Many marketers skip a few critical steps in their online advertising. Learn from these common mistakes to make sure you’re not one of them!
Key Takeaways
- Accurate ROAS Measurement: Calculating Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is essential for evaluating the profitability of your campaigns and making informed budget decisions.
- Focused Audience Targeting: Narrowing your target audience ensures your ads reach the most relevant and high-potential customers, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.
- Strategic Budget Optimization: Allocating your budget effectively across the most successful channels prevents overspending on underperforming platforms and maximizes overall campaign efficiency.
- Leveraging Existing Customers: Retargeting and nurturing your current customer base can significantly boost loyalty and repeat purchases, often at a lower acquisition cost compared to attracting new customers.
- Mobile Optimization Priority: Ensuring your ads and landing pages are optimized for mobile devices improves user experience and increases the likelihood of conversions, given the high volume of mobile traffic.
The power of online advertising needs no introduction. It’s one of the most powerful and cost-effective marketing strategies you can use to reach your target audience, boost your sales, and increase your profit. Recent research from dentsu’s Global Ad Spend Forecast shows that online advertising continues to dominate the marketing world (making up 58.8 per cent of all global ad spend in 2024), with businesses leveraging digital ads to enhance their social media presence and drive organic traffic.
However, even the most seasoned digital marketing experts can make mistakes. We’ve all seen our fair share of cringe-worthy marketing fails. These errors can be detrimental, especially for small businesses trying to establish their brand. That’s why it’s crucial to learn from the past mistakes of others and ensure you’re not missing any critical steps in your next online advertising strategy. This includes understanding the importance of targeted social media posts and effective content marketing.
Additionally, incorporating customer interviews and developing detailed buyer personas can provide a deep understanding of your audience. This helps in crafting tailored marketing strategies that capture the customer’s attention and lead to successful lead generation. Business leaders must stay informed about the latest trends and best practices in digital marketing to avoid common pitfalls.
Here’s our pick of the most common online advertising mistakes and our tips to get your strategy in-line and on-point! By addressing these issues, you can optimize your efforts across various social media platforms and enhance your overall marketing effectiveness.
Most common online advertising mistakes and what to do instead
Not measuring your ROAS
If you simply throw money at your online advertising channels without measuring any meaningful metrics, you’ll have no idea how successful your strategy was. What’s more, unsuccessful strategies will burn a big hole in your budget if you keep repeating the same mistakes over again.
What to do instead
Figure out what works and either drop or improve what doesn’t. A step that a lot of marketers forget is calculating your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). It all starts with deciding what you need to measure. Identify a key conversion metric for your campaign and work out the value that conversion brings to your business. This is your conversion value. To calculate ROAS, take your conversion value and divide it by the cost of the campaign. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. Many marketers focus solely on CPA (cost-per-action) or CPC (cost-per-conversion). While this is useful, it only tells you the cost for that single action and doesn’t give as much insight into how your marketing efforts are directly impacting your revenue.
While ROAS is a better metric, you have to have the right data to properly calculate it. If you’re handling data from several sources—or even multiple ad campaigns—take a look at this handy article about using Camphouse’s data integrations to see how successful your online advertising strategy is.
Targeting everyone
Online advertising can potentially target everyone with a computer or a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do this. You need to keep your target audience narrow and your ad message focused. Thinking about the demographics and intent of your potential customers will give you insights into how to target and engage them.
What to do instead
As you understand your users’ intentions, you can place your brand in front of them when they need it, and this is key to winning their hearts and minds, as well as increasing your sales. One of the best ways to boost your user intent targeting is to take a deep dive into your organic search results to discover search queries your target audience is using.
Then, identify focus topics to build your content for your advertising too. Don’t forget how valuable your organic marketing can be to making better-targeted ads! This strategy can help you avoid cringe-worthy marketing failures.
Leveraging micro-influencers can result in 60% higher engagement rates compared to mega-influencers, which helps in creating more effective and targeted ads.
Not optimizing your budget
Many marketers fall foul of a couple of budgeting pitfalls. On the one hand, they set their budgets high and when they don’t see the conversions coming in, they throw more money at the problem instead of examining what’s working and what’s not. On the other hand, they spread their budget too thinly across too many channels and fail to gain traction anywhere. The critical missing step is to monitor your spend proactively and optimize as you go if you want to bring in the conversions and get the results you need, all while staying within budget.
