Digital advertising is a powerful, actionable way to get your brand and message in front of your target audience. You can get started with a solid knowledge of your customer, a few choice keywords and a little know-how. Tools such as Google AdWords allow you to easily launch a campaign and let it run on autopilot, but letting your plan roll out automatically is just one of many ways you can create problems for yourself. Here are three other deadly digital advertising mistakes to avoid if you want to make your campaigns effective.
Mistake 1: Failure to Set Goals and Budgets
Before you set up any campaign, you need to define your goals and allocate an appropriate budget. With keyword bidding, pay-per-click and buy-ins, you could soon find yourself overspending — especially if you've automated your process and aren't tracking your metrics.
If your goal is building brand awareness, then success will be measured by exposure and traffic. But if you're looking to reach customers closer to the purchase decision, conversions matter — and quality matters more than quantity. Having clear goals will help you determine where to advertise and how to measure your return on investment (ROI), so you can focus on strategies that are meeting your targets.
Mistake 2: Failure to Diversify
YouTube has more than 1 billion unique visitors each month, according to Search Engine Journal, and around 46 percent of Web users look towards social media when making a purchase. This means that the more places you're seen and the more often your brand gets in front of your customer, the more likely they are to remember it.
But this doesn't mean taking a scattershot approach. You need to know where your customer hangs out — especially on social media, as demographics vary greatly — and you need to track which locations are worth your time.
Mistake 3: Failure to Track
By now, you've recognized the need to track everything that's going on with your campaign and how your customers are responding. One of the great advantages of digital advertising is the real-time feedback it provides on who is clicking, visiting, browsing, bouncing or converting on your website. You can use analytics programs to see which ads are clicked and which aren't, which landing pages work and which don't, which keywords are too expensive and which are profitable, and which search partners are delivering and which are just eating your budget. The bottom line is that tracking allows you to optimize your campaigns, so you know where to stop wasting money and where to spend more.
Many analytics tools are available to help you track and analyze your metrics. If you're using AdWords, check out Google's guide on what to track based on your advertising goals and their tools to help you create tracking URLs. A digital expert can help you analyze your metrics across all channels.
Digital advertising can be a powerful tool if managed properly. Setting clear goals and matching this with an adequate budget, understanding who and where your customer is, and tracking, tracking, tracking are the keys to success.
