How to optimize
Optimization isn't complicated.It's specialized and systematic.
The first goal of optimization is to hit revenue targets, however they're measured at the campaign level. (I help determine the right primary metric to use, if necessary.)
To hit these targets, the moving parts that comprise your web presence must align as optimally as possible, and there are likely suspects to analyze if this isn't happening:
tl;dr
Read further to learn more about paid marketing optimization.
You can also book a free 30-minute consult with me to discuss your need.
Audit for misalingment
The process of optimization is a search for misalignment, and an audit is the most effective search tool for this purpose. It systematically identifies and prioritizes areas of inefficiency. It shows you how to get more return per media dollar invested.
Materially, it lists and prioritizes fixable issues. Some will take longer to fix than others, but in my experience, you make noticeable gains quickly due to pivots that are identified with a basic audit.
Afterwards, the process of optimization becomes systematic and day-to-day; it is in-built into the media management process.
The following sections briefly describe areas of your web presence and marketing mix that can lead to media underperformance.
Marketing Mix
The great strength and weakness of digital ad buys is that they're trackable. So marketers under pressure to show results allocate budget into trackable channels.
This survival instinct is logical, but is it optimal?
Influence almost definitely doesn't happen in go-to paid channels (search, social, programmatic, etc.).
If you're media investments do not pencil out, you have to do the hard work and examine your top-of-funnel marketing activities. Otherwise, paid media becomes a choke point of diminished returns.
Back to topAudience targeting
Imagine a big bucket. Within is your whole audience together; all its geography, demographics and psychographics swishing around in your monolithic media spend.
Or, imagine a bunch of smaller buckets that comprise differentiated audiences. And to each is delivered a differentiated campaign—measured, optimized and reported on discretely.
Which set-up sounds more efficient and viable?
Media platforms and analytics software provide all the knobs and levers required to develop effective audience segmentation. But you have to use them.
Moreover, you have to experiment. Some cohorts take longer than others to convert. Some may simply not be great paid media targets. You have to experiment, learn, optimize, rinse and repeat. That's the process at a very high level.
Back to topCampaign assets, formats, and keywords
Digital channels are noisy, and creative optimization is extremely important.
Typically a core group of creative produces better results than others. This becomes your evergreen creative for a time. It's always on, and gets the most budget because it produced better returns.
But your audience eventually sees enough and fatigues. This is natural, and why testing new ad concepts must be an ongoing activity. Some portion of the ad budget—a smaller portion relative to workhorse concepts—must go to this.
This isn't the only reason for testing. What works well in one channel may not in another. Workhorse concepts on Facebook won't pull the same weight on LinkedIn or Pinterest.
Formats are important. Video vs. image-based vs. text-based creative all perform differently, and at a differnt cost (i.e. CPC, CPM, CPV), and enable different ad placements and even campaign types (e.g. Google's PerformanceMax requires video assets).
Some companies lack the budget for certain formats, such as video. That's OK. It's something we discuss and plan for.
Keywords matter, too. Keywords are the final mile to a conversion, often. Paid search is typically a lower funnel tactic, yet a lot of exploration occurs on search engines, and you can target this if you have the budget (and more importantly, the content strategy) for it.
Small to medium-sized business usually get the most from paid search by targeting purchase intent while also executing upper funnel marketing. This is a well-primed scenario for strong CPL, CAC, ROAS, etc.
Back to topIncentives
Incentives communicate a benefit to prospective customers, and benefit advertisers by:
Incentives need to be easy to understand. They should convey urgency. Different incentive types should be tested. And obviously, incentives and incentive types should be tracked and measured over time to enable optimization.
Back to topUser Experience (UX)
Media campaigns can be beautifully optimized and still miss goal when landing pages are poorly designed or constructed. Conversions don't occur when an ad is clicked. They happen on your website.
That may sounds rediculously obvious, but when media is underperforming, I've too-often witnessed how peformance data becomes a focus vaccuum when really the issue is the UX, not the media.
Friction kills conversion rates. Any obstacle sitting between site visitors and a primary conversion event is friction. Obstacles are commonly presented in three areas of a web presence:
The true hindrence of poor UX relates to scale. A portion of your audience knows you and converts well. This is a nugget of good performance, but when the net is cast beyond—when you try to scale—now you reach people who don't know you. This is when friction kills.
The online space is competitive. This is not new information, yet many companies market products and services on weak websites, and that's a really effective way to waste money.
Measurement Strategy
Measurement in a multi-screen world is not easy to begin with, and third-party data is going away. This puts certain needs on the people who manage media.
An important measurement enabler is structure. Campaign structure, right down to asset naming conventions, directly influences measurability.
And it goes without saying (hopefully) that your organization has a single "source of truth" for measurement, and (also hopefully) this platform doesn't exclusively use a last-click attribution model.
Last click is not how the world works.
