Most campaigns do not fail due to the bad ideas. The main reasons, however, are usually small mistakes which are very easy to solve: wrong targeting, stale creatives, and budgets that are bled to underperforming placements.
The very good news is that ad campaign optimization may not always require a complete revamp. At times all you really need is the right lever. Here are 10 of them that you can still do today.
What Does Ad Campaign Optimization Actually Mean?
Simply put, it is the continuous process of tweaking your campaigns so that you can achieve better results using the same amount of money.
These improvements may be trickling down in any one of three areas: more conversions, lower CPA, higher ROAS or all three at the same time.
The essence of the word “optimization” here is continuous. It is not a one-time job. In fact, it is a cycle: analyze, test, adjust, repeat.
To give you an idea, competition for every impression is fierce as worldwide digital advertising spend is now over $600 billion. If you do not engage yourself in optimizations, rest assured, your budget is instead increasing the losses.
The 10 Levers
Lever 1: Start With Clear, Measurable Goals
Though this sounds like the most obvious thing ever to do, it is surprising how many campaigns head in the wrong direction from here.
First of all, “increase sales” can never be a goal. On the other hand, “we want to reduce average CPA by 10% within a period of 60 days” makes sense.
Decide your KPIs before launching anything:
- Primary metric (CPA, ROAS, conversion rate)
- Secondary metric (CTR, CPM, engagement rate)
- Time frame for measurement
A campaign that is centered around a very vague goal tends to be optimized for a very vague type of result.
Lever 2: Consolidate Your Campaigns and Ad Sets
Running more campaigns has never meant more control. Actually, in most cases, it means slower learning and poorer results. By collapsing your advertisements to just one or two sets, you will be giving the algorithms more data, which means that they will be able to learn faster and do a better job.
The only time you would require to have separate campaigns is when you are selling totally different products to entirely different groups of people. Over and above that, consolidation is the way to go.
Lever 3: Respect the Algorithm’s Learning Phase
Both Meta and Google require a certain amount of data and time before they can optimize properly. Meta’s algorithm can gel for stable perfomance after around 50 conversions and 7 days, thus you should avoid any big changes during this time.
One of the biggest storage drains in digital advertising is the campaign-editing-every-48-hours habit. Don’t do significant changes before a minimum of 1,000 impressions or 100 conversions.
Lever 4: Switch to First-Party Data Targeting
With the third-party cookies being wiped out, any campaign that relies on them is only getting a partial signal. If you use your CRM lists, site visitor data, email subscribers, etc., you get audience targeting that is not only more accurate but also respects privacy better.
You can then create lookalike audiences from that data. Lookalike audiences built from actual customer data on Facebook tend to have a 47% lower cost per click and 3.4 times more conversions than broad targeting.
Lever 5: Fix Creative Fatigue Before It Kills Your CTR
Creative fatigue remains unnoticed for a long time and ends up costing a lot. When the same advertisement is exposed to the same audience over and over again, the CTR will keep going down and CPMs will be going up, even if the ad was great when it launched.
Symptoms:
- CTR is decreasing over the weeks even if nothing else has changed
- Frequency is above 3-4 for cold audiences
- Unexplained increase in CPM
The solution is to keep checking creatives continuously. Bring in new pictures, different video hooks, and different headlines regularly. Run A/B tests for at least one to two weeks to be sure of the statistical significance.
Lever 6: Align Your Landing Page With the Ad
A brilliant ad which takes traffic to a wrong landing page is essentially money down the drain. The message, offer, and the general tone of your landing page should be just like the ad.
Key landing page checkpoints:
- Does the headline convey the message or show the offer that is in the ad?
- Is the main CTA visible without scrolling?
- Does the mobile version of the page load in less than 3 seconds?
- Is there one clear action, not 5 competing ones?
Marketers can identify, and in turn fix customer pain points by studying behavioral metrics such as time on page and click patterns and thus stop guessing and start optimizing.
Lever 7: Use Frequency Capping
Frequency capping is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve the performance of your display and programmatic campaigns. Repeatedly showing the same ad to the same person is not risking doing so — it’s a waste of your money.
A reasonable starting point would be 3-5 impressions per user per week for awareness campaigns, and 1-2 for direct response. Consider testing it out on your own data from there.
Using Reacheffect, for example, you can control frequency not just for a single placement but at the campaign level across multiple placements — a capability that comes in handy in multi-channel campaigns, where the same user might be reached in different environments.
Lever 8: Optimize Bidding Strategy to Match Campaign Stage
Not all campaigns have to rely on the same bidding strategy. You have to make sure that your bidding strategy matches your objective and that you have sufficient data to use that strategy.
| Campaign Stage | Recommended Bidding |
|---|---|
| Early (low data) | Manual CPC or CPM |
| Learning phase | Target CPA with broad audiences |
| Scaling | Maximize conversions or ROAS |
| Mature / retargeting | Value-based bidding |
If you automate smart bidding while there still isn’t enough conversion data for the algorithm then the results will be unpredictable. First and foremost, accumulate the data.
Lever 9: Exclude Poor Placements and Irrelevant Audiences
It is equally important as delivering your ads only to the right people to stop your money from going to the wrong ones. Placement exclusion features are hardly used in most accounts.
When it comes to display and programmatic:
- Examine your placement reports on a weekly basis and take out those sites where there are a lot of impressions but no conversions.
- Exclude app categories that are burning your budget and still have no results
- You can even create exclusion lists for those who are already converted
Little wins resulting from a few exclusions will add up quickly over the whole campaign flight.
Lever 10: Use Multi-Touch Attribution, Not Just Last-Click
Typically, there are many customer touchpoints involved before the conversion even takes place. It is possible that a particular user had clicked a paid ad, then had visited from an organic search, then returned from an email and later had converted after seeing a retargeting campaign. The final step, or last click, gets 100% of the credit with last click attribution, which by the way, causes all the other channels contributing upstream to be undervalued.
You can truly understand what is driving the results and therefore what channels deserve a higher budget by using multi-touch attribution.
“First- and last-touch attribution models provide essential marketing insights, but they do not give an accurate picture of the customer’s entire journey.” —Amplitude
Optimization Is Not a Tactic, It Is a Mindset
There is no luck involved when it comes to winning campaigns that deliver high performances. What happens is a team that is always on their toes. They see everything as a signal, keep testing, and do not let their wrong assumptions pile up for more than a few days.
The above-mentioned levers stand for any kind of campaigns such as push traffic, display, native, or programmatic. Also, if you consider a platform that provides you the levels to have total control and actually utilize those, frequency capping, placement targeting, audience segmentation then Reacheffect’s advertising campaign tools is the one that you are looking for.
