Goals

Using a goal eases your decision-making when you create a campaign in Google Ads by guiding you to the specific features designed to help your campaign succeed. When you create a campaign, you can select a goal. The goal you select should align with the main thing you want to get from your campaign, for example, Sales or Website traffic. After selecting a goal, you’ll see relevant, recommended features and settings to help you attain the results that matter most to your business.

You can add or remove a goal at any time and, if you want, choose to not use a goal and create your campaign without seeing a goal’s recommendations.

Set Your Display Advertising Campaign Goals

The goals for your display advertising campaigns should be clear, actionable targets that you can work towards achieving during the duration of your campaigns. Your goals could include statements such as:

• Grow email list to 50,000 subscribers
• Increase sales by 20%
• Increase conversions by 11%
• Achieve a banner click-through rate of 5%

Note that all of these example goals have numbers and percentages attached to them. By creating clear and concise goals, it will be easier for you and your team to understand what success is. By adding a deadline for when the goal should be completed by will give your objectives a sense of urgency. Goal deadlines will also indicate when it is time to reassess your online display marketing strategy and start setting new targets.

When setting your goals look at how your previous display advertising campaigns have performed, or if you do not have this data, check for industry benchmarks to help you create challenging and achievable goals. Set goals that are attainable with hard work; if you set goals that are impossible to reach, you and your team will not feel motivated to try and reach them.

Create a new goal

Navigate to your goals:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Click Admin, and navigate to the desired view.
3. In the VIEW column, click Goals.
4. Click + NEW GOAL or Import from Gallery to create a new goal, or click an existing goal to edit its configuration.
   
   Note: If + NEW GOAL and Import from Gallery are not visible, then you have already created the maximum of 20 goals for the current view.

You have 3 basic options for creating goals:

• using a goal template
• creating custom goals
• creating Smart Goals

Goals for Display campaigns

Goal	When to use it	Types of features
Sales	Drive sales or conversions from customers who are ready to actEngage with customers who have already contacted you or are very close to making a purchase decision	Features that start the purchasing or conversion process, such as visually striking ads, automated bidding and targeting, and other features that help you reach people who are actively browsing, researching, or comparing the products and services you sell
Leads	Encourage relevant customers to express interest in your products or services by signing up for a newsletter or providing their contact information	Features that start the conversion process, such as automated bidding and targeting, visually striking ads, and other features that help you collect email addresses, newsletter signups, or other relevant contact information from people interested in your business
Website traffic	Drive potential customers to visit your website	Features that help researching customers find potential product options, such as automated bidding, targeting, and ad creation, as well as features that can help you build a list of visitors you can later reconnect with
Brand awareness & reach	Increase awareness of your products or servicesIntroduce customers to what you offer when releasing a new product or expanding your business into a new area	Features that help you build brand recognition, such as compelling visual ads, bid strategies that drive views, and other features that help attract new customers and capture their attention

1. Improve your Quality Score

Quality Score is a metric tracked in Google Ads that gives each keyword in your account a score from 0 to 10. It’s a measure of the relevance and quality of your advertising. the likelihood that Google predicts someone will click on your ad, and an assessment of the experience the user will have if they click through to your site.

If you are not familiar with Quality Score, then this has to be the most important place for you to start. Ads with high Quality Scores achieve higher rankings, cost the advertiser less per click, and because they have a more prominent position on the page, are likely to have a higher click through rate. Here is Google’s guide to Quality Score.

There are many factors that influence your Quality Score, from the relevance of your PPC landing pages to the topicality of your ad copy by displaying the keyword in your ad headline, your ad copy, and the ad URL.

In this example, we can see the concept of Artificial Grass appearing in the essential locations in the ad to ensure a high quality score:

2. Use the best ad extensions to reach your goals

Currently there are around 10 types of ad extensions. Usually not all of them are applicable to every campaign you’ll run, however if you’re not taking advantage of all the different extensions then you’re missing out. Using the full range of extensions increases the size of your ads and makes them appear more relevant, which you’ve guessed it, improves the click through rate.

Call extensions

Similar to site links, adding call extensions to your adverts makes it easier for people to get in touch. This is ideal for businesses where customer calls are common in the sales process. The major advantage of call extensions is that people can click to call using either their mobile device or by using software such as Skype on a desktop.

If you set up a Google phone number when creating your call extension you can record calls as a conversion in AdWords if they last longer than the call duration that you specify. Call extensions also make you adverts stand out and encourage those fingers to click.

Promotion extensions

A promotion extension allows you to highlight special offers or deals , and it displays below your ad.

There are 4 types of promotion extensions: monetary discount, percentage discount, up to monetary discount, and up to percentage discount.

It can be for promotions for a specific period, for example this ad is for up to 50% discount running over the Easter holiday:

Or they can be to highlight monetary discount, and will have a distinctive tag to feature the deal:

Price extensions

Price extensions provide additional links in your advertisement that will take users directly to a specific product page. 

Price extensions can be used to display different pricing tiers (see example below) or different levels of service offering.

Including price extensions improves your Quality Score, and also will improve your click through rate by making the information users require quickly and easily accessible.

Other ad extension types

There are many other extensions types including callout extensions, lead form extensions, location extensions and app extensions. Depending on your advertising objectives, these will all help to increase the number of people clicking on your ads.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7450050?hl=en#zippy=%2Cgoals-for-search-campaigns%2Cgoals-for-display-campaigns