Paid ads require a watchful eye to optimize spending and ensure the best results. See how to get the most from your paid ad campaigns.
Paid ads can help generate leads and new business for your organization. However, it requires careful attention and frequent optimization to see the greatest ROI possible and ensure you’re getting the results you’re hoping for. See more about how to improve your budget management for paid ads.
Taking time to make sure you’re reaching the right audience and generating true business results is important. Sometimes, advertisers just get caught up on initial metrics of click-through rates and impressions. But the far more important metrics are conversions and new business.
Manage your budget through paid ad optimization using these key tactics.
Exceed your advertising goals with strategic paid ad budgeting and optimization. Here are several activities you should be engaging in.
It’s challenging to know how successful you really were in your campaign if you don’t take the time to outline your goals before launching a campaign. Some metrics you might include in your strategy outline include:
Review standards for your industry to set realistic goals. But also take time to know what the ROI for a purchase is. That way, you know what you can afford to spend on attracting new customers. This will give you realistic goals that you can sustain long-term with your paid ads campaigns.
Paid ads are a great source of data for your business. You can A/B test messages to learn more about your target audience and what resonates best with them. However having a strong starting point will make your paid ad data and outcomes better.
Take some time to review important metrics before building out your campaigns.
Depending on the complexity of your products and services and how different your audience segments are, you might consider various ad sets for different target audiences.
Certainly, each product or service you’re selling should have its own ad set. That way, you can tout the product’s primary benefits and speak to the unique pain points customers face related to that product or service.
Audience segments often have different motivators and reasons to believe in various products or services. Take time to write unique copy that will speak to these motivating factors.
The cost per click can vary greatly across various platforms and even on differing keywords. You can choose how much to bid on a sponsored search or social media.
Ultimately, you’ll need to outbid your competitors but try to keep that amount low enough to where you can see a strong ROI from your ads.
If you’re planning a paid search ad campaign, you should look for high-volume search terms with low competition. That way, you pay less for every click but you’ll still see strong traffic from the ads.
Long-tail keywords often offer some of the best value because they are high volume but with minimal competition. A long-tail keyword is generally characterized as a phrase of four words or more. They are more specific than a keyword.
An example would be the term “paid ad” versus “how to improve ROI on paid ads?” The second search term is far more specific and has a much smaller search volume compared to the broad term. But because it is less desirable, there is less competition for the long-tail keyword posed as a question.
Paid ads can lose their effectiveness over time or keywords you’d targeted at one budget become more popular and require budget increases to continue performing at their best.
On social media, the same images or videos can become commonplace to your audience to the point where they just scroll on by without even thinking about your ad.
To spot changes in your paid ads campaigns, you’ll need to review your metrics regularly. For campaigns with big budgets, that could mean checking in daily to remove low-performing keywords or add emerging keywords. For smaller campaigns, you might only have enough data to review the campaign every few weeks or even once a month. It all depends on how heavily you’re leaning on that tactic.
The more paid ads you run, the more you’ll learn what works best for your organization. It can be challenging to pull budget from one platform to add to another, but the reality is, that’s the best way to increase your ROI.
Don’t look at paid ad results individually. Put the data in a spreadsheet alongside other paid ad data to see what’s delivering the best results for your business.
Remember, cost-per-click and total clicks only tell the beginning part of the story. What you should care more about is the cost-per-conversion for an advertising campaign.
If your cost-per-lead is lower on Google Ads than it is for social media ads, pull some budget from social and put it toward Google Ads to build upon your success there.
It’s tempting to feel as though you don’t want to pull social media ad spend because of the brand awareness it might be generating. Brand awareness is far more challenging to measure than new business and leads. And while brand awareness is important, leads and sales are the lifeblood of your business and you should treat them that way.
In most cases, paid ads are just the start of a relationship with a prospect. You need to be asking yourself what comes next long before you hit “start” on a paid campaign.
In e-commerce, the nurture series might be setting up cart abandonment reminders and retargeting ads to remind customers about what they viewed. For companies with complex sales cycles or longer funnels, it might mean developing an email nurture series with several steps to help share content that will assuage a customer’s concerns and demonstrate how you eliminate their pain points.
The process will look different for every business but the concept is the same. You have to think now about the next steps and actions you want your prospects to take and how you’ll guide them through that process through lead nurturing.
A major reason why paid ad campaigns fail or don’t reach their potential is because the marketing team doesn’t have the resources or expertise to devote to optimizing and monitoring the campaign. Or they watch it closely at first until they start seeing results and then allow it to keep running and expect the same results.
The reality is, that paid ads require a careful eye and continuous optimization as long as they are actively running. New Light Digital can handle your paid ads campaign and integrate it with your other digital marketing efforts as you work to find traction with your target audience and maximize your ROI. Schedule your free consultation now to learn more.
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