Defining goals for your lead generation PPC strategy

- [Instructor] How will you define success for your campaigns? That's what every marketer must decide, and the answer may vary from campaign to campaign. In order to understand whether or not a campaign served its purpose, we must first define what that purpose is. There are a few common goals that lead gen marketers often use. The first step is defining the primary action in which we want prospects to take. Most commonly, lead generation in and of itself is a goal. Advertisers must decide, though, if there's a specific type of lead that they are trying to achieve. For instance, there are sales-ready leads, which are folks who have requested a demo or reached out to sales. Then there are higher funnel leads, which have maybe downloaded a piece of content, but might not be ready to speak to sales. There are also campaigns that lead generation marketers run with the goal of increasing awareness in order to improve lead generation further in the funnel. For those campaigns, the goal might be to build an audience. Advertisers can set their goals based upon the performance of the audience that that campaign feeds into. The second decision here is more specific to priorities. Is the priority to drive as many of these priority action items as possible, or is the goal to deliver the highest cost efficiency possible, or is it a mix? For instance, you could say, I want to drive as many sales-ready leads as possible, as long as they are coming in for less than $75 each. In order to define your goals, I would suggest looking at closed rates from other channels, meaning that you should take a look at what percentage of leads are converting to sales. Then use that to back into the number of leads needed in order to get to a sale on average understanding that PPC may perform slightly better or slightly worse. Then use that to determine how many leads you need in order to hit your sales goal. If you need a thousand sales, and it takes 10 leads to generate a sale, then you need 10,000 leads. That's an easy calculation when the numbers are easy and round, but trickier when they're not. An easy way to calculate this is to take the number of sales that you need, and then divide it by your close rate or the percentage of leads that turn into sales, which will then tell you how many leads that you need. From there, you'll want to calculate how much you can afford to spend per lead in order to be profitable. If you can afford to pay $1,000 per sale, and you know it takes 10 leads to generate a sale, then you can afford to pay $100 per lead. You can calculate this by multiplying the amount you can afford to pay per sale by the number of sales needed divided by the number of leads that you need in order to hit that sales goal. That will give you the price that you can afford to pay per lead. In short, to set your goals, you must first choose the primary action that you want prospects to take, determine the parameters that are most important, then use those pieces of information to define your goal KPI.