Where, How and What: Evolve Marketing’s guide to online media advertising
Part Two: How do I ensure optimal ROI?
Welcome to the second part of our three-part series covering the ins and outs of digital marketing. In this post, we’ll discuss how to set up and monitor your ads for ongoing success and optimisation.
Three letters, one huge meaning – ROI, or ‘Return on Investment’. We understand that while digital advertising may not be cheap, it’s incredibly effective when executed correctly. Our team at Evolve are experts in the ad set up and monitoring process, providing ongoing suggestions, tweaks and reports about how our client’s ads are progressing. This ensures all of our clients know exactly where their investment has gone, and what it has achieved.
Digital marketing isn’t just set and forget. You can have the first two parts right – the platform and the creative but ensuring your spend is achieving at and beyond your desired results is even more important. So here is our breakdown on the best way to set up and monitor your ads to ensure ongoing ROI.
Set Up
As we covered in Part One, each digital marketing platform has a different audience breakdown. Knowing your userbase and identifying how you can best reach them through dynamic creative is half the battle. Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin offer extremely specific drilldowns of your audience, from their age, gender and location, to their interests and similar pages they’ve liked. Your digital market needs to be specific and tailored to meet your audience’s interests, as they may not be the same as your real-world audience. To accurately target we recommend the following steps:
1. Consider the demographics of each platform, such as age and gender. Develop an idea of which platform best suits your goals
2. Look at what kind of people are interacting with your page and content on the platform you’re looking to advertise on. Do they love polls? Are they tagging friends? What are their interests?
3. Create a snapshot based on this audience and develop your creative around what best engaged them
Circusrio Facebook Ad Example
4. Use that snapshot to develop your digital audience. Drill down by;
5. Age
6. Gender
7. Location
8. Interests
Client Snapshot: We run Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube ads for our client Circus Rio, which is touring Australia nationally with a family friendly ‘not your typical’ performance. They’re currently in Adelaide, so our ads have been targeted to the following audience:
1. Age: 16-64
2. Gender: Male and Female
3. Location: Within 20km of Circus location
4. Interests: FMX, circus, performing arts, family events, school holidays
In the set-up process alongside your creative, we recommend adding links to websites and calls to action. In our Circus Rio copy, we link to their website and add a call to action encouraging the audience to purchase tickets through an additional link to Ticketek. We will cover more about creative in the third part of this series.
Consider how long you want your ads to run, is your promotion seasonal or for a limited time? Or, like Circus Rio, will you be in a location for an extended time? Dependant on your needs, your copy will differ throughout the advertising process.
Spend will also vary depending on the duration and goals of the advertising process. We work with our clients to determine budgets that will not only work for their financial needs, but achieve their advertising goals.
Monitoring and Optimising
To ensure our clients are getting the most out of our spend, monitoring is vital. We check our client’s ads weekly throughout the advertising period to ensure vital signs are working effectively. For example, on a Google ads campaign, if keywords are spending too much per word, we will remove, adjust or ad to ensure the same effectiveness while getting the most out of an ad spend. Part of our optimisation is using this information to inform changes for future ad campaigns or adjust the ad as it occurs. As with every client, we inform them of our recommendations and once approved, make alterations and continue to monitor how they progress.
Monitoring is also a fantastic way to see how your audience is responding to your creative, by tracking link clicks, conversions, likes, comments and shares. By comparing how your sponsored ads are performing with how your organic posts typically perform, you can analyse how effective your spend has been.
If you’re running multiple campaigns at the same time with the same targeting, you can compare results to see how each ad performed. This is called a split-test, where you present the same creative to two different audiences, or different copy to the same audiences. This can effectively optimise your future campaign efforts by reporting on which audience responded best to which creative.
Circusrio Facebook Ad Results Example
Reporting
At Evolve, we ensure thorough communication with our clients through every stage of their digital campaigns, from ad strategy through to optimisation. To effectively present this, we report on how the ad campaign has performed at the end of the campaign period or the end of the month. This lays out the targeting, the spend and the performance in one succinct document that allows us to analyse trends in the data and ways to improve.
We also report on secondary effects of the ad spend, such as how much a client’s Facebook likes, Instagram follows, or Google reviews have increased or improved as a result of the campaign.
Over the long term, keeping track of how each campaign has performed allows us to inform not only our optimisation of the same campaign, but future campaigns across our client base.
In our third and final blog post, we’ll discuss how to make stand out creative tailored to the right platform and audience. This is vital to ensuring a cohesive ad campaign and a strong ROI.
At Evolve, we are passionate about making your brand shine through digital advertising. Talk to us today about how we can develop a complete advertising strategy for your brand that achieves optimal ROI.