Does Your Advertising Really Make Sense?
As an entrepreneur, your resources are likely limited. You don’t have the money or the time to invest in marketing ads that don’t work. So, let’s take a look at some tactics you can use to help reduce the amount of time and money you spend on ineffective advertising campaigns.
Today, we are primarily going to focus on pay-per-click campaigns, because they make up such a large proportion of online advertising.
3 basic reasons why is advertising important
Advertising is of course a key component of your business. Getting the word out about your products beyond the traditional word of mouth method will certainly help you to boost your sales. You can also reach many people that you would not be able to otherwise.
Another reason why advertising is important is because it increases your brand awareness. By making people more aware of your brand, they are more comfortable with it and more likely to purchase from you when the time comes.
One of the main advantages of online advertising is the ability to be highly targeted with your ads. On Facebook for example, you can segment by age, country, interests, etc. This helps you to get your advertisements in front of people who are genuinely interested in the products that you have to sell, and can lower your cost per conversion.
How to track the performance of your ads?
Most online advertising platforms have some sort of “ads manager” where you can check in on the status of your campaigns. Facebook, Twitter and Adwords all have these. One of the main metrics you should be watching here are cost per click. How much does it cost you for each click to your website? You can find this in the ads manager of your advertising platform.
On top of this, you will have to check the conversion rate of these visits. There are a couple of ways you can do this. Certain advertising platforms (such as Facebook) will allow you to implement a conversion pixel in order to see how many conversions you get from each ad. This will then allow you to calculate the conversion rate.
The other method is to generate a UTM tag for your landing page. Use the campaign URL builder from Google to ensure that the source of visits to your website is recorded. Just input all the information for the landing page here to generate a trackable URL that you can use in your ads. In addition to this, you will have to create goals in Google Analytics that match the activity you want to track. Once you have these goals created, you will be able to look at the conversion rates of visitors who came from your ads.
Save time and money — do it right
Now that you know how to monitor your ads, how do you go about reducing their cost? Clearly, this involves focusing on your most profitable campaigns where you get the lowest cost per conversion relative to revenue.
It would be great to have all the campaigns in one place and compare them, wouldn’t it? No problem, just find the right tool that allows you to do so, for example MonkeyData — analytics app for online stores.
MonkeyData displays campaigns from all the sources you use in one place. You can see Actions, Impressions, Cost per Action and overall Spent per each campaign. Having these data in one app saves plenty of your time that you can use for more pleasant things than analyzing.
However, how can we hone in on these campaigns and make them even better?
Refine your keywords and targeting. As you learn more about your customer base, narrow down your targeting to people who are genuinely interested in your product. Use the Google Keyword Planner in order to generate new ideas for keywords. Find long-tail keywords that are relevant to your business and have a lower suggested bid so that you can reduce your cost per click. Plug your keywords into the keyword planner to see keyword volumes and suggested bids. There is a great guide halfway down this post on Reddit to generate a list of keywords you can try in the keyword planner. Basically, it involves creating a list of suggested keywords and auxiliary keywords and using a combine function in Excel to create a list of long-tail keywords. Another strategy you can use is to type your competitor’s URL into the relevant field in the keyword planner to generate a list of keyword ideas that you can use.
Optimize your landing pages. Check the click-through rate of each landing page after someone clicks on your ad. Find what works best and replicate that strategy. This will involve a great deal of testing. Experiment with different versions of landing pages to see which has the best click-through rate, and then use that going forward.
Keep yourself organized. If you have advertisements on Twitter, Facebook, Adwords and other sources, it will be difficult to keep track of everything. In order to save time, we suggest using an ecommerce analytics application that will allow you to analyze all your data sources in one place.
Summary
All in all, online advertising is very important for online entrepreneurs. However, it is an area where there is a potential for a lot of waste and you can burn through cash quickly. Because of this, you need to stay focused. Set up the proper tracking and monitor your costs per click and conversion. Keep testing to refine your keywords, targeting and landing pages. Also, use an analytics application to streamline your monitoring process and make things easier on yourself. By doing all these things, you will be able to save substantial amounts of time and money on online advertising.
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Happy Advertising!
