How to Maximize Your Paid Ads Strategies With These 6 Tips

Paid digital advertising is a key player in tons of companies’ marketing campaigns. In fact, Hanapin Marketing found that 97% of marketers invest in paid digital advertising. But sometimes money is left on the table because those ads weren’t as effective as they could’ve been. Now I’m not saying these were made by bad marketers, but there are some tried and true tips here to make sure that even your best ads are as effective as possible. Here are six tips to get the most out of the ads you run. 

Optimization

Account optimization is key. Without constantly optimizing your account, you lose out on making small changes that ultimately make a big impact. Your work isn’t over once you’ve launched a campaign. After a set amount of time, you should review your ads—copy, bids, creative, audience, etc. Testing your ads, checking Google’s recommendations for your ads, and tweaking your settings until you find the sweet spot will help make sure you are getting the most out of your budget and moving the needle toward your goals. 

Call Tracking

If your call tracking isn’t linked up to your Google ads, oh no baby, what is you doin’? (If you catch that meme reference, we can be friends.) Having a call now button and your Google ads ready to track those calls is a great metric to have when understanding where your leads are coming from. This is especially important for industries that set up appointments or receive a lot of calls about their goods or services. 

Offer

This where you want to imagine stepping into your buyer’s shoes. Who is your target audience and what offer would appeal to them? We can step back even further and say, if my audience hasn’t heard of me before, what would make them trust me and be interested in what I have to offer? For example, let’s imagine we’re advertising for a local service-based industry and our goal is to increase revenue. Offering a certain dollar amount off or a free consultation would grab people’s attention more than just talking about your industry. This is something that will grab the attention of those who are ready to buy. If brand awareness is the goal, we may switch to emphasizing how long the business has been providing their local area with excellent services.

Landing Pages

A landing page is created with your ad specifically in mind. It creates a specific post-click experience with all the information a client needs to purchase, sign up, or do whatever it is that is the goal of your ad. Having a custom landing page for every ad you run creates these specific post-click experiences for each and every one. While this is great just for the audience’s experience, it’s also more effective for selling and tracking. Landing pages have a 9.7% conversion rate, according to Hubspot (and 10% is the benchmark for a good conversion rate). Landing pages also help track each and every lead that comes through your ad. With separate landing pages for each ad, you know the exact journey they are taking. This gives you a better idea of which ones need updating or which ads are crushing it. 

Refresh 

If your ads have a creative aspect to them, make sure you revisit that creative on a regular basis. After your potential clients have seen the same ad multiple times they are less likely to engage. Refreshing your creative and copy prevents ad fatigue and tends to bump click-through-rates and engagement. We recommend refreshing ad creative and copy monthly, but quarterly can work as well. If an ad is doing really well, making different variations of the same ad can be super effective. You don’t need to throw it all out and get new ads every month. 

Plan 

And last but not least, plan out where you want to go. Besides having a goal of increasing revenue by X% (or brand awareness, or whatever your goal is), planning can be as simple as keeping a list of your next ad ideas and target audiences ready. Make a prioritized list of ads you want to see go out in the next 6 months. Keeping an eye on your KPIs and analytics will help you stay on top of this so you know when to swap and move on to the next ad you’d like to run. By having your goals and plan in front of you, you will be able to make sure you are investing in the best possible ads for the greatest ROI in your marketing. 

No matter what type of paid ads you’re working with, paid digital ads are a critical part of your overall marketing plan. Things move fast in the digital world, but the good thing is that you have the tools to keep iterating and improving. With analytics tools, metrics are easily measurable that help inform where things need to change. Once you get a handle on it, there is great opportunity for ROI with paid digital ads. And of course, if you need help with your paid ads strategy, we are here to help.