Below is your complete guide to campaign goals. If you'd like to skip around, please choose the topic that best describes what you're looking for.
What are goals?
Goal
A goal is a quantifiable, tangible metric that’s used to objectively measure the success of your client’s campaign. While the general goal of a campaign could be to drive leads or increase sales, a campaign goal should be more specific. Examples of quantifiable goals could be a $50 cost per lead, a $200 nCAC (new customer acquisition cost), or a 4x ROAS. If you need help setting a goal for your client that is directly related to their business's bottom line, please head to the 'how to track campaign goals' section in this article.
To properly track goals beyond traffic and reach, Conduit requires Google Tag Manager access as this is where we set up all of the tracking.
The benefits of goals
Setting campaign goals is not only beneficial to the client, it's beneficial to your agency. Clear goals eliminate the guesswork in campaign success by providing:
Alignment: Everyone (agency, client, and ad ops team) knows what success looks like.
Transparency: Clients can see measurable progress toward their business objectives.
Optimized Performance: Campaigns are continuously refined based on performance data.
Data-Driven Decision-Making: Goals highlight what’s working and what needs improvement.
Stronger Client Retention: Agencies that deliver measurable success retain more clients.
If you need further proof, take a look at the image below as an example. This client had a cost per purchase goal of $300. They knew if they maintained this number, the sky was the limit for their media spend. By continually achieving this goal, this account scaled from $280k to over $800k/month.
What kind of goals are acceptable
Our team's preference is to work with you towards tangible goals that impact the client's business. That's why (as you'll see in the next section) if you need help choosing a goal, we'll steer you towards a customer acquisition cost or cost per lead goal.
However, we are fully aware that some clients may not fit exactly within these parameters or you may have pre-determined goals with the clients, so you may absolutely choose to submit your own goals if you desire and we will dedicate our complete focus to achieving them. Here are the goals you'll be able to submit to our team.
Leads (recommended when applicable): Either in the form a quantifiable number or cost per number. For example: 200 leads per month or a $50 cost per lead.
Purchases (recommended when applicable): Either in the form a quantifiable number or cost per number. For example: 100 purchases per month or a $40 cost per purchase.
Revenue: Send us a desired revenue number over a period of time. For example: $13,000,000 in revenue per year generated.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) / MER (Media Efficiency Ratio): Send us your desired ROAS or MER. For example: a 8:1 MER or 4x ROAS.
Website Traffic: Traffic campaigns will focus on generating as much traffic as possible. If you have a desired session or CPC number, we'll work towards achieving that.
Maximum Reach: Reach campaigns will focus on generating the most amount of reach at the lowest cost. If you have a desired impression or CPM number, we'll work towards achieving that.
Other: If the goal of the campaign that was sold to the client does not align with any of the above, please feel free to choose other and provide a quantifiable number and goal for us to achieve.
How to set campaign goals
Setting goals doesn't have to be complex. What the client/business ultimately cares about is if marketing efforts are helping drive bottom-line sales or leads. So if you're able, we highly recommend setting goals based around exactly that.
With that in mind, we've built a calculator to figure out goals based on real metrics from the client's business. The output of that calculator is how we will measure the campaign and is based on the industry of the client/whether the client is focused on leads or sales. Here's what each will look like.
Sales: For e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses, it’s best to measure and focus on nCAC (New Customer Acquisition Cost). When a campaign gets onboarded, we take a baseline of what the stats are currently. The focus is to lower nCAC or keep it at a profitable number for a business (hence the output of the calculator). A secondary metric to look at for e-commerce campaigns is MER (Media Efficiency Ratio, measured as Total Revenue / Ad Spend).
Leads: For leads campaigns, it's best to measure and focus on cost per lead, hence the output of the calculator. As long as closing rates are consistent, this acts as the nCAC for service-based businesses.
This calculator is built directly in the IO and is also available separately for your team to utilize with the client. If you're looking to get a quick, accurate goal based on a client's business, here's how to use the calculator:
Step 1: Determine The Goal
The calculator outputs nCAC for sales-focused clients and CPL for leads-focused clients. To determine which to use, just ask if there is a necessary close step between the client and the sale. Service-based industries that get quotes or have discovery calls and need to follow up to get the sale should focus on acquiring leads. For sales, there should be nothing in between. The customer can just purchase online or in person right then and there.
Step 2: Gather Key Business Information
To determine the right goal, collect the following from your client:
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
CLTV = Total Revenue / Number of Unique Customers
CLTV is the lifetime value of each customer. If you need help calculating this or want more information, check out Step 1 of this article.Net Profit Margin
Use the company's net profit margin for the most accurate number as it accounts for other expenses and overhead. If the client doesn't know theirs, feel free to use an industry average from Google. You may also use the net profit margin from either of these sources (NYU or Full Ratio). Note that we do not vouch for the accuracy of this information.Conversion Rate From Leads to Sales (if service-based)
Step 3: Input the Data into the Goal Calculator
The Goal Calculator will generate realistic, trackable goals based on your client’s business model.
Step 4: That's it!
If you would prefer to manually calculate the client's nCAC, please reference this article.
How to track campaign goals
Once goals are in place, tracking their progress and reporting on them is critical.
Tracking
As noted in this article, we will need access to Google Tag Manager (as well as the client's CRM if applicable) to properly set up and track these goals. Although we will be looking in the client's CRM for the source of truth if given access, we will still need to set these up in our platforms to optimize towards them and feed that data back to our campaigns. That starts with GTM. For more information on why Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics (GA4), and CRM access are necessary to track goals properly, please reference this article.
Reporting
There wouldn't be a point to setting all this up unless it was the main focus of our reports. Once we have everything we need and we're all on the same page, the goal will be the main priority of the campaign and the focus of the report. If the client's goal is how their marketing dollars are impacting their bottom line, our reports will speak to just that.
Performance Dashboard
Our Performance Dashboard provides real-time data to help agencies stay on top of performance. If your client's particular CRM works with Looker Studio, we'll work with you to populate this into our dashboard so we are all looking at the same source of truth for the data. Otherwise, we will default to GA4 and match the events as accurately as possible.
How to measure campaign goals
Overview
We've built our agency around hitting target campaign goals. It's our north star when a campaign kicks off and it's what our entire focus, strategy, and reports revolve around. If you're using our recommended CPL and nCAC goals, you'll see how we measure/calculate them below.
Our Calculations
Cost Per Lead (CPL) = Marketing Spend / Overall Leads
New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC) = Marketing Spend / All New Customers
Why overall leads and new customers and not just those driven from marketing efforts?
Not all marketing efforts have directly attributable leads, but that doesn't mean they didn't play a vital role in driving the lead. The customer journey is getting more and more complex with more and more touchpoints required. So whether a specific channel was directly (last click attribution) or indirectly (the efforts are increasing awareness and overall sales) responsible for the lead is not as important as whether or not they played a role. That's why when we measure cost per lead or new customer acquisition cost, we utilize the entire picture, and not just those driven from last-click attribution.
Is your CPL or nCAC good?
We get asked this next question a lot. “How do we know what a good cost per lead is?” The truth is, that’s a really loaded question. There is no set good cost per lead or sales goals out there. Sure, there are industry averages for conversion rates, CPCs, etc., but every business is different. If a client asks this, know that we are constantly looking at ways to lower the CPL or nCAC, but the most important piece is that the client's business is hitting a profitable number or not. If they are, it's good.