Keywords are No Longer the Most Important Building Block for Successful Google Ads

Over the last 13 years, I have worked with hundreds of advertisers on their digital campaigns. Up until two years ago, if someone asked me about the essential thing that makes Google Ads campaigns run well, I would have said: choose the right keywords, as those determine when and to whom your ads show. That has now changed: today, it is conversion tracking.

Automation and machine learning plays an ever-increasing role, and a successful Google Ads campaign is a flywheel. If you generate good results, Google understands what you want and deploys its algorithmic magic to give you more of the same.

So when you create your Google Ads strategy, you no longer start by brainstorming keywords. You think about the results you want to achieve, how you can track them and how you generate enough data to feed the optimization algorithms.

What is a conversion? We decide that ourselves! A conversion is typically the customer action we want our campaigns to achieve: a purchase in our online shop, a subscription to our platform, etc. But it can also be a download, a completed contact form, a visit to a specific page on your website, an add an item in the shopping cart, or even just reaching a certain number of pageviews while surfing your website.

It’s best to measure as many relevant actions as possible to analyze them if you want and optimize for the result that is as valuable for you as possible (a sale is more valuable than an add-to-cart click or a signup) but that still generates sufficient data points. We need at least 15 per month, but the more, the better (30 is a better number).

This is how you start your ads flywheel.