and traffic to your site. 

Using Organic Search to Drive Conversions

A strong organic strategy involves targeting keywords with high purchase intent. These “money keywords” are highly relevant to your offerings and are regularly searched by your target audience. Unsurprisingly, these keywords are typically quite difficult to rank for organically. In our financial advisory firm example, these keywords include: 

• Wealth management services
• Financial advice in [city]
• Portfolio specialist

Now, difficult does not mean impossible. By laying the groundwork with content targeting topics higher in the funnel, your site gains authority and increases its chances of ranking for these high-intent keywords. But depending on your domain authority, ranking for high-competition keywords can be an uphill battle. 

This stage is another great opportunity for SEO and PPC to work in lockstep. Look at top converting terms for paid campaigns and aim to rank in the top 3 spots for these organically. Because these terms are difficult, whittle it down to a list of 10 or so high-value keywords to focus these efforts on. 

The PPC Play: Use data from campaigns to identify top converting keywords. Allocate spend to these terms, working in tandem with organic to ensure related content features aligned messaging for a seamless user experience. With both SEO and PPC efforts focused on these high-intent terms, you can maximize brand presence on the SERP. 

Combining SEO and PPC to Create a Synergistic Strategy

Now that we’ve covered the keyword research phase, let’s look at how we combine paid and organic efforts. Cross Team Functionality is the goal for Keyword Research and it is important to continue evaluating progress and performance after the initial stages. 

Here are a few specific areas where Tuff uses all the information above to get the most out of our Growth Marketing Strategy.

1. Use Data from Both Channels to Inform Strategy 

Good news. Utilizing paid and organic search in your marketing mix means you’ll have double the data to pull insights from.

On the organic side, top-performing pages can provide insights into the terms and pain points that most resonate with users. A high organic ranking signals that content is matching search intent and delivering value. Keywords with high organic performance should be added to paid campaigns and tested to see which lead to the highest conversions. This way, we double down on what’s working. 

This principle works in reverse as well. On the paid side, looking at Search Term reports in Google Ads is one way to zoom in on what terms are converting well. Once we’ve uncovered key terms that are driving revenue, we can prioritize these in our organic strategy. This may include optimizing existing content to include the terms or creating new content around these terms that align with search intent.

By cross-analyzing data and using this to inform keyword strategies, a brand can cover the SERP for terms that matter most to its bottom line. 

2. Leverage PPC & SEO to Dominate the SERP

Another reason SEO and PPC are better together? They allow a brand to maximize visibility in search results. 

Paid ads will always be placed above organic results, making them the first thing users see. So investing in paid can secure your brand a spot of prime real estate on the SERP. However, organic content brings an element of authority as users tend to trust organic over paid ads. To get the best results for important keywords, combine both strategies so you’re top of mind for searchers. 

3. Target Expensive Terms with SEO 

Certain keywords come with high CPCs that get more expensive over time. In these situations, it’s helpful to target these terms organically as part of an SEO content strategy. Targeting these high-value keywords in your organic search strategy is a smart long-term play. The time it takes to rank will depend on factors including your site’s domain authority and the top 10 ranking pages. 

4. Boost Organic Efforts with PPC Retargeting 

Many users will find your brand through organic search, but what happens when they leave without taking action? Paid offers the chance to retarget specific users so that organic efforts are bolstered. Because these users have demonstrated an initial interest in the brand, they are farther in the pipeline, making them a better bet for PPC spend. 

SEO & PPC: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven

Sherlock and Watson. Movies and popcorn. Some things just work better together. When it comes to maximizing your marketing ROI, combining PPC and SEO are a dynamic duo on that list. These marketing channels complement one another beautifully when looking at any stage of the marketing funnel. With more powerful insights into user behavior, you can drive conversions and increase efficiency. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post SEO & PPC Powerhouse: Capturing Demand at Every Stage of the Funnel appeared first on Tuff.

Changes in the macroeconomic environment have left many businesses and marketers scrambling to adjust budgets toward the channels and campaigns that seem to be driving the best results. When we say ‘driving the best results’, we typically mean the channels and campaigns that have been attributed to driving the most revenue, the lowest cost per lead, or whatever the core KPI is in our attribution software.  

