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Our Conversion Obsession Is Misguiding Our PPC Strategy (and Hindering True Brand Growth)

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Let’s hit the elephant in the room.

The ability to track conversions has harmed PPC advertising (I’m just going to lump all channels in Google/Microsoft Ads into this: Video, Display, Native, Search, Email, Discovery, etc) in that it has shifted the stated objectives of PPC campaigns to a conversion mindset rather than a quality traffic generation mindset (Does this mean it's bad to track conversions, nope, you'll have to keep reading).

Geez Kirk, come out of the gate blasting away, why don’t ya??

Well, sometimes you have to rip the band-aid off, and this article is one that will either vilify me with my peers and clients (until they learn I’m right in a few years ;) ) or be another cog in the giant wheel of change that must occur in our industry. 

Here’s what I mean, if you read or hear anyone talk about anything with PPC Advertising objectives, it’s all about conversions. Sales. Leads. Demos. What is the final action you want your audience to take, and how do we optimize for that?

And here’s where it gets tricky, because conversions ARE a necessary part of optimization, but should NOT be the primary determiner of success in an advertising campaign. 

I’ll get into that, but first, where’s this coming from? 

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When Conversion Rate Isn’t Helpful

Well, this is something I’ve stated for years off and on, even including the concept as a chapter in my PPC Ponderings book about when things are a “targeting” problem and when they are a "business" problem. However, two distinct events have occurred in the past week that are pushing me to be more bold in my assertion here.

First, I listened to this podcast episode with the Marketing Operators in which Connor McDonald of Ridge Wallets made the incredibly articulate statement that Conversion Rate (CVR) basically doesn’t matter to him. I was intrigued because I’ve never heard a brand side marketer note this. I happen to agree with him, but I loved how he put it at one point (paraphrased but pretty darn close): “CVR has far more to do with what happens off of your website than on your website.” YES. PREACH. 

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What does he mean by that?

Well, CVR is the percentage of visitors who purchase from you. If CVR gets higher, your revenue rises, but more importantly, your PROFIT rises because you’re not spending more for the same customers. So in some ways, CVR and ROAS are also directly related (tho, not entirely. For instance you could increase AOV without increasing CVR and also see ROAS creep higher… but you get the picture). 

So the point (I believe) Connor is making is that your pricing, product positioning, offer, sales team, stock projections and purchasing, product quality, and a HOST of other things that have nothing to do with the website impact how often a person will purchase from you. I would add advertising targeting to this, by the way. Connor made the point regarding website CRO, but I think that’s inextricably linked to advertising and marketing (and I think Connor would support that). 

The second event that occurred was this morning. I made an offhand comment on LI about client trust in agencies, and one of my agency friends (a well known and respected industry person who shall remain nameless) told me a story about a client who was unhappy with them because they stood up to him and told him their advertising was dialed in, but his sales team was poor performing compared to his competitors’ sales teams (they did a deep dive to determine this!). This client ignored them, so they fired him. 

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This is a common enough story for (good) advertising agencies. A client (or boss, with an in-house team) insists on trying to get his marketing team to solve what is not actually a marketing problem.

Let’s say you are selling socks that target a very specific demographic: people who have ultra large feet! You’ve identified that nobody sells size 20+ socks and so you slip into this hole in the market and offer a great product.

The next thing you want to do is get exposure, so you ask your PPC team to target customers with large feet. Your PPC team is top notch and they do all sorts of cool things, they build custom audiences of people visiting ultra-large feet websites and they specifically target people searching for “size 20 shoes” and “size 20 socks” to get your brand in front of EXACTLY who should be buying your socks. 

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The Hidden Truth: Sometimes It’s a Business Problem

You begin to advertise and realize that you have a very low conversion rate, and your ROAS is far lower than you expected… so what do you do? Well, what typically happens is for the advertising to be analyzed… and this is a good first step! You should absolutely be asking yourself “are we targeting the right people” and should investigate that.

But then what? 

If you are targeting the right audience but they are not purchasing from you, then this is no longer a marketing problem… it is a business problem.

I’ve said that before, almost word for word, but it’s really really important to grasp, because no matter how much you try to optimize your Conversion KPIs, you cannot actually grow your brand if you are asking marketing to solve something it cannot solve. 

So here it is again: 

If you are targeting the right audience but they are not purchasing from you, then this is no longer a marketing problem… it is a business problem. 

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In this case, focusing on this as a marketing or targeting problem is actually shifting your resources and mental energy away from solving the actual problem.

