Considerations Before Starting an Ad Campaign

In order to drive more targeted traffic to your website, an ad campaign will accelerate the process very quickly. However, if you don’t do it right, it can burn through your budget just as quickly. Here we discuss some key considerations in deciding on an ad campaign that will have optimal results and give you best return on investment.

Competition and Budget Considerations

Larger ad networks, such as Google, can have such high competition in your market that the cost can be prohibitive for the best keywords. However, alternative ad networks such as Microsoft Ads can deliver qualified traffic at much lower cost per click, albeit in smaller volume.

What are Your Business Goals

Is it to gain customers, grow subscribers, increase product/service awareness, or something else? Your business goals and understanding where your audience can be found are important criteria in determining what ad platforms will work best. Also what landing page would yield best results.

Reporting and Analytics

The campaign needs to have easy to understand and detailed analytics to measure results both on the ad network side and local side. Whether the goals are not being reached or if they are, you need to have the data to make decisions to improve your campaign. Tweaking is also necessary to keep the campaign moving in the right direction.

Develop a Branding Strategy

A successful branding strategy creates a simple and unified messaging blended with visual elements, video, and audio. It will resonate and stay in the minds of the audience even after they see the ad or visit the website. A branding strategy will allow you to create a cohesive campaign across multiple networks.

Reaching Your Desired Audience

Do research of your audience persona and what platforms are they most likely to be on. There may be subsets of your audience on different platforms. Are you trying to reach decision makers in large companies, small business owners, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, family heads, etc.? This understanding will impact which ad networks you will want to use.

Your Campaign’s Objectives

Your ad campaign can combine multiple ads with different objectives. One may be to increase brand awareness. Another can be to sell a specific product or service. Yet another may be to build brand loyalty. Each will have a unique objective, require the message to be tailored, and different ad networks that will work best with each one.

Alternatives to Ad Networks

Think outside the box. You can add to your campaign alternatives to established ad networks. For example, have you noticed by looking at analytics that you get a lot of qualified traffic from a specific website or more? Why not contact them directly and make an arrangement to run your ads by-passing the ad network’s algorithm thus preventing your competitors to also advertise there. Dealing directly with websites where your audience spends their time can have a high benefit to cost ratio.

Scalability

It is important to have control over your budget and be able to scale up or down depending on your situation. You cannot set up an ad campaign and forget about it. That is a recipe for disaster. A successful ad campaign needs to be constantly tweaked so that the expenditure is controlled and goals are reached.