Digital Advertising: Know Your Goal

Paid advertising via social media or search engines can be a valuable channel for your digital marketing initiatives.  But the nature of paid adds is that it requires a defined budget and for that budget to be actively managed to optimize the return on investment.  It’s critically important to have a clearly defined goal for your paid advertising so that you can leverage your budget specifically to that purpose.

There tend to be two kinds of digital marketers when it comes to using paid advertising budgets:

1. Those that want to spend as little as possible to meet a set target.
2. Those that want to use a pre-defined budget to get maximum return.

Both of these strategies can lead to valuable results, but both can also be undone by a lack of focus.

Losing sight of an advertising goals seems absurd but it is surprisingly common.  A general assumption that I hear is that lack of focus on a goal can only stem from absentmindedness.  If that were the case, it would be far less common.  Unfortunately, the catalyst is often a result of incorporating new tools or external suggestions.

As an example, several of our clients attended a conference that discussed LinkedIn’s new interest targeting in their ad platform.  Every single one of them took away from the conference that they should include this new targeting tool because the speaker outlined how powerful segmented messages could be and potential results.  The assumption was that adding the interest targeting to existing ads would make them better.  More is better after all, right?

Unfortunately for several of the clients, the answer was no.  Adding the interest targeting on top of their demographic requirements shrunk the target group to such a small sample size that goals couldn’t possibly be met.  The intention was improved segmentation and targeting to get more responses but it neglected the goal of getting a certain number of people to view and fulfill the offer.

After analyzing why conversions plummeted and almost none of the digital advertising budget was used, we found the targeting change.  We then restructured the campaign into two unique campaigns, one set of ads defined by interest targeting and a second defined by demographic criteria so that the target audience remained sufficient.

Always have your goals in mind when making changes to your digital ad campaigns.  Sometimes updates that seem like improvements can run counter to you objectives.