Marketers can produce a better return from their PPC investments by incorporating first party data across campaigns.
Using information gathered from analytics platforms, subscriptions, sales data, incoming call data and resource downloads, PPC marketers can make more informed decisions when it comes to campaigns. These decisions can, in turn, generate improved returns from PPC.
What do I need to do?
Firstly, you will need to combine all the data from different sources. This is a big task, but one that is worth its weight in gold. First party data is spread across multiple CRM systems, email platforms and paper spreadsheets, and is often duplicated and outdated.
Use Google Analytics to integrate with other first party data sources and then manually enter additional data pulled from your CRM into Google Analytics using the measurement protocol, including actual sale value of conversions passed to CRM, CRM opportunities created and sales conversion rate (this information is not collected by Google Analytics). Alternatively, search for “your CRM + Google Analytics connector” to find a tool to speed up the process and ensure accuracy.
The next step is to link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts, which will then pull these conversions into Google Ads and can help to optimise campaigns.
How does this work?
Influence bidding strategies
You can use first party data to influence bidding strategies by using Google’s conversion-based bid strategies under their smart bidding umbrella. This smart bidding involves analysing millions of bidding signals. Available smart bidding strategies in Google Ads include Target ROAS, Target CPA Bidding and Max Conversions and Max Conversion Value.
Improve budget efficiency
Use Google Analytics’ data on user behaviour to optimise the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) let you customise Google Ads search network campaigns to target users who have completed a specific action on your site.
Expand your audience
Target customers or prospects using Google Customer Match, which imports customer email lists into Google Ads. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn also have this functionality. As well as targeting users who are already familiar with your brand, you can build targeting lists of users who display similar characteristics as the customers on the uploaded list.
In conclusion, the integration of first party data between CRM and web analytics platforms means more accurate data to use in PPC campaigns and better results and reporting.