Elevate your advertising efforts by measuring what’s working and what’s holding you back.
Knowing you want to place an ad or run a campaign is a great first step, but remember to keep track of the valuable insights you’ll gain from your ads in addition to leads and sales.
Planning what you’re advertising, targeting specific types of leads, and deciding on tactics for driving traffic are important metrics to consider when building a campaign.
Leverage Your CRM Software
Instead of thinking of each sale or site visit as trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, manage your incoming and returning customer data with Customer Retention Management software to create a map for next steps of understanding which campaign choices drew which leads to your site, product, service, or brand. CRM softwares consolidate information gathered to help you recognize customers and localize their information for colleagues to more quickly attend to them.
Collecting data is wonderful, but if you aren’t applying what is learned to future exploits and endeavors, the information is essentially useless. Make sure when running report metrics to remember to look for patterns. Some results may surprise you, so remaining open minded to the data and allowing it to inform next steps is vital.
Manage Ad Lead Reports
You can set up your CRM software to automatically sync and compare data directly from Facebook, Google, and other sites to ensure your data is accurate and up-to-date. It’s important, when running reports, to calibrate your metrics to focus on your KPIs or key performance indicators.
KPIs may differ with each campaign, but a a main focus should be Return on Ad Spend or ROAS. Another good metric to consider in relation to ROAS is the CPC (cost-per-click) for determining if ad placement is lacking or if the content itself isn’t resonating with your target demo that’s expected where you’ve placed ads.
Looking at conversion rates or click-through rates can help you reassess the content of the ads specifically as the source of the lack of engagement. Simply looking at number of impressions will only tell you the size of the audience, which is valuable only in relation to the conversions resulting from that reach.
Determining your KPIs before running reports is key to getting quality data for managing your leads.
Know Your Target Marketing Demo
A crucial metric for tracking ad performance needs to be considering the demographics you’re targeting versus the ones responding to your ads to see if you can find a disconnect that’s keeping viewers from engaging more with your ad efforts.
Ask for Feedback
It may seem simple, but the most straight forward path to answers is to ask. Ads give customers a point of reference related to your company that they otherwise wouldn’t have which opens the door for connecting with them.
There are several ways to go about getting information from customers, and each will give you different results. Pop-ups on your website asking users to join an email list could give you a list of people to ask or open doors to creating a personalized email campaign with a call to action being tailored to feedback instead of purchases.
This option also requires minimum investment on the front end from the customer and creates a pool of customers that can benefit from direct email campaigns. Structuring your marketing funnel to encourage users to share information instead of pitching right away might also be a tactic in itself to help drive sales by helping customers feel valued for their contribution and more inclined to purchase.
Imagine Your Ideal Customer
The inspiration for your business or brand likely came as a result of seeing a need that wasn’t being met or wanting to contribute something of value to others. That entrepreneurial mindset can be applied not only to structuring the business but also in understanding your audience and how to reach them. If you build an ideal buyer persona, you get a more focused idea of who you want to reach and can structure your content around aspects of that demographic that relate back to your brand. This extra thought and foresight is a great way to create leads that convert rather than just making noise.
Use UTM Parameters
UTM Parameters, or Urchin Tracking Module, are bits of coding you can add to URLs for generating and tracking Google Analytics. You can track the source site, type of ad, and campaign name all from a click on the structured URL. Additional trackable options include ad duration/term and content so you can tell if clicks came from ads or links that route to the same URL.
This would certainly be the subtlest approach, but the problem is UTM parameters only track the source of clicks, not the human being doing the clicking. While you’ll understand what method is generating the most traffic, it won’t tell you who is within that traffic. A more tangible example of this phenomenon is like a billboard. You can study traffic patterns of vehicles coursing by a particular billboard, but you won’t be able to reliably track who is in each car and what impact each impression has on viewers.
Combine Tactics!
Why use one tactic when a combination can get you results more quickly? Even though business is increasingly digital, the interpersonal connection between you and your customers could be the difference between capturing a sale or handing it off to engaging competitors. Taking the time to understand your clientele is a great way to improve your reach to them while also helping your products and services improve to meet their needs. Leveraging all of this data efficiently will ensure your customers feel heard and valued and increase your value in their eyes.
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