Typically, we will see performance-focused channels like paid search or even retargeting campaigns driving the key conversions in our attribution software and are therefore inclined to push a greater percentage of our total budget toward these channels and campaigns. This makes sense, right? These campaigns are delivering the ‘best results’ currently, so surely if we push more money to those campaigns and cut budget from the campaigns that aren’t being attributed to our key conversions, we will have better performance, right?

However, this approach will be shortsighted and as a growth marketing agency we’ve been partnering closely with our clients to help identify the right mix of brand and performance spend for each brand we work with today. 

It’s very difficult to measure the true success of your top of the funnel campaigns and brand spend, especially when many popular attribution softwares like Google Analytics are designed to give full credit to the channels and campaigns that were at the bottom of the customer journey i.e. last click or last non-direct click. 

If we take a few steps back, we need to ask ourselves – how successful would our performance campaigns be if we continued to lower brand campaign initiatives or put less emphasis on the top of the funnel? Would our brand search campaigns still have the same volume and efficiency that they are currently producing? Would our retargeting campaigns be as effective if they’re targeting a smaller audience?

It is not a trick question. The results may not suddenly change overnight or over one week or even over one month, but in the long run, that lack of awareness and trust that was historically developed from brand campaigns will start to affect your performance campaigns and limit your ability to gain new customers. 

That’s why it’s always important to ensure that you are constantly running and optimizing top of the funnel campaigns which should be building trust and recall of your brand amongst your target audience, alongside your performance campaigns. And in order to do so successfully, it’s important to measure the success of these campaigns using KPIs that are many times different from the KPIs used to measure the success of your performance campaigns. Although this measurement is not easy, we have some tips to help!

Why Measuring Brand Campaigns Is Hard 

As mentioned above, it’s harder to both measure and communicate the intangible value driven from brand campaigns, and this is why many brands and marketers will look to reallocate or even eliminate spend provided to these campaigns in order to make their CPA metrics look better.

For an easy example, consider that you’re an ecommerce brand and you see your branded search campaign on Google Ads driving a 10x ROAS while your YouTube Efficient Reach optimized campaign is driving a 1x ROAS. You’ll surely be tempted to reallocate or completely eliminate the YouTube budget and push the extra spend into branded search. After all, the ROAS numbers don’t lie.

But, what this strategy is missing is the long term effect of reaching thousands of new users with CPVs under $0.03, day in and day out, that only a brand awareness optimized YouTube campaign can provide.

If you are to remove the campaign driving awareness of your brand in the first place, will you still have the same amount of users searching for your brand later? Most likely not. As your brand campaign begins to be less efficient and provide less conversion volume over time, you will start wondering what’s happening.  

Similarly, we will typically see social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, drive higher CPAs of our lower funnel metrics than paid search. Why? Because those social media channels are disrupting a user during their scrolling while paid search is presenting a solution at the exact moment the user is searching for one. In short, the intent is vastly different and the effect that each of these channels have on the full funnel is different as well and should be treated as such. 

So then, how should we consider measuring the effectiveness of brand campaigns?

How You Can Measure Brand Campaign Effectiveness

Measuring the effectiveness of brand campaigns isn’t as straightforward as clocking your last non-direct click interactions in Google Analytics. You need to be smart and selective about what metrics you can attribute to a brand campaign.

To begin, it’s important to set clear expectations and get alignment with all key stakeholders involved in the campaign of what the expectations will be. When you are running brand campaigns that are typically introducing or reinforcing your brand messaging to people, you should not expect to drive lower CPAs than a higher intent campaign type like paid search.

Instead, you need to be realistic about what you can expect and align on those KPIs instead in order to truthfully measure the effectiveness of your brand initiatives. 

Some KPIs to consider when measuring brand awareness campaigns include:

Interactions (views, impressions, engagements)

Available in all ad platforms, you can begin to measure your brand campaigns’ effectiveness by first looking at your views and related view metrics like cost per view, your impressions and related impression metrics like cost per impression, and your overall engagements and cost per engagement. Here, you can also take into consideration view-thru conversions, which are mutually exclusive from click conversions and measure the number of conversions which occurred after a user saw the ad then later converted through a medium other than the original ad they saw.

