There are plenty of digital ad guides out there, and most of them do an incredible job of explaining the benefits of digital advertising and how you can use it to enhance your business – whether by getting more leads, spreading brand awareness, or any of the other various goals digital advertising can achieve. However, as with any learning endeavor, we often find the confidence of ‘tutorial land’ seems to keep landing us face first into the pitfalls of real world practice. With that said, I thought it important to begin with the top 3 things you probably should know before starting, so that you may (hopefully) avoid some of the most common mistakes made in digital ad campaigns.
Number One
How to Set Proper Goals
The word ‘goals’ comes up a lot in life, and even more so in marketing. In fact, double that number again when we’re talking about digital advertising. If you’re here to learn about managing your digital ad campaigns, you probably immediately thought of the “Campaign Goals” you saw when you were setting up your first Google Ads campaign. I’m here to say no, we’re not talking about those goals. In fact, I don’t think you should worry about those at all right now (or ever… we’ll get into that in a later article.)
For these purposes, I’m talking about your actual business goals – or, the reason you’re running ads in the first place. This is going to sound like a simple one, and you’re going to be really tempted to just skim right through this. Please do not! Proper goal setting in the beginning leads to a much smoother ride down the line. We’ve all been in a situation where chance brought us to the high road, only to find we forgot to learn how to drive.
Maybe I’m a bit dramatic with my analogies, but knowing your goals before beginning any business endeavor will make the entire journey much smoother in a few ways:
Benefits of settings goals for your campaigns
- Tracking Your Progress – Imagine you start a business and you don’t set a revenue or profit goal. How do you know you’re succeeding? If the answer resembles “number go up,” you have a problem. Setting a goal you can measure and work towards let’s you know if you’re on track every step of the way.
- Seeing The Bigger Picture – To avoid missing the forest for the trees, a good ‘step back’ is always warranted. Setting goals, writing them down, and analyzing them allows you to do exactly that while you’re still in the planning phase. Catching inefficiencies is a lot more fun before they start causing problems.
- Creating A Growth Plan – What happens when we hit our goals? Pizza party? Undoubtedly, but then we set new goals and work towards those. Pretty soon, you’re tracking progress, hitting ever increasing goals, and just like that your business is growing. Best of all, you look like a pro.
I can go on, but if we spent all day talking about a plan and not going through with it, we haven’t done very much at all.
What Goals Should I Set For My Ad Campaign?
Luckily for you, I have a whole article that goes into common digital advertising goals. Go ahead and read or bookmark that one. For now, i’ll just list some of the most common goals.
- Increasing Traffic
- Generating New Leads
- Increasing Sales / Revenue
- Raising Brand Awareness
Your goals may change depending on your business and your current needs or growth plan, but the practice of setting proper goals still holds true. To ensure proper goal setting, we make sure that our goals are “SMART.”
What Are ‘SMART’ Goals?
SMART is an aptly named acronym that you can (and should) use to test if your goals are proper.
- Specific – A goal is specific when it has an exact number or measurement attached to it. Saying that you want to “increase revenue” is not enough, as you won’t really know when you’ve actually hit the goal. A more specific goal is to “increase revenue by 25%”
- Measurable – Goals that can’t be tracked or tested can never be proven or disproven. The previous example does this by setting a specific and measurable goal of increasing revenue by 25%. Through internal reports, we can measure our revenue and see if we hit the mark.
- Attainable – Goals should be attainable for a few reasons, but we’ll go with the less obvious ones for now. Try to always think on the shorter term for your goals. You may be able to increase revenue by 200% over 10 years, but it may not be feasible in the next quarter or even year. Set goals that you can hit to keep you moving forward and keep business morale up (yes, pizza parties work.)
- Relevant – Goals should be relevant to your current business objectives. It’s hard to find an example of a time where increasing revenue isn’t part of a business’ current objectives, but it is possible that other initiatives have a higher priority.
- Time-Bound – Finally, and most importantly, goals should be time-bound. I’m always tempted to place this higher on the list, but breaking the acronym just seems wrong. The original example, “increase revenue by 25%,” is almost perfect. It’s specific, it’s measurable, it’s attainable (we’re assuming), and it’s relevant. However, without a time gate on it, we are at risk of silently failing at our goal. What if it takes us 3 quarters to reach the goal? Great, but what if we set the goal at 25% by next quarter? Instead of waiting 9 months to know if we succeeded, we could have put in an action plan 6 months ago to increase revenue further. Keep yourself and your team accountable by setting time-limited, attainable goals.
Whenever you set a goal, test it against these 5 terms. If it fails any one of them, adjust the goal so that it doesn’t. Our example “increase revenue by 25%” failed the final check, so we simply adjust it to say “Increase revenue by 25% next quarter.” Often times, you’ll find your goals are already 3/5 or 4/5. A simple and small adjustment can make a world of difference without a major impact to the team or project.
