Increase your ROI by Running Effective Campaigns

Knowing how to maximize your return on investment (ROI) in digital marketing is essential to increasing brand visibility, staying competitive, and growing your business. That’s why we’ve created an easy-to-follow guide showcasing the how-tos of successful online campaigns using popular platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. From pay-per-click advertising to content marketing, it offers tips that will help you optimize your digital marketing strategy and cost-effectively reach more customers. Access our step-by-step guide now to understand better how to increase ROI with thoughtful digital marketing campaigns that effectively target market segments for maximum impact.

Step 1: Determine your Marketing Objective

One of the fundamentals of a digital advertising campaign is setting a clear objective and goal. You need to ask yourself, ‘what do you want to achieve with your marketing campaign?’ Usually, there are different goals on the agenda, and for every specific goal, you will need to decide on the best tool or set of tools to use. Below are the marketing objectives that are used by many marketers to drive sales and conversions:

• Building brand awareness
• Increasing organic traffic (e.g., on website, store, Facebook/Instagram page, etc.)
• Generating better-qualified leads
• Increasing online/offline sales

For example, here are the campaign goals when running ads on Google:

After determining your objectives, the next step is to decide on the metrics you need to measure and analyze to meet the set goals. You have to develop a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to track the efficiency of your campaign. Let’s get a closer look at important metrics when running campaigns on Facebook and Google.

Step 2: Decide on the Metrics to Track. Practical examples for Google and Facebook Campaigns

Metrics are the data value used to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign. You have to pick the proper metrics that will give you accurate insights into how effective your campaign is. You would want to consider different metrics depending on the kind of campaign that you are running and the platform you are using. There are, however, two metrics you should always keep track of, namely:

• CPA (Cost per acquisition) – tells you how much it costs to acquire a new customer. Calculate your CPA by taking the total advertising budget spend and divide it by the new customers (or conversions) acquired:

• ROAS (Return on ad spend) – shows the revenue you return for every dollar of ad spend you’ve invested in a campaign. It’s a very simple formula to calculate: simply divide revenue on advertising cost (total spend on ads), and you’ll have the number:

When running a campaign, you should work on reducing CPA to the lowest value possible while bringing ROAS to the highest point. Apart from CPA and ROAS, more metrics should be used to measure the performance of a marketing campaign. Let’s have a look at the key metrics to measure when running a Facebook campaign:

• Frequency – shows you how many people see your ad on average (for the selected period).

Why does it matter? Watching frequency ensures you don’t overwhelm your audience with your ads, e.g., a person doesn’t need to watch the same ad three times every day. It’s crucial to take care of your creatives and develop different unique ad samples to avoid ad fatigue. Make sure your target audience doesn’t end up seeing the same ad over and over again.

• CPM (cost per thousand impressions) – tells you the cost Facebook charges per 1000 impressions:

Why does it matter? It helps you to gauge the cost-effectiveness of an advertising campaign and also compare the performance of different campaigns to understand which one is more effective.

• CTR (click-through rate) – the percentage of people who clicked on your ad when they saw it:

Why does it matter? It tells you how many clicks you’ve got compared to the number of impressions the ad received. It helps the marketer to estimate the performance of their creatives and understand how effective ads drive traffic to your third-party links.

• Secondary events

It also makes sense to measure secondary events. For example, when optimizing campaigns for an e-commerce site, you need to keep an eye on “add to a cart” and calculate checkout metrics.
Why does it matter? Helps you to understand traffic quality and sources of conversion. When people seem to buy certain products more, you can identify the items that are in high demand.
Take a look at the below metrics that are important to measure when running Google Ads campaigns.

• CPC (Cost per click) – tells you how much you pay when a person clicks on your ad:

Why does it matter? It helps you define where you can pay more or less for ad clicks.

• CTR (click-through rate) – the same metric as in Facebook Ads. It shows how many people clicked on your ad compared to how many people saw it. The formula remains the same:

Why does it matter? It helps to identify the effectiveness of your ad.

• Impression share (%) – this metric tells you the impressions you’ve received over the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.

Why does it matter? It helps you understand how you stand in the auction and how much you lose against your competitors. It directly impacts your CTR.