Additional helpful in-platform metrics to consider measuring include reach and frequency. How many users is your ad or campaign actually reaching and how many times is each user being served the ad.

These metrics can help begin the analysis of your brand campaign performance.

Overall revenue/leads increase

In addition to tracking view, engagement, and frequency metrics within your ad platforms, the effect brand campaigns are having can also be measured by monitoring your overall revenue or leads (or other core KPI metric) lift. 

In order for this to be as clean a measurement as possible, it’s important to measure the results that you are typically receiving before you launch a new brand campaign vs the period the brand campaign was running and shortly after it ended. If possible, try not to launch any additional marketing efforts during this timeframe in order to minimize the number of variables contributing to a potential lift. 

To help make these types of measurements easier, ad platforms like Google Ads have begun to release additional measurement options within accounts. One such helpful measurement option within Google Ads is Conversion Lift. Conversion Lift helps you measure the number of conversions, site visits, and other actions directly driven by your audience viewing your ad. You’ll also be able to view data such as Incremental Conversions, Relative Conversion Lift, and a Incremental Conversion Value, which helps make understanding the 

While not available in all Google Ads accounts, Conversion Lift measurement can be added by contacting the account’s assigned Google Rep.

Branded search lift

Similar to measuring your overall revenue/leads/conversion lift, another helpful way of determining if your brand campaigns are driving results is by measuring your branded search keywords on both paid and organic search for any signs of potential lift.

Again, here you will want to make sure that you have as limited number of variables as possible, but if your brand campaign is running and reaching thousands of new users, you should be able to notice an impact on your branded search terms in the form of an increase in search volume and clicks. 

If your budget isn’t large enough to cover an entire country, especially one as large and diverse as the US,  a helpful tip can be to limit your brand campaign to a smaller geographic area and then measure the lift on branded search terms in that geographic area only. This can also help cut down on other variables interfering with the results.

For example, consider launching a brand campaign in one metro area such as Nashville, Tennessee, while keeping all other advertising initiatives in this area the same. Now, measure the brand search numbers on both paid and organic before the campaign is launched, while the campaign is running, and after the campaign has ended for any noticeable lift in brand search volume and clicks during and after the campaign run time.

Direct/Net-New traffic lift

Finally, similar to the brand search lift, you can also look to measure if you have received any additional direct traffic during and after the brand campaign run time. The measurement methodology is the same as above, but will be looking at direct traffic numbers instead. 

Bottom Line: Brand Awareness Matters

When building a new campaign strategy or optimizing an already existing campaign strategy, it can be easy to put the most emphasis and therefore budget on the channels and campaigns which drive the lowest cost CPAs. Majority of the time, these will be your performance marketing initiatives like paid search. 

However, ignoring the brand campaigns which create trust and awareness, while also assisting in driving your overall conversions, is a common mistake. Instead of jeopardizing your long term success for short term wins, consider a healthy mix of brand and performance campaigns to provide the best results for long term growth.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post How To Measure Brand-Related KPIs appeared first on Tuff.

Whether it’s optimizing paid spend, identifying the right channel mix, updating the user flow to improve CVR, pulling a creative analysis, implementing technical SEO fixes, or more, as a growth marketing agency, our entire team is in Google Analytics on a daily basis. So as we prepare to say goodbye to our longstanding and trusted analytics sidekick, Universal Analytics, the team at Tuff has been busy testing the new Google Analytics 4 platform with a variety of our partners. 

In this blog, I’ll take a look at a few ways we’ve started to leverage Google Analytics 4’s new or updated features to gain analytics insights to drive better learnings and key results for our partners. 

Customize Your Reports To Find The Data That Matters Most

We’re not going to lie, Google Analytics 4 seems very cumbersome at first. For example, there are ‘bread and butter’ reports, like the ‘source / medium’ report from Universal Analytics that are no longer configured for you from the start. Little things like this make the transition to Google Analytics 4 a bit more painful than it probably needed to be. 

But, one area where Google Analytics 4 really shines is in the ability to customize reports and visualize data in a much easier and simplified way when compared to Universal Analytics. Head to any of the initial reports created on the left hand menu, such as the Acquisition Overview report, and you’ll see a few pre-populated graphs, charts, and cards. 

