Would we even be a legit biz if we didn’t talk about goals (and/or strategy) in January?

If I’m honest I love a bit of reflecting at the beginning of the year as much as the next gal. But for the Google Ads accounts we manage? I have to confess…

I don’t set goals at the beginning of the year.

I set goals when we first take over an account. And I set more goals when we’ve smashed those first goals out of the park. And I tweak goals when things like a pandemic hit. But I don’t muck around with strategy just because it’s the start of a new year.

When I do look at setting goals, here’s the only thing I think about:

  • Are your ads profitable, can they be profitable and how profitable can they be?

That’s really it. No pie charts or powerpoint needed here, thanks very much. Every optimisation we do in an ads account is based on profitability. And business type, because often the approach we take does depend on things such as:

  • Likely search intent (are there lots of different keywords or lots of keywords that group together?)
  • eCommerce v service based
  • Location (how targeted, are there multiple countries etc)
  • Market share (how competitive is your CPC?)

All of this information guides the decisions we make every time we go into an account, whether it’s the beginning of the year or not.

So if you’re looking at what goals your Google Ads account needs, first set a goal that is profitable for you (and obvi within your budget!). And then create your strategy around how you can achieve this. For ecomm biz’s this will be a ROAS target and for service based this’ll be a CPA goal.

Here’s the thing I really want you to understand…

You can (and should) do this at any time of year!

Once you have your goal?

You’ll need to be in your account on the regular, because G-Ads is not the platform where you can set things up and forget about them.

In general, we make small tweaks each week (bid adjustments etc) larger tweaks once a month (ROAS or CPA tweaks if needed) and once a quarter we look to audit and refresh the creative, including ad copy.

If this is something you want help with then do yourself a solid and jump on the waitlist for my signature Google Ads course, next running in May 2022. It’s been over a year since I’ve run the live course and I can’t wait to delve back into it (hopefully with you)!