- Importance of ad campaign optimisation for marketers
- Ad campaign optimisation hacks every business should utilise
- Create campaigns that correlate to the buyer journey
- Utilising centralise product catalogues when optimising ad campaigns
In this highly competitive digital age, it’s become increasingly crucial for businesses to create the best advertising campaigns to reach potential customers.
However, creating the best ad campaigns cannot rely on the content alone. To boost your reach and convert your audience into clients, you’ll need to make sure your ads are correctly optimised for them to be effective.
What is ad campaign optimisation?
Ad campaign optimisation refers to a process whereby the marketer takes steps to improve the performance of your ad and maximise your reach by:
- Understanding and targeting the relevant audience
- Increasing the click-through rate (CTR)
- Personalising the content
- Re-evaluating searcher intent
- Reducing the cost-per-click (CPR) of a keyword
The most successful ad campaigns are customer-focused, not brand or product-centric. Prioritise offering value to the customer, which will attract more users and increase their chances of progressing down the funnel and purchasing a product or service.
We will delve into a few hacks that you could utilise to scale your campaigns and boost traffic to your site.
Ad campaign optimisation hacks
Marketers need to “stay on the ball” in this rapidly transforming digital landscape if they want their ad campaigns to remain relevant to users, especially as advertising platforms are constantly changing their algorithms to improve user and search experience.
While algorithms might seem simple and relatively harmless, as they are constantly changing, marketers who don’t understand them or know how they work could find themselves struggling.
Here are several ad optimisation techniques you should take advantage of to help boost your bottom line.
Market on multiple channels
In today’s digital epoch, clients can engage with brands across several different platforms, meaning that they could initially interact with your business on social media, continue on the Internet site and finish in a mobile app.
Displaying your ads on multiple channels will create a cohesive, integrated strategy and increase the chances of conversion.
Promoting the same or similar message to your audience across multiple channels helps build brand awareness and drive new demand for your product or service as you’re able to reach a broader market.
Multichannel ad campaigns combine different distribution and promotional channels into a single, unified customer acquisition strategy.
The benefits of adopting a multichannel strategy for your ad campaigns include:
- Time-saving and cost-efficient as it repurposes the same message across different channels
- Providing customers with a seamless experience when they move between channels
- Increasing your audience reach
When done effectively, multichannel ad optimisation is one of the most powerful strategies for promoting your business.
It makes it easy for people to recognise your brand when they see your ads on different platforms.
How to create and optimise multichannel ad campaigns
The key here is understanding your target audience and the channels that they frequent.
When creating your campaign, make sure you:
- Set goals
- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how effectively you’re achieving business objectives
- Optimise messaging for each platform
- Use analytical tools such as Google Analytics to track user visits and web performance
Although multichannel campaigns require a considerable amount of work, they can place your business well ahead of competitors if executed effectively.
Track campaigns to gain insights into how to optimise
When optimising your ad campaigns, you need to ensure benchmarks are in place to allow you to judge the efficacy of your paid marketing campaigns.
Develop a strategy for tracking and measuring the performance of your campaigns by using marketing tools such as Google Analytics to gain real-time insight.
Why is tracking campaign performance important?
Tracking and measuring your ad campaigns performance will help you:
- Find the most productive keywords as you can use the search terms report to see how closely the search terms on Google relate to the keywords in your ad.
- Discover whether the content you create resonates with your audience. Tracking your campaign performance will allow you to determine what types of media and content are triggering the most engagement and boosting conversions.
- Analyse audience behaviour, which will give you insight into what elements of your campaign are being received well by your target market, and which are not.
- Know how well each of your channels drives traffic to your product or service and which of these you need to dedicate more resources to help with attribution.
However, while reaching your target audience on their preferred channel is vital to running a successful ad campaign, it’s not always easy to execute.
Salesforce has introduced a new feature to facilitate the planning, running and execution of multichannel ad campaigns called Advertising Sales Management (ASM).
The feature allows administrators to automate multichannel ad formats from one platform to help drive revenue by harmonising reporting contrasting data sources. As a result, the complexity of managing and tracking multiple campaigns results is made simpler as optimisation is converged and displayed onto a single dashboard.
ASM also provides marketers with real-time updates and automated alerts to allow teams to optimise content according to relevant trends. As the dashboard shows, when a particular channel is underperforming, you can quickly reallocate remaining resources to that channel to help maximise your return on ad spend (ROAS).
However, avoid optimising your campaigns too frequently as this could hinder your ability to identify long term trends, which you could use to improve future campaigns.
Create campaigns that relate to your buyer’s journey
In today’s digital world, marketers need to understand how audiences interact with different platforms and where they can find their target market at each stage of their journey towards conversion.