While the initial layouts of these reports are great to start, Google Analytics 4 allows you to go a bit further by customizing each report to your liking by adding any number of dozens of pre-made cards to make the report more efficient and useful for your specific needs. 

As an example below, I’ve added two new cards, ‘Conversions by Source/Medium’ and ‘Conversions by Device Category’ to my Acquisition Overview report. As a PPC Strategist driving paid traffic to a website, these are two metrics that I care about greatly, so adding these as cards to my Acquisition Overview report will allow me to find these metrics as quickly as possible without needing to go further into other reports. 

Customizing reports with additional cards is simple, but so is creating entirely new reports to find the information most important for you. 

In the example report below, we’ve created a report detailing repeat purchasers by the campaign that brought them to the site and the length of time it took to make a repeat purchase. This information is particularly useful for understanding which campaigns are creating the most ‘sticky’ customers – those who are willing to come back to our partner’s site and purchase more than once. 

It took only a few minutes to create this report, and by adding it to our reports section via the Library feature, we’re able to quickly find and interpret this information within Google Analytics 4, thus enabling us to act and allocate our ad spend accordingly to the campaigns that are driving the most repeat purchasers:

Act Efficiently With The New & Improved Insights Tab

One of my personal favorite features of Google Analytics 4 is the new and improved Insights tab. First released in Universal Analytics, the Insights tab has gotten a new facelift in Google Analytics 4 and is offering a simpler, more efficient way to find important insights to help drive marketing decisions.

By simply opening the Insights tab, we’re presented with a few pre-configured sections to help spark our data investigation and find key information driven by Google’s AI, including: 

• Basic Performance
• Demographics
• User Acquisition
• Traffic Analysis
• Technology
• eCommerce

But, it doesn’t stop there. To find the exact measurements we’re looking for, we can type in a quick sentence to find the relevant data quickly. 

The key benefit of these insights is efficiency – while you may be thinking of data that you want to find, many times you may be unsure of the best way to configure your reports to find this data, especially when using a new platform like Google Analytics 4 that requires a learning curve. Instead of setting up a new report or editing an existing report, hop up to the search bar and type in exactly what you are looking for and you may just be surprised at how efficient and easy it is to use this enhanced Insights feature.

By typing into the search bar exactly what I wanted to see – in this case, ‘revenue and transactions and users by channel last month’ – I’m presented with a clear table that I can view in platform, share a link to, or download in PDF, PNG, or CSV format to share elsewhere. 

This insights tab has proven particularly useful early on when learning Google Analytics 4 as I’ve been able to find the most relevant information quickly, without needing to edit or configure existing or new reports. 

Conversion Paths to Determine Where Your Budget Should Be Allocated

Conversion paths and model attribution is one feature of Universal Analytics that all growth marketers love to use when looking to find a clearer picture of how their various marketing efforts are interacting with each other and contributing to traffic and revenue, especially as channel diversification becomes more and more important. Luckily, Google Analytics 4 has kept this feature and, in my opinion, improved it further by making it easier to use and more insightful, allowing growth marketers to more efficiently find the insights to their user paths that are most valuable in order to take this information and act on it.

Now living in the new ‘Advertising’ section and under the ‘Attribution’ dropdown, the Conversion paths section provides us with a clear look at which channels, sources, mediums, or campaigns are being credited at various touchpoints along the user journey. Take the following example below which shows the various touchpoints of the user journey for purchases for an eCommerce partner:

How can we use this information to drive better marketing decisions? 

First, what we can notice right away is that the Paid Social channel gets the most conversion credit out of any channel in the early touchpoints. However, as we get later into the user journey, Paid Search becomes the channel that is gaining the most conversion credit.

This means, for this example, that the Paid Social channel is highly important for our top-of-funnel marketing efforts. Users who later make a purchase are coming to the site first from Paid Social more than any other channel. So, it’s critical that we continue our top-of-funnel marketing efforts on this channel, and if possible, look to expand here to introduce the brand to more people via Paid Social since we know that these users are likely to convert.

On the other side, Paid Search is receiving the most conversion credit for late touchpoints. For this example, this means that when users are ready to make a purchase, they are turning to Paid Search to find the site and make the purchase. Many times, we see the final touchpoint be from a Branded Paid Search campaign, as users are searching for the brand name on Google to be taken to the site and make their purchase. 