What is the ACTUAL problem here if you are targeting people who are literally telling you “we are your target audience, we want to buy large socks” but then they do not buy YOUR large socks? 

Time for a customer survey! Or better yet, time for some sort of survey from people who are NOT buying from you. 

But that’s neither here nor there with PPC, so let’s get back to the point of this article… where does all of this preamble lead us?

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Traffic Quality Should Be the North Star Metric for Your PPC Campaigns

When sales are your primary KPI for determining if your advertising or marketing is working you are asking advertising and marketing to solve something it cannot. 

We actually have this baked into our contracts, that the objective of our advertising is to send high quality traffic and that we cannot guarantee sales. But what too often happens in 2025 PPC is brands have specific conversion KPIs they need to hit, and if a great agency focused on sending high quality traffic doesn’t hit those KPIs, they fire the great agency in search of someone who can hit their conversion KPIs… and in doing so, often actually damage themselves by asking the wrong questions (and getting rid of a solid team who could actually help them do what they want: send the best traffic to your website who is most likely to be your target audience / customer).

Hopefully I have demonstrated above, that conversion KPIs as the primary metric of success is not aiming your resources at the correct target, which can harm your business. But does this mean conversion KPIs are pointless?

Absolutely not. Conversion KPIs and tracking are ESSENTIAL for optimizing ad campaigns to your ideal audience. But that’s exactly the point, conversion KPIs are for optimization, they are not your objective. Your marketing / advertising objective should be to find the highest quality traffic on this ad platform… and your KPIs should reflect that. 

Okay, but hold on, what about the economics of an ad platform? I mean surely it’s not just about audience quality, but also whether the particular cost of a platform can work for your business. 

This is an important question, and one I’m still pondering myself. We definitely see certain times where more established brands who either have their product math figured out, or have big enough budgets to spread things out across a variety of auctions so they don’t have to be profitable in every auction (and thus arbitrarily drive up auction prices). This can make it more difficult, at least in paid search and shopping, for a smaller brand to break into an established industry. 

But here again, is where I ponder what can be done here on the brand/business side. At some level, your auction costs are your auction costs. So if your target market is dialed in, but the average CPCs (which thus impacts your ROAS if your CVR isn’t high enough) are too high, then perhaps the solution is to rethink your offer. What can be done with bundles, or multipacks, or other business aspects that can help to increase your CVR so that even the higher auction costs can still work with your unit economics? Here’s where I admit to ignorance here (go follow someone like Kevin Hillstrom or Dave Rekuc or listen to the Finance Operators podcast) to help you here.

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A Better Way to Measure PPC Success

So what’s the solution here? What KPIs should we be aiming at in our PPC campaigns? 

Gosh you’re going to hate me, because I am still trying to figure it out myself and don’t have an easy answer. In fact, arguably an old-school, pre-internet marketer may be best for answering this question. 

That being said, based on ALL of what I’ve written above, I think somehow determining success in these two categories will help you have confidence in your marketing being as optimized as possible: 

1. Audience quality - we’ve discussed this ad nauseum, but it really is as simple as: “if your target audience is coming to your site and not converting, then you need to solve that within your business, it’s not a marketing problem”. Marketing has in this case, done it’s job… and the KPIs should reflect that. So how does one determine audience quality and what KPIs *should* be a target… let’s group think this together! What do you think? 

2. Auction Economics - keep an eye on if the math of your advertising can work with your current margin and unit economics. If it can’t, then what can be done to solve this on the product or business side? Sometimes this can be an advertising issue of course (I never said this job was easy, lol). For instance, we’ve seen certain times when the campaign smart bidding can get too aggressive and bid higher for auctions without seeing corresponding growth in sales. In that case, a good advertiser will identify and work to optimize to the ideal bidding model for a campaign. There is always some level of skill and art involved in advertising. But at the end of the day, you need to be able to identify how to determine whether your bidding/advertising is improperly optimized, or if these are just expected auction costs and you need to determine how to play within this advertising space if you so choose. Sometimes, it’s just math… and then figuring out how to beat that math with clever sales techniques. 

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But that’s the point of all of this, your advertising can only take you so far… and I think setting hard conversion KPIs as your objectives is setting up your advertising for failure, because it is literally not what your advertising is capable of accomplishing on its own. 

The only thing advertising can do is to “find and send a quality audience at the most efficient cost possible without losing audience quality”. So, if you want your advertising to be successful, figure out how to set KPIs that tell you THAT, and then you can begin to solve the right problems in the right places. 

Cause honestly, maybe your sales team just really sucks. 

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