If you’re investing time and money in social media advertising and marketing campaigns or using LinkedIn or Google ads to reach your target audience, you want to get the most bang for your buck.
While there’s no magic wand to ensure your paid search and ad campaigns hit the mark and convert every time, there are strategies to help you boost your conversion rates.
Let’s look at your ad optimization from two angles: how you run your ad campaigns and how you manage your ad spend.
Optimizing Your Ad Campaigns
Campaign optimization is the first place to start. Let’s look at different components you need to be on top of.
Monitor Your Metrics
Each ad platform has its own analytics tools, and though, for example, Google Analytics can be a bit daunting to new users, there’s plenty of good stuff to explore.
That being said, you may not need all the tools available to you. Focus on what you care about. Does your click-through rate give you the best indication of the success of an ad? Cost per click? PPC? CPA? CTR? Or are you just looking for brand awareness? How do you measure that?
You may also want to look at elements of campaign performance like the times of day that you’re seeing the most conversions, as well as which demographics you’re reaching.
Focus on Your Copy
Campaign performance depends heavily on what you communicate with your ad copy. Not only does it need to be well-written from a grammatical standpoint, but it also needs to fuel a fire in your audience to take action.
What does your ad compel people to do? Keep it simple and focused on one action: click a link to a landing page, sign up for emails, or make a purchase. Use words that invoke a sense of urgency. Buy now! Limited offer! For 3 hours only!
Test, Test, Test
Even if you think you’ve written the most perfect ad ever, you still need to test different versions of it. With a/b testing, you can run two nearly identical ads to see which does a better job of connecting with your audience.
Make one small tweak between the two. You might use a different image or header, or a different call to action. If you change more than one element, you won’t know which element spurred the better results.
Zero in On Your Audience
I can’t say enough about the importance of really, really knowing your audience. It’s easy to say, harder to put into practice. It may be tempting to choose a wide swath of people in Facebook ads (or Google, or wherever you’re advertising), but the more narrow your demographics, the better you can reach the exact audience that will buy from you.
There are also tricks you can use to corner more market share. Facebook ads let you target people who like particular pages (maybe your competitors’?). And you can use remarketing to show your ads to people who have viewed your website.
With Google Ads, you can block certain people in a demographic from seeing your ads so you focus on those who are most likely to convert. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “gifts for women,” you might opt to not show the ad to women, since men might be the most likely to actually buy products from this search.
On LinkedIn, you can narrow down your target audience based on location. If it matters where people live, focusing your ads within a certain geographic area can ensure you optimize your ad spend.
With Instagram, you can look at who’s already engaging with your content to shape your advertising, knowing it’s likely to hit home.
Promote Your Best Content
There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel when it comes to your advertising and marketing efforts. Pay attention to the content you’ve published on social media that’s getting a high number of likes, shares, and interactions
Optimizing Your Ad Spend
Now that your ads are running smoothly, targeting your ideal customer, let’s talk about your ad spend. Ideally, your bidding strategy would be to pay as little as possible for search terms and ad sets, but that doesn’t always happen with all the competition for keywords out there.
The fact is, you’ve got to spend money to make money. To get a solid return on ad spend (ROAS), you may have to increase your budget significantly. That doesn’t mean blindly spending on ads. You need to carefully monitor your cost per click (CPC) or another conversion metric.
You must constantly watch performing ads because what was killing it last week might be a dud this week. As your ad conversions rise and fall, you can make bid adjustments accordingly. You may want to increase your ad spend for an ad that’s doing phenomenal in Google search results and pull back from your investment in one that’s costing money but not converting.
You might see better results on one ad platform than another, and you can shift your budget to the one that’s making money.
To sum it up, to optimize your ad spend, you’ve got to constantly pay attention to how your ads are doing and reallocate your spend where it makes the most sense.
Your New Favorite Tool for Optimizing Ad Spend
Here’s a little-known secret that can help you hugely with your ad campaigns: having the right payment method.
So many advertisers struggle in using traditional credit cards to cover astronomical digital advertising budgets. They might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks on ads, but those credit card companies sometimes see the high spend as a red flag and freeze their accounts.
The ad manager has to then call the bank to get the issue resolved. Meanwhile, those ads aren’t running.
It’s an issue, yes. But the good news is that there is a solution: dash.fi. It’s a virtual credit card that allows you to spend on ads with a 10-20x higher credit limit than traditional cards. And you can have unlimited cards to use across all your ad campaigns and advertising platforms.
Earn Cash Back on Ad Campaigns
Not only does dash.fi eliminate the headache that advertisers have been facing in using traditional credit cards for ad spend, but it also offers impressive cash back to users. In your first two months, you can get up to 3% cash back on your ad spend.
Consider for a moment how much you spend over that period. Yeah. That’s a lot of cash back. You can use it to invest in a new campaign, buy sneakers for your entire team, or even purchase a pet monkey for the office. We won’t judge how you spend the money.
Keep Campaigns Running with Automatic Payments
When you don’t have to worry about your credit card freezing because you’re spending high amounts, your ad campaigns run smoothly. With dash.fi, you can automatically pay down your balance so your credit is always available for ad spend.
High Credit Limit to Support Big Budgets
You have a big ad budget and you need a credit card that can keep up. No other credit card offers the limits that dash.fi does. When you’re not impeded by a low limit, you’re able to optimize your ad campaigns without worrying about having to make daily payments on the balance.
Using dash.fi is one of the smartest optimization strategies you can have when it comes to advertising on social media and search engines. Period.
