Ready to skyrocket your campaign performance? Discover how to lay the perfect data foundation for effective value-based bidding.
Why the Right Data Matters More Than Ever
Your bidding success hinges on quality data. Value-based bidding is only as powerful as the data you feed it. It’s not just about having data—it’s about having the right data.
In last week’s article of this value-based bidding series, we explored how to determine if this strategy aligns with your business goals. Now, we’re diving into the essential steps to ensure your data foundation is primed for success in this second video of our series.
Set Clear Goals for Google’s AI
Without clear goals, even the smartest AI can’t hit the target. Once your data foundation is established, it’s crucial to tell Google exactly what your objectives are.
It might seem daunting at first, but with a few strategic steps, you can make your value-based bidding campaigns operate at peak efficiency.
Step 1: Tighten Up Your Tracking
Precision tracking is the heartbeat of your data strategy. Ensure your Google Tag or Google Tag Manager is properly installed and configured across your website.
This snippet of code measures crucial user interactions, particularly those vital lead form submissions that will serve as your initial conversion actions.
Don’t let offline interactions slip through the cracks. Not all valuable customer interactions happen online.
Phone calls and other offline conversion events are often just as significant in your lead generation efforts. Each stage of the offline sales cycle—lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, closed deal, etc.—holds specific value for your business.
Sharing this offline conversion event data back into your campaigns enhances your value-based bidding strategy to find more of the conversions you value most.
Enhanced Conversions for Leads
Take your offline data to the next level. The most durable method for sharing offline sales conversion data is enhanced conversions for leads.
This allows you to attribute offline conversions back to your Google Ads campaigns. When a user submits a form on your site, it sends back hashed lead information you specify, such as an email address.
You then store that lead in your CRM or database, and when that lead converts or completes a further action, you upload that hashed lead information for Google to match it back to the ad that drove the lead (auto-tagging is required).
If you’re currently using offline conversion import (OCI) to bring in your offline data, we recommend transitioning to enhanced conversions for leads for several reasons: it’s privacy-safe, provides more accurate measurement, supports cross-device and engaged-view conversions, and is easier to implement since you don’t need to modify your lead forms or CRM systems to receive a GCLID.
You can implement enhanced conversions for leads using the Google tag or with Google Tag Manager—more on making this switch here.
Google Ads Data Manager
Centralize your data like a pro. Google Ads Data Manager is designed to simplify importing and activating your offline conversion and first-party data in one central location.
You’ll find “Data manager” under the Tools icon in your Google Ads account. This is where you can connect your first-party data sources, such as BigQuery, Google Cloud, HTTPS, HubSpot, Snowflake, Google Sheets, and more via a direct partner connection or Zapier.
Note, if you don’t see your preferred data source listed among the featured products, be sure to click “Search all” to find more options.
Configure your data sources to ensure that all your conversion data, regardless of origin, is feeding into Google’s AI. You can also access and configure your Google tag from Data Manager.
Step 3: Use Data-Driven Attribution
See the full picture of your customer journey. As you know, the customer journey is rarely linear.
People might visit your website multiple times from various sources and interact with your brand on multiple channels before finally converting.
A data-driven attribution model takes all these touchpoints into account, assigning credit to each interaction based on its actual contribution to the conversion.
It looks at conversions from your website and Google Analytics from Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Demand Gen ads, determining which keywords, ads, and campaigns have the most impact on your goals.
The benefit of this approach, especially when using value-based bidding strategies, is that it gives Google’s AI a more nuanced understanding of what’s driving results than a last-click or other static attribution model.
This means the system can make better-informed decisions about where and how to allocate your ad spend to find more conversion value based on your goals.
Setting the Right Goals
Aim small, miss small—set precise goals for maximum impact. Now that you’ve got the right data flowing in, it’s time to tell Google’s AI what to focus on.
While you can—and should—track a variety of actions within Google Ads, when it comes to bid optimization, it’s important to choose a single, primary goal and focus on one specific stage of the customer journey.
Ideally, your primary goal should be the action closest to the end of the customer journey where you have sufficient conversion volume.
Ensure this action occurs at least 15 times per month at the account level so that Google’s AI has enough data to work with. Additionally, the shorter the conversion delay (the time between an ad click and the conversion), the better.
That doesn’t mean that if you have a long sales cycle and relatively low closed-deal conversion volume you can’t use value-based bidding. You’ll just need to look at other actions your potential customers take that have more volume and a shorter conversion delay. This could be a lead form submission, a product demo request, a free trial sign-up, etc.
Keep the Data Fresh
Fresh data fuels smarter decisions. Lastly, make sure to upload your conversion data to Google Ads frequently, preferably on a daily basis.
This ensures that Google AI always has the most up-to-date information, allowing it to make the most accurate predictions and optimizations.
Again, you can upload this data by connecting your sources in Data Manager or the Google Ads API.
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