If you want the best online advertising outcome for your business, here’s a quick overview of what not to do. We’ll keep this list of digital advertising blunders short, sweet, and straight to the point. Our team learned about these advertising mistakes to avoid by taking over ad accounts that our clients had courageously started, and by our own A/B testing of different digital marketing tactics. Save yourself from committing the same errors by continuing with this article.
1. Creating Your Ad Account Last Minute
We get it. Business owners are extremely busy, especially while wearing multiple hats launching the organization. However, even if you don’t plan on running ads anytime soon, we encourage you to set up your ad accounts.
Many of our clients come to us wanting to launch their Google Ads or Facebook and Instagram Ads campaigns within a few days. Although our agency works to meet deadlines, ad platforms aren’t the most accommodating.
When business leaders go to create the ad accounts they will own the profile and share access with us. Sometimes Google, Facebook, and other platforms detect what they categorize as suspicious behavior – and temporarily suspend accounts. We then have to appeal their decisions and ask for manual reviews, which can take weeks, if not months.
As a result, if you’re thinking about running digital marketing campaigns in the future, create accounts now. Accounts can always sit without activity while you work on your advertising strategy. You’ll also get extra points (in the metaphorical sense, no real value) if you set up conversion tracking at the same time. That way, you’ll start gathering conversion data and can launch your ads with an upper hand.
2. Not Tracking Your Digital Efforts
We find this problem many times when auditing ad accounts and conversion tracking is not set up. After discussing our findings during our discovery meetings with potential clients, they mention that their marketing efforts are generating great results but don’t have any proof.
We recommend setting up tracking in two ways. First, with Google Analytics and Google Ads. You can set up analytics tracking using Google Tag Manager and specialize which conversion you want to focus on. Conversion rates can be calculated by phone calls, form submissions, email subscriber sign ups, and more. However, tracking website visitors who click on a phone number button on your website doesn’t always provide accurate data. As a result, the second form of setting up tracking is through third-party software, such as call tracking.
With call tracking or landing page software, you have accurate data on conversion results. For example, if your Google Ads campaign generated 50 phone calls last month, you’ll have the list of 50 phone calls in the call tracking software you’re using. But if there was a flaw in contribution attribution for a period of time, Google Ads may only reflect 35 calls. The same goes with form submissions when using a landing page software.
3. Driving Paid Traffic To Your Website
Business owners often think of driving paid traffic to their website. Instead, we suggest sending traffic to a landing page. The difference between the two is that a website is meant for browsing, having lots of webpages and information. Hence why these are great for SEO and organic traffic. On the other hand, landing pages are a single page, dedicated and laser focused on generating conversions.
This is what often happens when you pay for a person to visit your website. They land on your homepage, then scroll through the About Us page, then the Blog, before they realize they forgot to add something to their Amazon cart and leave. On the contrary, paying for people to go to your landing page will make them decide in a few seconds if they want to contact your business or not.
4. Targeting Broad, Top-Of-Funnel Keywords (Search Ads Only)
Compared to more traditional marketing efforts, digital marketing efforts are relatively inexpensive. However, each click still comes with a price tag. For this reason, it is important to focus on “money” keywords or keywords with the intent to take action. A Massage Therapist, for example, should not be bidding on keywords such as “back pain.” These keywords are known as top-of-the-funnel because the intent of the search term can be purely for information purposes.
The person searching for back pain may be trying to learn more about what causes it and how to get rid of it by themselves. However, bidding on a bottom-of-the-funnel keyword, such as “massage therapist near me,” will lead to a higher return on investment.
5. Going After Leads And Sales Rather Than Engagement (Social Ads Only)
Unlike search ads, which allows you to target keywords with the intent of people ready to take action, social ads do not work in the same way. With social ads, such as Facebook and Instagram, advertisers target people based on interests. Furthermore, people don’t click on their preferred social media app hoping to find an ad and submit their information or buy something. For this reason, some may incorrectly structure their social media ads strategy by focusing on generating leads and direct sales.
We’re not saying that you cannot generate both of these two objectives. These objectives do work for generating leads when the offer is free and provides value to the end user and for sales when a product fits into the category of impulse and relatively inexpensive purchases. If your company doesn’t offer what was just listed, your advertising efforts may be better spent going after engagement.
Take the residential roofing industry. If someone is ready to have their roof shingles replaced, they’ll more than likely search “roofing company near me” in a search engine. Rather than serving social ads, promoting free roofing quotes, building engagement may be a better approach. Pushing the roofing company’s brand by showcasing a video on how drones are used to provide damage-free roofing estimates could spark an interest in people. Or a guide on how to maintain and clean your roofs.
Hiring Dedicated Designs To Manage Your Ad Accounts
These are only some of the mistakes we see made in regard to digital advertising. Avoid these mistakes by reaching out to our team. We offer consulting to business owners who want to keep their marketing in-house and ad account management as a service.
Get in touch with us by filling out the form below or emailing marketinghelp@dedicateddesigns.com, and we will respond to you quickly. We look forward to speaking with you about our online advertising services.