Additionally, Email is playing a crucial role across all steps of the user journey. We can see Email as a top three channel across the early touchpoints, mid touchpoints, and in particular at the late touchpoints. Email is proving to be incredibly important in nurturing the user along the journey from initial interaction to final purchase.  

Universal Analytics 3 Says Goodbye in Less Than a Year

Although you may be inclined to push your Google Analytics 4 transition to as close to the cutoff date as possible, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the new analytics platform as soon as possible to begin enjoying some of the new features and benefits. Play around with the new layout, test and configure new reports, and you’ll soon find ways to enhance your marketing efforts in conjunction with Google Analytics 4 like some of the ways detailed above.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post More Data, Better Results: How We’re Leveraging Google Analytics 4 To Drive Growth appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s note: This post was originally published in 2020, it has since been updated in 2024!

Whether you work in eCommerce or simply market your business online, you’ve likely heard of cost-per-click (CPC) advertising in which the advertiser is charged each time their ad has been clicked and the user is redirected to the advertiser’s website. CPC is the primary way that advertisers are charged when running Google Ads along with other first tier search engines, but what advertisers don’t always know, however, is how much Google Ads cost.

With CPC advertising, advertisers will typically place bids on keyword phrases relevant to their target audience. When a potential customer searches for this keyword phrase, search results will display the advertisement. Among the first-tier search engines that offer CPC advertising, Google reigns supreme. This makes sense, as the search giant controls nearly 90% of its market share and has around four billion users.

This degree of market reach is both astounding and unequaled across other online advertising venues like Facebook or Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Advertising). Google Ads’ dominance is such that, for many small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs), it represents the only online forum in which they advertise. In fact, of the 65 percent of SMBs that invest in CPC advertising, the vast majority utilize Google Ads. Since it can make up a majority of your online advertising, how much Google Ads cost becomes an important consideration.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. You may read online that Google Ads average between $1 and $2 per click. For SMBs, this can come out to $9,000 to $10,000 a month. That’s not chump change for anyone, much less a small business. 

If you wonder why so many businesses fork over that kind of cash, consider this: Google Ads offers an average return of $8 to every $1 spent on advertising. That’s a lot of “averages,” however, and it doesn’t tell the whole story. To learn the truth of Google Ads’ cost, and how this investment works, requires a little more digging.

Average Google Ads Cost By Campaign Type

As stated above, how much Google Ads cost depends on your targeted keywords. If you want to target a keyword like “insurance,” for example, get ready to lay out some cash. As the most expensive keyword, “business services” can cost as much as $58.64 per click. Keyword bidding aside, the type of campaign you choose determines the way in which your charges accrue. 

Your average Google ads cost will accrue differently based on which of the six types of campaigns you pursue. These campaigns include:

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Lead Gen ads
• Shopping ads
• YouTube ads
• Performance Max ads

The type of cost associated with each appears in the table below.

Google Search Ads

The most basic ad type on the Google Ads platform, search ads, display within Google search results. If you perform a search, you will typically see at the top of the page sponsored links marked as ads. Search ads are billed based on CPC and have the benefit of displaying in the same spot searchers look for information. The shared format of these ads and standard search results helps ensure users see them. The familiar look also encourages more clicks.

Google Search Bidding Strategies

When you are serving ads on Google Search Network, there are a handful of different ways that you can choose to bid. This bidding strategy will determine how much a traffic costs, who Google serves the ad to, and ultimately, how much you will pay compared to the competition. With these different strategies, you can focus your Google Ad spend on Conversions, Conversion Value, Clicks, or Impression Share.

Which Bidding Strategy is right for you?

Let’s take a look at the different paths you can take when setting up a Search campaign. each one of these below is going to indicate to Google what your main priority is. Once Google knows that priority, it can focus on getting the right users to click your ads. (Reminder, these strategies are set at a campaign level, not an ad group level.)

Maximize Clicks is an oldie but a goodie! If your main goal is to send traffic to your site, this is the bidding strategy for you. Google will aim to maximize low cost traffic when serving your ads. CPC tends to be cheaper with this strategy since it is fully traffic based.

