A lot more can go wrong than can go right with your ad campaigns. Without proper best practices and ongoing optimizations, you might as well light your ad dollars on fire. We’ve compiled 5 things that we see that can change your ad campaign from hero to zero:
- Weak and/or low mix of ad creative – Paid Media has evolved over the years with the emergence of AI. One thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of great ad creative. In fact, it’s even more important now. We see too often ad accounts not using enough creative and/or unengaging creative. Taking meta ads for example, it’s ideal to have a good mix of 4-6 creatives per each audience. Additionally, it’s ideal to use a diverse mix of video, gif, static and carousel creative. It doesn’t stop there. You need to regularly test headlines, descriptions and call to actions to see what resonates best with your audience. This is #1 for a reason!
- Thinking one landing page is enough – If you’re only driving ads to your home page, you’re not doing it right. Google and other platforms like Meta & Linkedin take into account the relevancy of the page your users land on from ads. If your ad is talking about a specific product, they need to be taken to a page about that specific product, not the home page. It’s not enough to drive ads to various pages either. You need to be regularly a/b testing the layouts and elements of these pages. That’s how you maximize
- Poor audience targeting – While AI has helped make audience targeting more automated, it’s still a crucial part of your paid media strategy. One mistake that is seen most often is too many or too few audiences being tested. It can be different based on a service business vs. e-commerce. Ideally, you want to have an audience or 2 for each stage of the funnel. Meaning your top-of-funnel audience is broad, mid-funnel audience is more narrow based on website, CRM or email lists (retargeting), bottom-funnel audience being your highest intent audience of most likely purchasers. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy but if you think of your audiences in the context of the marketing funnel, you’ll be better equipped to convert more users.
- Improper bidding strategies – Auction-based bidding across platforms is still very relevant. We see all too often accounts bidding too high or too low for certain keywords or objectives. Too high and you’re going to get a lower ROAS, too low and you won’t show up to users at all. Automated bidding is now very much entrenched in all ad accounts today. Our advice would be to lean on automated bidding to maximize clicks, conversions or return on ad spend. Depending on your campaign objective.
- Ignoring data & analytics – If you can’t measure the success of your ads and close your feedback loop, you’re doomed to fail. All too often, we see tracking of ads setup incorrectly or not at all. You need to leverage data analytics tools such as Google Analytics 4, meta pixels, google pixels, etc. to gauge performance and make adjustments. Look at metrics such as click-through-rate (CTR), conversion rate and cost per acquisition. The more reliable data you can leverage, the more impact you’ll start to see.
Reach out to us if you want us to take a peak at your ad accounts. We’re always happy to point things out to help tier up your marketing growth!