The digital landscape is vast, everchanging, and ripe with paid marketing opportunities for business professionals. Effectively targeting digital spend, and measuring results, can seem like daunting tasks. Having a basic understanding of the tried-and-true digital solutions that help identify, reach, and convert target audiences is a great first step towards advancing your marketing strategy.
This blog is the first in a three-part series that will help you choose the right type of campaign to meet your goals, measure your success, and optimize your marketing spend over time.
Below is an overview of the basics of paid digital campaigns.
Audio & Video Streaming
Advertising on audio and video streaming platforms is a must post-2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, subscriptions to streaming services soared to new records. According to Forbes, “48% of U.S. online adults had subscribed to at least one streaming service” by June 2020, and there’s no sign that this trend will slow. YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Hulu, Connected TV, and OTT platforms offer advertisers agility and the ability to implement a cross-channel marketing strategy that integrates across all of your digital experiences.
What metric is most important?
It’s up to you to define how you’ll measure success depending on your campaign goal. Generally speaking, monitor your total impressions and CPM (“cost per thousand” or “cost per mille”). CPM is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one web page. Total impressions and CPM are standard metrics that are easily accessible when you engage with platforms such as Google. If you have the resources, you may want to measure brand awareness and/or share of voice before and after the campaign. This type of in-depth analysis generally requires a more custom approach.
How to improve your campaign
First and foremost, focus on the content. What types of images and videos do you want to project and what story will they tell? Immersive platforms, where the viewer is drawn in and engages with the content, are a great opportunity to stretch your team’s creativity and move beyond static images and audio. Beware of falling into the trap of simply using your existing TV and radio ads on digital media. For more information on creating breakthrough ads, check out Hulu’s playbook on Creating Ads for Streaming TV.
Second, utilize ad sequencing. Ad sequencing is a feature many digital platforms offer, and it allows you to automatically serve ads to your audience in a specific order. Creating a series of ads that can be shown in sequence to deliver a narrative will increase ad recall and inspire engagement. Need help? Use one of 5 tested ad sequences developed for YouTube to get started and boost your performance.
Finally, utilize the extensive targeting capabilities at your disposal. Deliver relevant and personalized messages to different segments within your target audience.
Paid Search
Search ads are text ads that appear on Bing and Google results pages. These typically appear above the organic search results. Companies pay for this strategic placement. Paid search ads can be quite expensive depending on the number of competitors with overlapping geographic targeting and keywords. The more popular the search term, the more expensive the ad campaign.
Ongoing optimization of keywords is most critical to the success of a search campaign.
What metric is most important?
Pay attention to cost per conversion, or the total amount spent during the campaign, divided by the total number of conversions in the same period. This will tell you how much each win costs.
How to improve your campaign
Impression share, or the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get, is a metric that is often overlooked. Impression share can help you understand how to adjust your budget, bids, and keywords. It also indicates how competitive the market is.
Ongoing optimization of keywords is most critical to the success of a search campaign. Ask your digital marketing team for a list of recent search queries to see if you’re attracting the right audience with your keyword strategy. You may find that you are paying for clicks that are entirely unrelated to your product, service, or brand. Identify negative keywords that indicate that a search is irrelevant to your business so that your ad is no longer served to individuals with that keyword. See 7 Common Paid Search Mistakes (And How to Fix Them) for more tips on improving your paid search campaign.
Optimizing your landing page is also essential, especially if your campaign has a low conversion rate. The landing page may be your only chance to make a good first impression, and once you’ve lost prospects it will be a challenge to get them to return. Read 7 Landing Page Design Tips for Digital Marketers to learn more about creating high-performing landing pages.
Conclusion
Google and other digital platforms are constantly changing their paid offering options, interfaces, and analytics. While it is challenging to stay current on everything, it is highly useful for business professionals to have at least a basic understanding of the paid digital opportunity landscape to start making digital part of the marketing strategy conversation.
Keep an eye out for part two of our Digital Marketer’s Toolbox series, which will cover display ads, social media marketing, and more!