What to do instead
Firstly, be tactical about your budget. Make sure you allocate realistic amounts for each segment of your marketing strategy. Of course, this will be different for every company but it’ll also differ by marketing channel as well. According to HubSpot, 59% of social sellers reported an increase in sales through social media this year, highlighting the importance of channel-specific budget optimization.
Secondly, keep track of your spend vs. performance per channel and optimize as you go. For example, if you’re getting more conversions via Facebook ads than Display ads, consider rebalancing your budget to increase your ads spend (and your conversions). If this sounds like too much to keep on top of, you could also use media tracking software (like Camphouse!) to view your budget alongside your actual spend so you can adjust it in real-time.
Forgetting your existing customers
Targeting your existing customers is just as important as acquiring new ones (if not more so). It’s a great way of maintaining a strong customer base, and offering discount codes and coupons is one of the best ways to keep those customer relationship ties strong.
What to do instead
Make sure you’re targeting existing customers in your remarketing. Retargeting can boost ad engagement by up to 400%, making it a powerful tool in your marketing strategy.
Offer promotions to attract repeat visitors who are keen to buy from you again. Remember, offering a promotion doesn’t mean customers won’t pay full price for other goods.
The point is you’ve got them to your website and while they may buy discounted items, other things may catch their attention too. This strategy can improve your online reputation and lead to higher customer retention.
Using a generic buyer journey
It’s essential to review the user journey of your ads. Remember that three clicks is the magic number for conversions. Test out your ads yourself, if the user journey feels long or pages take time to load, you need to rethink your ads. If clicking your ad takes interested viewers to a generic page on your website without targeted information or a clear call to action, chances are they’ll simply exit your page. And that will be a huge waste of money for you!
What to do instead
Check your user journey contains the information a potential customer needs at each stage of the buyer journey with as few steps as possible. It should take a maximum of three clicks to convert.
Another huge mistake many make is forgetting the mobile user journey. Whatever you do, don’t forget about mobile users and specifically optimize the journey for them too as more often than not it needs to be different.
It takes time to review user behavior and consider how to improve your sales funnel, so be patient and keep gradually optimizing as you go.
Neglecting mobile optimization
With more consumers using smartphones and tablets to browse and shop online, mobile optimization is no longer optional. Many marketers overlook this critical aspect, leading to a poor user experience and missed conversion opportunities.
What to Do Instead
Ensure your website and digital ads are fully optimized for mobile devices. This includes fast loading times, easy navigation, and mobile-friendly designs. Use responsive design techniques to ensure your content looks great on all screen sizes.
Regularly test your ads and website on various devices to ensure a seamless experience. Optimize your social media posts for mobile viewers to maintain a strong social media presence. With 54% of all website traffic coming from mobile phones, this optimization is critical.
This attention to mobile optimization will enhance your social media platforms, boost organic traffic, and improve your overall digital marketing efforts.
Additionally, consider the behavior of mobile users in your content marketing strategies, ensuring that lead generation forms and buyer journeys are streamlined for mobile use. This approach will help small businesses capture the customer’s attention and provide a smooth user experience across all devices.
FAQs
What is ROAS and why is it important?
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising, helping you assess the effectiveness and profitability of your campaigns.
How can I better understand my target audience?
Utilize data analytics, customer surveys, and create detailed buyer personas to gain deeper insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors, allowing for more precise targeting.
What are effective ways to optimize my advertising budget?
Continuously monitor campaign performance, allocate more funds to high-performing channels, and implement A/B testing to identify and invest in the most effective ad strategies.
Why is retargeting important in online advertising?
Retargeting engages users who have previously interacted with your brand, increasing the chances of conversion by keeping your products or services top-of-mind and encouraging repeat visits.
How can I ensure my ads are optimized for mobile devices?
Use responsive design, ensure fast loading times, simplify navigation, and test your ads on various mobile devices to provide a seamless and engaging user experience.
Track your online ads like a pro
You’ll notice there’s a common theme running through these mistakes, and that’s the need to track and measure all your marketing activities. This is critical if you want to optimize your campaign as you go, increase your conversions, and meet your goals. One of the best ways to track your marketing activities in real-time and optimize on the go is to use a media planning platform like Camphouse. It has a host of features to help you effectively plan, track, and analyze your advertising campaigns, like using data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms to track your ad performance and spend across all your channels so you don’t fall foul of these common advertising mistakes.
