By setting up and running ads, the goal of a marketer is usually to get more in return for each made investment. No matter if the outcome is more visibility, more sales, clicks or anything else. To achieve the best results and highest efficiency, you should avoid some of the most common mistakes that marketers make while running ad campaigns. Are the goals clearly defined? Do you have the right content for your target group? Is it the right message for the specific channel? So many things that come together and that will have a huge impact on the success or failure of your campaign.
In our latest article we will show you not only the most common mistakes in the Setup of Ads, but also how to avoid them or how to make it the right way.
Regular mistakes on Google Ads
No or bad goal definitions
Before setting up ads on Google, it is important to think about certain goals. Spending your budget on ads that bring visitors to your home page can be a good idea for boosting your brand awareness.
Nevertheless, using your advertising budget on more specific goals—such as landing pages, gathering email addresses and so forth—might be a more beneficial strategy in the long run. When setting up ads, goals should generally be targeted more on leads (for example, gathering new potential customers’ email addresses) and less on the traffic leading to your home page. Depending on your objectives, it is important to measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of your ad set. This way, it is easier to more effectively determine the future budget.
Wrong conversion setup or unknown ROI
Various marketing channels offer an overview of the conversions certain ads bring you. Nevertheless, relying only on this source is not enough. It is important to check the conversions and the ROI from your database to see if the numbers match the information provided on your ad channel.
It can also be that multiple ad channels count the conversions as their own—this usually happens and is not wrong per see. As the customer usually switches between different marketing channels, it can be that he/she saw your ad twice and also clicked on both sides but only converted once. This is a common problem we’ll talk about in a future blog article about attribution modeling. Understanding your ROI is the first step in enhancing your ad-campaign planning because now you can start calculating the effectiveness of your ad campaign.
No understanding of your customer lifetime value
To have a good ROI calculation, you need more than the knowledge of how much your customer revenue was in the last shopping cycle. You need to know how much revenue customers will bring in in the future. This metric is called the customer lifetime value (or CLV).
Calculating the lifetime value of your customers can bring more transparency to your budget planning. Knowing how many sales one customer will generate during their entire lifespan can help you to estimate the effort you should put in as a marketer.
Vague ad content
The information shown on an ad is the most important determinant of whether the user clicks on it or not. So be careful to put effort into how the ad itself looks! Useful ad content such as reviews from other customers, location, price, etc., is beneficial to add since it gives detailed information about your offering.
Badly defined target keywords for your ads
Defining your target keywords is one of the most crucial elements of a successful ad campaign on Google Ads since these are the search terms that will be shown to your potential customers while they browse on Google. Depending on your objectives, you can define your keywords by setting either broad-type keywords or narrow types. Testing your ad is the best way to see if you get traffic and, depending on your goal, conversions from relevant keyword search results. To minimize the irrelevance of your ad, you can set up phrase-match keywords and get even more precise with your ad placing by setting up negative keywords. This way you can avoid showing your ad for certain keywords that are not relevant to your offering and reduce the spending of your budget on traffic that is not within your target.
Regular mistakes on social media ads such as Facebook
Ad fatigue
Showing the same ad too many times to the same audience is one of marketers’ major mistakes on Facebook when they are starting out. It should be avoided since it can create irritation and negative branding as well as ad blindness. Fixing or avoiding this mistake is pretty simple on Facebook. Before launching your ad campaign, you can adjust the settings by selecting a frequency cap for your ad. This frequency cap will control how many times your ad will be shown to users in a specific audience within a specific time frame. Additionally, a growing cost-per-click (CPC) is also a general indicator of ad fatigue.
Not creating new potential audience groups
This is something marketers can oversee/overlook. While setting up ads on Facebook, marketers have a clear picture of how their target audience looks. Nevertheless, it is worth a try to check audiences that are similar to your target audience. There might be potentials you are missing out on otherwise.
No CTAs or specific goals
While creating a social media advertisement strategy, identifying the end goal is the crucial part. Implementing appealing CTAs for your advertisement can increase CTR and ad engagement. Even if your objective is brand awareness, you cannot lose anything by implementing creative, engaging CTAs into your ad.
Using the home page as the end URL
Users click when they see a clear CTA, which should lead them to a page that is highly relevant to the CTA and the ad. If the advertisement leads a user to a homepage where the user must self-navigate, this can lead to bounces since it creates confusion and frustration for the user. Therefore, it is always important to identify target landing pages for your ads. That’s also important for verifying conversions and traffic in general.
Overlapping audiences
While setting up multiple ads within your campaign, marketers often forget to edit the target audiences, and that causes overlapping. If you want to learn more about how to avoid overlapping.
Summary
Rule of thumb for all ad channels
Think about your end goal before launching your ad campaign. It can be gathering email prospects, getting subscriptions to your newsletter, new downloads for content like ebooks, courses, videos, etc. Having clear end goals helps you to optimize your ads for better results and more efficient budget spending. This is the first and most important step to take.
