Optimizing your ad spend means getting the best return on investment out of each ad campaign.
And, unfortunately, it isn’t a one-and-done task; it requires consistent analyzing and fine-tuning. In the analysis phase, you’ll find which platforms resonate most for your audiences and receive the highest clicks. You’ll also identify how audiences engage with your advertisements, whether it’s simply an impression or an actual click. Depending on your campaign goals, you can then optimize based on these findings and test other strategies to see what works best.
Are you curious to learn how to optimize your company’s ad spend? You’re in the right place. Below are three tips to reach your audience through advertising while not sacrificing your entire marketing budget.
1. Create Compelling Ad Campaigns
Serving ads for the sake of it won’t get you far. In today’s digital marketing world, you need to create compelling ads. They should draw audiences to them, speaking directly to their wants and needs. They should be splashy, but not necessarily over-the-top as you may come across as gimmicky as opposed to innovative. Most of all, you should remain authentic to your brand. When users come across your ad, they should get a sense of who you are and what the brand stands for.
That’s a lot to ask for an ad that the majority of users will only glance at before scrolling on. The trick is to tap into audience insights and customer knowledge. This will help inform a campaign strategy that will compel users to stop scrolling and click on it. A robust ad campaign will speak to your audiences while they are on different parts of their journey. For those who are new to your brand, your ad should be focused more on awareness. Current customers likely already know of you, so messaging should focus on how you differentiate from the competition.
Creating several ads within a campaign portfolio can help diversify your ad creative while still staying consistent with your overall brand objectives. One way to unlock insights about your different audience segments is by leveraging predictive audiences. This data set considers first-party data and AI learnings, allowing you to create and build segments based on factors such as buyer behaviors, purchasing habits, content engagement, and audience preferences. Using predictive audiences, you can create compelling campaign messages for your audiences today and discover effective messaging strategies for the future.
2. Bid Wisely
Similar to an auction house, Google serves as an auction for advertisers to bid on premium space. But before you raise your paddle haphazardly, you need to set and define some bidding goals. You’ll want to consider what amount you have to spend on this campaign and you’ll want to align with your brand’s main objectives — whether that is brand visibility, leads, or conversions — before you set a bid.
The process and terminology of placing bids can be confusing, therefore it’s important to do your research ahead of time. Go back to your content plan and see which keywords you currently rank for and those that you wish you did. Also, see where your competitors are landing on Google’s result page for various search terms. You typically don’t want to pay for an ad for a niche you already rank high on, at least not when you have other areas to grow.
Then, the next step is to choose a Google Ads bid strategy, either manual cost-per-click (CPC), automated, or smart bidding. Manual CPC bidding is a more tedious process because you’re controlling and managing each bid on the keyword level. Automated bidding relies on algorithms to optimize bids based on your campaign goals, such as clicks or conversions. Smart bidding is tied to automated bidding but uses Google’s AI metrics, which considers geographic location, time of day, and device usage. Educating yourself on the bidding process before walking into it blindly will help optimize your campaign spending efforts.
3. Don’t Forget Organic Campaigns
With so much focus on paid advertising, organic campaigns can quickly be pushed aside. However, pairing paid advertising with organic campaigns can give you the most bang for your buck. Anything that you aren’t paying for falls within the bucket of organic campaigns. Content marketing that relies on keyword research is one example as is community-building efforts on social media.
A huge benefit of organic campaigns is that there is no hard deadline or expiration date. Unlike paid advertising, which has a strict start and close date, organic campaigns can live forever. A blog post, for example, that you created a few years ago may still be receiving traffic. This isn’t to say that you should just prioritize updating older content, but rather that organic tactics can be beneficial for years to come.
To optimize your paid advertising spend, consider leaning into learnings from organic campaigns. Take your keyword research for your content marketing strategy and look to see where there are gaps. Fill these in with paid tactics that will reach your intended audiences without duplicating your efforts on your organic strategies. During product launches or the holidays, consider leveraging more of your paid tactics to make a bigger splash than you can with organic alone.
Takeaways
How you spend your brand’s advertising dollars will vary based on the company’s short- and long-term goals. If you’re seeing rapid success and having a hard time keeping products on the shelves, it may do some good to pull back on your advertising efforts. Alternatively, if you’re about to launch a new product and need to get the word out, then a robust ad campaign will serve you well. With any type of advertising, be sure to monitor your progress, including your ad spending, to get the most optimal results.