Step 3: Decide on your Budget and the Right Tools

Deciding on a marketing budget helps you determine the scope of your campaign hence reducing the chances of overspending. Depending on your initial goal (Step 1), you can leverage the strength of advertising on Google with Google Ads. It focuses on keywords likely to be included in search queries by your target audience. With Facebook Ads, you can acquire new customers based on their behavior patterns and interests. The platform offers your product (or service) for those who already looked through similar products or services before. Another tool to consider is LinkedIn. With over 760 million active users LinkedIn’s marketing solutions platform can help you reach out to thousands of prospective customers. We’ve created a detailed complete Checklist describing explicit steps to launch a successful LinkedIn campaign. Check it out if LinkedIn is your marketing platform.

Read Now: How To Create Effective LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

One of the strategies many marketers use to identify the main source of their traffic is incorporating more than one marketing platform. That’s what we did for one of our clients in e-commerce. The client is the US fashionable sunglasses company that was looking to promote their brand and scaling the business using Paid Social and Paid Search platforms, particularly Facebook and Google Ads. Continuously testing new audiences and replacing underperforming saturated audiences, our media team has improved remarketing audience collection and built an integrated strategy between these two platforms delivering a 42% ROAS improvement and 1,200% increase in total sales.
If you are facing the issue of defining the right marketing platform(s) to target your audience, we are happy to help. Just leave us a brief message by filling out the form on our web for a digital strategy consultancy.

Step 4: Take Care of your Creatives. Practical examples for Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn Campaigns

• Tips on Google Creatives

Google’s Dynamic Creatives help to serve your audience with relevant ad content targeting different customers and contexts. Let’s put this into context; by using a dynamic feed, you can choose to display an ad targeting one of your audiences, e.g., male and female students under 25 years, and simultaneously target another audience, e.g., only male students over 25 years.
With more than 45 thousand potential permutations available to test, you can swap or add multiple elements, including (but not limited to) images, videos, texts, exit URLs, and call-to-actions. It’s a convenient tool that allows you to display the most relevant ads to your target audience and increase traffic efficiency.
Examples of dynamic creatives include Google Store, Google Pixel, Google Ads, and Stadia (cloud gaming service). They can be used in Search, Display, Shopping, Discovery, and App campaigns.

• Tips on Facebook Creatives

According to Facebook research, Static + Video Ads work together better and show a 17% higher conversion rate than static images alone. Taking into consideration that video is booming right now and most of the world’s total videos are being viewed on mobile, we recommend creating mobile-optimized ads. Based on these insights the best option would be to develop video creatives and optimize them for mobile initially. To learn more specifics about ads’ development that showed a high conversion rate, check our previous post and download the Creative Guide.

Download Now: Guide on How to Create Highly Engaging Ads for Mobile
Read Now: Facebook Creatives: Which Ads Convert the Best?

• Tips on LinkedIn Creatives

LinkedIn is a great tool to have for any brand aiming to leverage a digital presence and increase brand awareness. The platform offers multiple ad formats, including Sponsored Content (single Image Ads, Video Ads, and Carousel Ads), Message Ads (previously called Sponsored InMail), Dynamic and Text Ads.
Sponsored Content appears on users’ feed and aims at sharing relevant content with your audience. Video ads are important elements on the platform since they tend to show a higher engagement rate.
Message Ads work well for lead generation. A short and sharp CTA goes hand in hand with Message Ads since they are a direct line to your network.
Dynamic Ads help you create a personalized experience for your audience. This is achieved by developing personalized ads, tailored details, and data taken from LinkedIn members’ profiles.
Text Ads are compelling pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) Ads. It’s a great format to reach your target in minutes and boost brand awareness.

Step 5: Measure the Results Constantly

Constantly measuring the outcomes of your advertising campaign is vital to optimizing its performance. Setting up clear KPIs and measurement metrics (Step 2) enables you to direct your resources towards the most efficient campaigns and allows you to make better-informed decisions. Constantly keeping track of CPA and ROAS values for each of the campaigns reveals the best practices to maximize your ROI. If you feel numb about analytics, feel free to reach out through the form to discover the opportunities to collaborate. Partnering with Google (Google Premier Partner) and Facebook we help brands take control over their data and bring measurements to the next level. We’ll gladly do the same for you.