Maximize Conversions is where Tuff optimizes many of our campaigns to. This is an effective bidding strategy when you want a user to click on your ad AND take an action on your site. The most common conversions to optimize to are a product purchase or a lead form submission. In this scenario, you may pay more per click because Google is focusing further down the funnel. When focused on conversion, competition is higher.

Target CPA is most often used when efficiency is the main metric you care about. An example of this would be an E-Commerce company wanting to maximize their sales with an acquisition goal of $50. With this bidding strategy, you can focus Google on bringing in users who are likely to convert WHILE keeping costs low.

Target Impression Share shifts the campaign focus to maximizing the amount of eyeballs your ad shows up for. This is particularly useful for Branded Keyword bidding. If you want to make sure that you show up for 90% of all searches for your brand, this is the bidding strategy for you.

Google Display Ads

Google has a network across various industries that appeal to a wide range of audiences. These websites have opted into Google Ads to display advertising across the Google Display Network. Website owners receive payment per click or impression. 

For advertisers, Google display ads put content directly in front of audiences while they visit a website of interest. Display ads typically take the form of images that draw the eye away from a site’s written content. Display ads determine price through CPC or viewable cost per mille (CPM). CPM measures cost through viewable impressions. Viewable impressions occur simply as the ad appears, and do not require a click. For CPM advertising, Google Ads cost a set amount per 1,000 impressions.

Demand Gen Ads (Previously known as Discovery)

CPC determines the cost of one of Google’s newest types of advertising, Demand Gen ads. These are native ads that appear across multiple Google-owned properties, including the YouTube homepage, Google Discover feed, and Gmail feeds. Visually compelling and designed for mobile devices, these ads rely on the “power of intent.” This means that Google uses information derived from a customer’s site visits, video viewing, map searches, and more to determine the content of the advertising. Learn more about why we love Google Demand Gen Ads at Tuff.

Highly targeted marketing like this has an obvious benefit in that it should automatically appeal to customers’ tastes. Google thinks of this campaign type as an extension of a social media marketing strategy. Since this acts as native advertising similar to the standard social channels, Demand Gen campaigns can really bridge that gap between traditional PPC on Google Ads and Social Advertising. 

Shopping Ads

These types of ads allow you to promote individual products or lines, rather than a brand as a whole. Like other types of Google Ads, these appear on search engine results when a customer searches for a product or service. 

For example, if you were to search for “running shoes,” you might see a detailed ad on the right side of your screen for Nikes. Shopping ads can include prices, photos, and customer ratings. As with other types of search ads, these Google Ads run a set CPC.

YouTube Ads

YouTube video ads open up a vast marketplace for advertisers engaged with Google Ads. In fact, YouTube represents the third-most visited website in the world, behind only Facebook and Google. There exist many types of YouTube ads, most of which appear either before or during viewable content. 

The cost of YouTube ads depends on which type of ad you run. Video ads are cost-per-view (CPV), while bumper ads are CPM. Instream ads that run while the viewer engages with a video can be either CPV or CPM.

However you can also choose to use a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy when utilizing conversion optimized YouTube campaigns known as Video Action campaigns or can target a certain Frequency if you want to make sure the user sees your ad a certain amount of times. In the case of Conversion campaigns, advertisers are charged by CPC.

Performance Max

Performance Max is the newest campaign type revealed by Google Ads in early 2022, and it relies heavily on algorithmic bidding. It also requires advertisers to input a wide variety of assets including video, display graphics, shopping feeds, and even search copy. With all of the assets given to the campaign in an ‘asset group,’ Google uses its algorithm to determine when and where to show ads created with combinations of the assets provided.

Performance Max campaigns are currently charged by CPC, but advertisers are not allowed to set their own CPC. Instead, advertisers can choose between Max Conversions and Max Conversions Value bidding strategies with or without a target CPA. Learn more about how Tuff clients are leveraging Google’s Performance Max campaigns.

Here’s how Performance Max can use similar assets in different formats – both on the Discover and Youtube placements.

Google Ads Cost By Industry

You might assume that since you know the average CPC of Google Ads, along with the method for measuring cost, you’re ready to build a budget. In reality, this is not the case. As illustrated in the example of “business services” mentioned above, Google Ads cost vastly more or less across different industries. There are thousands of highly competitive keywords which cost upwards of $50 a click, but on the other hand, there are countless relevant keywords that cost less than $1.00 per click.

