3 Skills Every Digital Ads Marketer Should Learn
Reading Time: ~5 Mins
There are so many ways to shuck a clam in the digital ads world today, and many marketers will tell you what’s the right way and wrong way to run your paid digital ads campaigns.
The truth is, the way that’s right is the way that produces the desired results for you and your business. I know what you’re thinking: “how does that help me when there’s so much information out there?”.
But what we are going to talk about now are methods you can use to best determine if your ads are knocking it out of the park, or still sitting on the bench.
Establish A Realistic Benchmark For Your Business Industry
Publicly Available Industry KPI Benchmark Averages
You can pump as much money as you want into your paid ads campaigns, and watch the numbers go up and down, week to week, or month to month without truly understanding where you stand in the grand scheme of things.
Here are some excellent resources published by Wordstream.com that shed some light on the average KPI’s businesses like yours care about and measure every reporting period:
Compare Your Own Past Data To Current Data For Growth Analysis
BUT, looking at the average data of other people’s businesses is not the full picture of how your business is doing in the digital paid ads world.
Benchmarking against other businesses tells us how well our ads may be doing as a snapshot in time, relative to other competitors. But to fully understand where your business is going with its digital ads, you need to compare your own past data performance with current performance to understand where your ads are headed. Here are some good comparison periods to try:
Last 2 weeks vs. 2 weeks prior
Best used for testing ad creative, while letting the ads “soak” and collect enough response data
Last month vs. month prior
Best used for general reporting for financial and overall performance reasons
Last 3 months vs. 3 months prior
Best used for deciding whether or not to scale up or down with a given ads platform (ie. Google Search vs. Facebook) as it uses a bigger picture of data
Use Data To Understand Your Target Audience
There’s times to trust your gut, and there’s times to trust the evidence before you. In marketing, the same holds true, especially when we want to understand who’s clicking and converting on our ads.
There is often a discrepancy between who we want to click on our ads, and who is actually clicking on our ads. It’s our job as marketers to go where the results are and cater to audiences that will get the biggest benefit from our product or service!
Here are some useful tools we can use to observe who our most effective users are:
Google Analytics Audience Overview
Look at Demographics, Geographics, and Interests (important!) of the users who are landing on your site with paid and/or organic ad methods (Use Segments to separate or combine the two)
Google Ads Audience Demographics/Insights
Understand the basic demographic conversion data of your ads in the “Audiences” tab on the left-hand navigation bar when clicking on a campaign/ad group/ ad
Use the Audience Manager tool to get “Your data insights” from existing audience sources you have provided already, observing both In-Market and Affinity Segments (you need at least 1,000 users in a given audience to use this feature)
Facebook Ads Campaign Demographics Charts
Use the “View Charts” feature to observe Age and Gender distributions, segmenting by “Results”
Use the largest date ranges available to get the most accurate picture of who is clicking and converting on your ads! How do we use this information we just learned? Prudent marketers will use this audience data to influence future paid and organic content design to reproduce content that generates results.
Learn How To Scale Up And Down Ads Campaigns
We spend our hard-earned money on paid digital advertising in order to invest in our business and growth from our efforts.
Sometimes, we spend that money on campaigns that aren’t producing results as efficiently as they could be. Other times, we may overlook campaigns that are producing results efficiently in ways that could improve our business overall! Here are some ways to get the most out of your ad dollars spent:
Which KPI’s Should I Be Looking At?
It’s important to understand which KPI’s we want to use to determine what an “efficient” campaign is.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
In terms of generating traffic, we want to look at Click-Through-Rate (CTR) to determine how efficient a campaign is at generating traffic. This is defined as the number of Clicks divided by the number of Impressions the ad received, expressed as a percentage.
This will give us insights into the quality of our ad design and placement, and how effective it is at getting users to click on our ads. Use benchmark data and your own growth data to determine where you stand, where you were before, and where you’re headed.
Conversion Rate (CR)
For measuring Conversion results, we use Conversion Rate (CR). It’s defined as the number of Conversions an ad receives divided by the number of Clicks expressed as a percentage.
This is a KPI that measures how efficient a campaign is at securing results. This will give us more insight into our UVP (Unique Value Proposition), how well our landing page and overall conversion experience is for our users. Refer to benchmark data and your own growth data to understand where you stand.
Cost Per Action (CPA)
This KPI tells us how much it costs (in ad spend) to generate a result in terms of money. Ads can be expensive, and we want to make sure we are spending our money where it will fly the furthest.
An “action” is any conversion we are measuring for a given campaign. CPA is defined as the total Ad spend divided by the total number of Conversions (actions completed). For example, if we are running a campaign that generated 128 leads, and it cost $3,250 in ad spend, our CPA would be $25.39.
It is recommended to spend more money on ads campaigns that are generating more cost-efficient results. Again, use benchmark and growth data to determine what a good CPA is, and a target CPA you want to reach.
Observing these KPI’s, you will be better equipped to understand which campaigns will allow your ad dollars to fly further, generate more results for your business, and which campaigns or ad platforms deserve more of your hard-earned cash.
Written by Simon Frackiewicz
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