Number Two
Keyword Management, Not Keyword Research
Once again, I’m probably guilty of being a bit dramatic here. Keyword research is important, and, in many of the resources I’ve seen, it usually is grouped in with the larger practice of ‘keyword management.’ I’m writing this for the new guy hearing terms for the first time and assuming (like many others) that research is done before the fact. The number of guides out there for keyword research is astonishing, but it leads many first time digital marketers to think they can ‘set and forget’ after they’ve done some really fantastic keyword research.
Check out my article if you want to learn a bit more about keyword research and how it relates to keyword management. For now, we’ll discuss what keyword management means and how it often gets lost in translation.
Imagine we’re far into our ads campaign by now. We’ve done all of our keyword research, set up all of the fancy trackers and tools and business has been rolling along. All of a sudden, leads start coming in less. Sound the alarm bells? Maybe ignore it and hope it’s an anomaly? After all, you did your keyword research.
Well, research without management leads to “run aways.” The keywords you found that you loved so much? So does every other competitor in your business area. While you were away taking calls, the CPC on one of them was rising rapidly, eating away at your budget and stealing clicks from your other keywords. I’ve seen plenty of “set and forget” accounts that hired me to find out why their leads started dropping, only to see a single Ad Group or set of Keywords bleed their budget dry. Look at your campaigns, keywords, and search terms regularly (I do at least once a week), and start picking out “run aways”.
However, proceed with caution. It’s one thing to optimize, and another thing to ‘over-optimize.’ Taking number 2 too far leads me to the final thing to know before starting digital ads:
Number Three
Don’t Chase Rabbits
I tell this to my dog and to all of my clients – and neither of them seem to grasp it too easily. It’s tempting and fun, it gives you something to do, and you feel like if you just get it, your immediate problems will be solved. Yes, I’m talking about rabbits… but i’m also talking about over optimizing, or optimizing too rapidly in your ad campaigns.
In the section above, i talked about watching for ‘run aways.’ While this practice is incredibly important in the ongoing management of your campaign, you don’t want to react too quickly or too often to changes. The problem i’ve seen with a ton of accounts is that they start ‘chasing rabbits,’ making changes every time a KPI changes in their reporting. Even worse, they’re making these changes and tracking their ‘results’ on a weekly basis.
“But Matt,” you might be saying, “shouldn’t we be optimizing regularly like you said?” As the great Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Philosophy aside, it’s important to be able to tell the difference between anomalies and trends. Let’s take a look at them now:
Anomalies vs. Trends
The catch-22 to figuring this out, unfortunately, is that you don’t get a definitive answer to the question until it is too late. Instead, you must assume based on how things progress.
- Anomolies – Happen out-of-the-ordinary and often resolve themselves over time.
- Trends – May start looking like an anomaly, but continues for many reporting periods.
A quick look shows you the problem – how do you know if something is an anomaly or a trend before it completes its course? You don’t, not always at least. The best thing to do is to flag it and go through the checklist of concerns. Ask yourself these questions after flagging:
- Has this happened before?
If this isn’t the first time this specific KPI started to change, this might be a good indicator that it is a trend beginning. - Can you attribute a reason?
Even if it’s a guess, is there something you can point to that happened recently that might cause this? An easy example is budget – if you just dropped your budget, there’s probably a good reason why you’re other metrics fell. - Can you think of a way to effect this KPI?
If this becomes a trend, do you have a general plan of action to combat it? - How long has it been happening?
If it’s the first time you’ve seen this, flag it and keep moving. If it’s been more than 2 weeks in a row, you’re looking at a trend. - Did we just come out of a ‘boost’ period?
This is one a lot of people miss. Things tend to balance out when given enough time or range to do so. If you just did a huge push, had a big busy season, or ran an incredibly successful campaign, your metrics are probably all through the roof. A drop the other way the following month may simply be a correction, rather than a trend.
These are a few examples of the questions you should be asking yourself when deciding what to do about a change in your report. With these in hand, you can set a plan, set some goals, and watch your KPI with confidence. Another important note to keep in mind is to try not to make weekly changes. Things tend to balance out over time, so while it’s ok to view reports weekly, keep the changes to near a monthly basis to be safe.
In Conclusion
Now that you have this knowledge, hopefully you can avoid some of the common digital advertising pitfalls. If nothing else, you can impress your friends with your deep knowledge of the industry! To summarize, let’s touch upon the three things I wish I knew before starting digital advertising.
- Set Proper Goals
- Goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-limited.
- Manage Your Keywords Regularly
- Keyword research is just the first step (maybe even step 0.5) in managing an effective search campaign. After finding your keywords, watch how they perform in the real world and adjust them accordingly.
- Make Changes Strategically
- A counter balance to number 2, always remember to watch before making changes. Data tends to balance out over time, so what looks like a drop in your weekly stats ends up being growth in your monthly.
That’s it for this one! Stick around as we go more in-depth into Google Ads and other strategies.