Why A failed Campaign Is Still A Good Investment
Whatever online advertising strategy or strategies you use to grow your online business, it’s important to look at your ad spend as an investment. One of the big advantages of online advertising is the information you get back. That’s almost as much as the results (or even lack of them) from campaigns. Sound crazy?
Actually it’s crazier to not look at it that way. Most people are going to “lose” money with online advertising initially. No matter what online advertising strategy or platform used, it’s all about testing.
The big difference from offline advertising though is that you can easily determine WHY a campaign is not working. You can test any number of variables and make educated decisions based on the data coming back. It’s a lot harder and more expensive to do that with traditional media advertising.
Most online advertising platforms allow detailed tracking on the campaigns you set up. They also allow a lot of control on the spend – way beyond simply starting and stopping a campaign. Yet that’s what many advertisers do. They set up a campaign, let it run for a short time and either stop it if it’s not giving a good return or keep it running if it does.
A Better Online Advertising Strategy
A better online advertising strategy is to set up a number of slightly different campaigns that allow comparisons to be made. You might create 4 ads within a campaign for example. Yes you would be targeting the same keywords but would vary the copy. In the case of Facebook you might vary the images used.
You might also send any traffic generated to different landing pages and sales funnels. If you properly track all this stuff you can easily fine-tune a campaign by cutting out the parts that don’t work and scaling up those that do.
That’s how the big guns do it. In fact they get so good at it that they are in a position to outsource their online advertising strategy to an agency. They’ve invested in the campaign so know what’s working and can pass that on to an agency. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of it for the agency so they don’t need to spend your budget gathering that info through testing.
A joined up online advertising strategy like this also provides another key piece of data. It clearly identifies the CPA (cost per acquisition) for a campaign. That’s something an online marketer seriously needs to know. And that comes down to the products or services being advertised.
If those are high-ticket products and services then you can afford to invest a lot more in your online advertising strategy and campaigns. Like it or not – knowing the numbers – becomes essential at some point. That point can come later though with high converting sales funnels and high value products at the end.
What’s The Real Cost of Your Online Advertising Strategy?
If you know – from the data you gather – that a lead costing £10 has a good chance of converting to a £20 sale it begins to make sense. If you also know that a percentage of those £20 sales will lead to £2000 sales you can begin to see your investment in advertising making A LOT of sense. The return on that investment might not be immediate but when it can be that good – who cares?
Basically you can keep the front-end £20 sales coming in EVEN if they are costing a lot more than that to generate.
If the profit margins are lower, then knowing the numbers is much more crucial. If your profit on a sale ends at £20 then a sale better not be costing £20 or more. Trouble is you might be investing a lot in advertising up front just to find out what works.
An effective online advertising strategy starts with good targeting. Again online advertising comes into it’s own in this area. In particular search based advertising – where potential customers are telling search engines what they are looking for. This makes putting the right things in front of the right people far less of a shot in the dark than traditional advertising ever could.
If you’d like to learn more about selling online – your products or someone else’s click the link below. You will then be able to sign up for a free series of videos from master marketers Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek – co-founders of SFM and DEA.
