Google’s formula for navigating economic uncertainty involves “doubling down”

Google’s formula for success requires a balance of doubling down on what’s working, and “placing calculated bets to unlock future growth.” The formula comes directly from Google’s best practices playbook.

1. Directly connect your marketing goals to real business outcomes

To maximize ROI, start with defining the value of different conversions based on what they’re really worth to your business. Setting the right goals helps you point Google Ads to place the right bids so you can get the most out of your campaign budgets.

Revisit your success metrics regularly to identify the most important conversions and drive the best performance possible.

2. Lay the measurement foundation that enables better performance

Google recommends three steps to unlock more accurate, privacy-centric measurements as third-party cookies and other identifiers are phased out:

1. Measure impact while preserving user trust: Set up sitewide tagging with the Google tag, and supplement it with enhanced conversions to collect consented, user-provided data. Rely on conversion modeling to learn from your first-party data and fill in conversion gaps when observable data isn’t available.
2. Understand what’s driving performance: Make better bidding decisions across channels by switching to data-driven attribution so you can assign conversion credit to multiple touchpoints that are the most incremental.
3. Get more actionable insights: Make sure you upgrade to Google Analytics 4.

3. Capture existing demand now and generate new demand for the future

To help fully optimize your Search campaigns, combine broad match keywords with Smart Bidding and responsive search ads. This helps you unlock incremental sources of conversions and ROI. Then, go beyond Search using Performance Max campaigns to multiply conversions across Google’s full range of advertising channels and inventory.

4. Evaluate and expand what’s working

Watch your optimization score and recommendations to identify ways to improve performance, and automatically apply the recommendations that matter most to your bottom line. Finally, check the Insights page frequently to discover performance and consumer trends that are uniquely customized to your business. 

Dig deeper. You can read the entire playbook here.

Why we care. Though there are some good tips here, make sure you are making the best decisions possible for your own business. Don’t always auto-apply recommendations without reviewing them, and use broad match and smart bidding where necessary.

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About The Author

Nicole Farley is an editor for Search Engine Land covering all things PPC. In addition to being a Marine Corps veteran, she has an extensive background in digital marketing, an MBA and a penchant for true crime, podcasts, travel, and snacks.