Introduction to the Set Goal Values wizards
While many of the recommendations generated by the ActEngine involve best practices that can improve your search marketing campaigns, our most detailed actions and alerts are customized to your business goals. In order to generate these recommendations, we need to learn more about the strategy behind each of your accounts. You give us this information by using the Set Goal Values wizards.
There are three places where you can set goal values:
1. The Set Goal Values (Account) wizard in the Manage Account section, which sets a default goal value for all campaigns in a given account.
2. The individual Set Goal Values (Campaign) wizard in the Manage Campaign section.
3. The Set Goal Values (All Campaigns) wizard, which allows you to set individual goal values for every campaign in your account from a single place.
Selecting a Goal Type
After you launch the Set Goal Values (Account) wizard for the first time, you need to select the type of goal you want to optimize for. The two options are Cost Per Conversion (CPA) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). CPA goals are appropriate if you are trying to direct users to a particular page on your site, get them to sign-up for a newsletter or another form, collect a lead, or sell a fixed-value item. ROAS goals are appropriate if you make sales on an eCommerce-style site.
Whichever goal type you choose, the Set Goal Values wizard suggests a value based on recent account performance. However, more information about CPA and ROAS is available below.
Setting CPA Goals
When you set a CPA goal, the question you need to answer is, "How much am I willing to spend for each conversion?" There are numerous ways to set this value, but the industry standard is the following equation:
For instance, let's say that you're trying to generate leads by having visitors to your site fill out a basic information form. If you are comfortable spending $500 on a search marketing campaign that generates 100 leads, the amount you are paying for each Visitor Action is $5.
Using this calculation, you can determine a value that makes sense for your business. You can also implement the wizard's suggested value, which will be based on your account's recent performance.
Setting ROAS Goals
If you have monetary transactions on your site, you can set a Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, which represents the profit generated by ad campaign conversions per dollar spent on advertising expenses. Your ROAS is calculated by dividing advertising-driven profit by ad spending. If, for example, you want to make $1 for every dollar that you spend on advertising, your ROAS is 1. Or, if you want to make $3 for every dollar that you spend, your ROAS is 3.
When you enter your ROAS goal, be sure to enter a multiple rather than a percentage. So if you want a 300% return on your ad spend, enter "3" rather than "300." (Entering “300” would mean that you wanted a 30,000% return on ad spend - not a very realistic goal.)
As with CPA goals, the Set Goal Values (Account) wizard suggests a value based on your account's recent performance.
Implementing Dynamic Conversion Tracking
In order to set an ROAS goal, you need to track revenues from your Web site using conversion tracking. If the value of the transactions on your site depends on what visitors purchase, you will need to set up your site to pass the value of these transactions to your conversion tracking tool. On the page that displays the conversion value for a particular user (usually the confirmation page following a purchase) you need to pass the variable with the transaction amount (Total_cost or SaleValue, etc.) to the conversion value field.