I’ve written before about the importance of advertising goals, so I won’t dwell on them again too much, suffice it to say, every online advertising campaign you run should have a specific goal you can measure its performance against.
This activity is most often referred to as conversion tracking. In the simplest terms, a conversion can be thought of as a sale, but can also be more abstract, such as a website visitor, PDF download, or even calling a number from (yes you can even track calls on a number from a specific ad campaign….).
OK, so it’s pretty obvious how important conversion tracking is to ALL advertisers. If you don’t know what your ads are doing, how do you know you’re not wasting your money? So the next few stats might come as a surprise to you.
- Research conducted across 2,000 google advertisers last year revealed that 42% weren’t tracking what their ads were doing at all. The (so if your know what your ads are doing, you’re already ahead of 40% of your competitors)
- Worse still, of the remaining 58% that had conversion tracking, more than 50% had broken or faulty tracking on their campaigns (might want to quickly check if the pat on the back you just gave yourself was justified)
- Of the remaining ads with tracking that worked, less than 40% of ads reported a single conversion. (Yes that’s right, 60% of their ad spend was wasted)
Now the 3 steps needed to double your online advertising budget?
- First you need to go on a quick journey. Click on your ads and follow the path they lead you down. Then review the conversion tracking to make sure it’s all working as it should.
(this should be all accessible in your google analytics).
- Next you need to review your campaigns for the last 180 days. Stop running the ads which show low or no conversions. (on average this will be 60%+ of your spend over the last 6 months)
- Take that spare (more than double) advertising budget and apply it to the ad campaigns that have shown conversions over the same 180 day period (most campaigns are capped by budget rather than results)
So in summary…..
At the very least this email will have confirmed you deserve an A+ for conversion tracking!
Hopefully, for everyone else, I’ve helped you identify a big fat saving that you can now apply to the ads which are working. Not only does this mean you stop wasting money, it means you can actually increase the return you’re getting from your good campaigns That’s much more than just doubling your ad budget. It’s doubling your profitable ad budget!
As always if you’d like to discuss any of your PPC or Email marketing campaigns over a Zoom call, you can book some time with us via the following link.