Effective ad campaigns are not brand-centric; they should focus on the customer, which is why it’s essential to devise a strategy that reflects your customers journey across different touchpoints and different platforms.
According to a recent study by Forbes on digital transformation and the customer experience, 71% of respondents said they want a consistent experience across all marketing channels. However, less than 25% of participants said they receive this when searching for a product or service.
The steps prospective customers take before converting into customers tend to follow three processes:
Awareness
The first stage is awareness, which refers to the point at which your prospective customer recognises that your product or service could be a solution to their problem.
At the awareness stage, marketers should be producing content that positions the brand as a trusted, credible authority. For example, rather than promoting products, advertise helpful resources such as whitepapers and blogs that will grab your audience’s attention and attract them to your brand.
Consideration
At this stage, your prospect will more than likely compare websites and consider solutions to their problem.
You want to promote ads that deliver value and demonstrate your brand’s ability to solve that problem. It might also be worth running retargeting ads at this stage to engage with prospects who have viewed previous ads. To distinguish buyers in the awareness stage from those in the consideration stage, focus on high-level keywords to target users that are more likely to be converted.
Decision
The final stage of the buyer’s journey is the decision stage, which is the point where the prospect decides which firm is best suited to solve their problem.
Craft ad campaigns that will encourage your prospects to make informed decisions – promotional content, coupons and deals always tend to sweeten the deal for customers during this stage.
When optimising ad campaigns, you must align your strategy with the buyer’s journey, as this will enable you to create more personalised, well-performing campaigns that should ultimately lead to better conversion rates.
Take advantage of media planning strategies
Whether you’re a media planner, marketing manager or entrepreneur, media planning is a powerful way to drive the success of your overall marketing campaigns.
Media planning refers to the process of determining when, where and how often a business should advertise content to its audience to drive engagement and maximise ROAS.
Marketers should not underestimate the benefits of media planning as it forces you to analyse your audience, understand the types of content they are searching for, and identify the best time to display your ads and how to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
If your customers get confused about the product or service you are offering because the media across your platforms are unaligned, this will negatively impact engagement and conversion.
With the right tools, you can easily manage the cohesive flow of your media assets. Salesforce’s ASM is a great tool that marketers should utilise as it boasts a multimedia planning feature, allowing you to plan and manage media assets across the different channels.
Drive demand by creating a centralised product catalogue
Marketers often overlook the importance of keeping a centralised product catalogue (CPC) when optimising their ad campaigns.
A centralised product catalogue is essentially an online database of your products, which can help seize revenue-generating opportunities by increasing the visibility of products that are popular with your audience.
Centralised product catalogues include pricing and descriptions of products, making for a more enjoyable experience for your prospective clients as information is easily accessible and consistent.
How would a centralised product catalogue help with my ad campaigns?
Having a centralised product catalogue is crucial as it allows marketers to see and determine which products they need to feature when optimising ad campaigns and streamlines the creation process.
It’s also helpful if you’re running ads across multiple platforms, as it will enable administrators to link images of products to the most appropriate channels.
To acquire a CPC, you’ll need to source a catalogue service provider such as Syndigo to help you aggregate, enhance, and generate catalogues with product descriptions, images, videos, and other rich media content.
Frequently Asked Questions for optimising ad campaigns
Have you found that the competition is drowning out your ads?
If you want to know how to effectively optimise your ad campaigns to increase your bottom line but are unsure of the right questions to ask, we’ve compiled a list of the most commonly asked questions.
How often should you manage and optimise ad campaigns?
Depending on how much you’re spending on your campaign, you might need to make frequent updates, perhaps even biweekly changes, albeit that is pushing it.
Successful ad campaigns are usually optimised every six months. However, given that the competition is constantly changing and search engines revise features every so often, you might need to make a few tweaks here and there.
Still, if you’ve found that your ad campaign is underperforming, don’t jump the gun. It can take time for your campaign to start seeing success, so be sure to let it run long enough for you to identify long term trends before making too many changes.
What is ad optimisation?
Ad optimisation refers to the process of creating ads targeting a specific audience and using data to perfect those ads and improve the overall performance of your campaign.
What hacks can I use to optimise my ad campaigns?
Some of the best and most effective hacks for ad optimisation include:
- marketing your ads on multiple channels,
- tracking campaigns to gain insight into your audience,
- aligning your ads with the buyer’s journey,
- and utilising media planning strategies to create a seamless experience.
Why should you optimise your ad campaigns?
Optimising your ad campaigns will ensure you’re consciously targeting and attracting the right consumer to your brand. Failing to optimise your ads could reduce the return on your investment (ROI) and limit the effectiveness of your ad.