Below, you can see a table that compares the CPC of Google Ads from search campaigns across various industries. The data for this table was taken from actual Tuff-managed search campaigns from January 2021 – January 2024.

This table is not meant to be exhaustive and only includes a handful of the countless number of industries in which companies are utilizing Google Ads to market their businesses. However, this snapshot could give you an idea of what to expect if you are in one of these industries looking to begin advertising with Google Ads.

You can also expect that Google Ads costs will differ widely within the same industry. For example, in the fashion industry, “activewear” and other exercise-related terms appear near the top in terms of cost. In this case, you can tie the difference to societal factors. In the wake of Covid-19, personal fitness saw a boom, as it gave consumers an excuse to leave their homes for a walk or run. 

This provides an important lesson: when the time comes to estimate the cost of your Google Ad campaign, you’ll need to consider a wide array of factors.

How to Estimate the Cost of Your Google Ads Campaign

To better understand how much a campaign or specific keyword will cost, you can employ Google Ads’ Keyword Planner. It’s important to understand that Google Ads’ cost is determined through ad auctions. As the advertiser, you set the maximum CPC you will pay. This bid then gets compared to the bids of other advertisers who targeted the same keyword. The higher your bid, the better your ads’ placement in the campaign type of your choosing.

Before you start bidding on keywords, you will want to use the Keyword Planner tool to help outline your Google Ads cost. This tool allows you to search for specific keywords and see their historical cost, along with cost forecasts.

Google’s Keyword Planner essentially reveals the industry benchmarks for your targeted keywords. Remember, if you want better placement in search results, you will need to bid higher than the benchmark provided in the average CPC. Keyword Planner also estimates the number of clicks and impressions your ad will receive on a daily basis. Between this and your CPC bid, you can easily derive an estimate for the cost of your campaign.

How to set a Google Ads budget

Once you define your targeted keywords and get an idea of their cost, you can create a daily or monthly budget for your Google Ads campaign. These budgets represent the maximum amount of money you will pay for a campaign across the chosen time period. This ability to control your ad spend makes advertising on Google a safe bet for your budget. Once you set your maximum bid and budget for Google Ads, you’ll suffer no surprises from unexpectedly high bills.

We recommend looking at a Google Ads budget within a larger Paid Media plan. This allows you to see exactly how a Google ads budget fits into the wider digital marketing budget for your business.

Quality Matters

Quality represents one final factor of Google Ads’ cost. In fact, the quality score ranks alongside your maximum bid as one of the most important factors that influence your AdRank, or the placement of your ads.

Google determines your quality score based on the relevance and quality of your advertising. More clicks on an ad will give you a higher overall Quality Score. Curious about how to raise this all-important score? 

There’s really no secret to it. If you create compelling ads with relevant keywords that deliver what the searcher expects, you’ll do just fine. To attract new business to your website, focus on the highest intent keywords for your brand. this will lead to a higher click through rate, better conversion rate, and ultimately more money in your pocket in the long run. We recommend matching your ad copy directly to the keywords being targeted. If you sell Blue Sweatshirts, then make sure that the term “Blue Sweatshirts” shows up in your ad somewhere. Keywords relevant to your business will ALWAYS perform better than ones that are not.

The quality of your landing page will also affect your Quality Score, so make sure your website offers a compelling experience for its visitors. It makes sense. We are all consumers. When a landing page experience is a positive one, we are more likely to spend additional time there. If that landing page matches exactly what I searched for, Blue Sweatshirts for example, it will lead to better performance.

The Cost of Google Ads: It’s All Up to You

As you can see, many factors can influence Google Ads’ cost. Some of these come from clear-cut choices, such as the type of campaign you run and your maximum bid at an ad auction. Other things, such as industry competition, are outside of your control. 

Though you can’t control the cost of popular keywords, you can absolutely plan a campaign around creative phrases that precisely target your market. All it takes is a little research, some time on Keyword Planner, and a daily or monthly budget that reflects your means and goals. Put work into these, and you’ll start seeing those 8-to-1 returns before you know it.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post How Much Do Google Ads Cost? appeared first on Tuff.