Building out an extensive paid media campaign that converts can require lots of strategy, time, and adjustments. Whether you’re investing in Google Search Ads, Google Display Ads, or even Facebook or Instagram Ads, furthering your business goals with paid media can be intimidating if you’re not working with paid media experts. However, what can be more intimidating than building ad campaigns from scratch? Giving an existing ad campaign an overhaul due to changes in market behavior or poor overall performance can be just as daunting.
At some point, all ads have to be adjusted and reoptimized in order to maximize their performance. It’s only a matter of time before existing ad copy, images, and strategies become stale and less effective than they were before. Wouldn’t you rather make informed decisions surrounding your paid media adjustments rather than succumb to behavioral changes in your industry? If so, know that these adjustments require comprehensive data analysis, strategic targeting efforts, and a clear picture of your marketing objectives.
Evaluate Key Performance Metrics
Before you can improve your campaign’s performance, you must have a clear perspective on its performance up to the current date. To gain this perspective, it’s essential to get a thorough read on the key metrics that put a campaign’s health and efficiency on display. To start, visit your ad platform’s Campaign Dashboard and look over the metrics associated with each ad group and individual ad you have running. Consider the important metrics such as impressions, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, cost per acquisition [conversion] (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS) to determine how well ads are performing and why. Once you get a gauge on these metrics, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are the status of these different KPIs poor, satisfactory, or superb?
- Which of these metrics are most important to me and my business?
- What are my priorities here? Maximizing my conversions or spending my ad budget efficiently?
- How can I improve the metrics that are most important to me and my business?
Once you’ve determined the answer to these questions, you can move forward with ad adjustment further your objectives and the metrics you want to maximize. You can also adjust your bidding strategies, as well, to enhance your advertising efficiency. If you want to maximize impressions with your ad spend, there are bidding strategies gears towards that outcome. If you want to maximize site conversions with your ad spend, there are other bidding strategies which are effective in that arena. Do research and look over metrics if you have to, but don’t change your paid advertising approach blindly without first assessing your current status. Take the safe route by determining your specific goals, assessing your current performance, comparing performance measures with your vision for the campaigns, and adjust your ads and bidding strategies according to the insights you’ve gathered.
Look Over Audience Targeting Efforts
Understanding which audience that you are targeting is of the utmost importance to any marketing campaign, especially if you’re investing hard earned money into every impression, click, or conversion. Without knowing the traits about your audience that allow them to connect with your messaging, your business can’t efficiently reach them where they’re at or provide them with solutions for their problems.
Note that the characteristics that make your company’s target audience unique can often be broken down on multiple levels. First, there are demographic traits, such as age, gender, and household income, that can give you insight into the audience’s needs and perspectives. These types of details can be distilled and understood quickly using your website’s Google Analytics reports. Also, there are also psychographic details such as attitudes, interests, personality, values, opinions, and lifestyle that influence a users receptiveness to your ads. Some of these indicators, such as interests, can be found in Google Analytics. However, many of these details are qualitative. Deeper research will be needed to get to the bottom of these characteristics.
To go below the surface and learn about your target audience’s collective mindset, consider doing some in-depth keyword research in your industry and region using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush. These tools and the prominent keywords they provide can give you insight into the things that make your target audience tick. The keywords that you find that perform well in your space can also reveal semantic nuances that indicate which topics and ideas users have on their minds when searching for solutions online. Qualitative information like this can help you improve your ads and their click-through rates drastically.
Consider Conversion Rate Optimization
It’s possible to set up an ad campaign that maximizes clicks to your site without getting any closer to your business goals. This is because a cohesive conversion path is essential to the process of driving actions on your website. Imagine being a Google user and coming across an advertisement that convinced you to click through to a landing page. What was it that made you click the ad? It was likely of an appealing promise that the ad made that encouraged this action. Now, imagine that the landing page you arrive at is completely irrelevant and unrelated to the ad you saw previously. Wouldn’t that turn you off from opting into some email newsletter or purchasing some product? Of course it would.
To keep this from happening to users visiting your site, sift through each and every ad you have currently running. For each ad, ask yourself if the ad’s landing page gets users closer to actualizing the promises detailed in the ad itself. Determine whether the landing pages and ads are complementary to each other or unrelated to each other. Ask yourself if the landing page URL attached to each ad effectively references the content that the landing page features. Protect your ad spend and potential customers by knowing where your ads and landing pages stand as far as compatibility.
Contact Geek Powered Studios for Paid Media Management Services
Your business’s management of paid media campaigns could potentially get tricky if you lean exclusively on your in-house team. They often have a wide range of marketing tasks on their plate, so applying expert level paid media practices requires lots of time and self-education. Our paid media management team at Geek Powered Studios is equipped with the background and knowledge to take your paid media campaign to the next level. We’re communicative, responsive, and data-driven, and we’ll even integrate directly into your existing team framework by joining you on Slack and collaborating with your marketing personnel. Don’t settle for average paid media performance. Let the paid media experts at Geek Powered Studios take your campaign to the next level!