source: TheNextWeb |
I had an unlimited budget. I could spend as much money as I wanted on whatever ads I wanted. But I had to be profitable. I was working in-house for a technology company. We had aggressive revenue targets and I wanted to play a major part in making that happen. I managed to grow ad spend from $3 million to $6 million per year because I found creative ways to profitably scale my campaigns.
I crushed our revenue targets. Here’s what I learned.
The creative is everything
This is true across every major paid media channel, be it Google, Facebook, Youtube, whatever. A good creative trumps everything else. No amount of planning, research, targeting, or audiences will have as big of an impact as your creative. A good creative will get you tons of clicks. There’s so much machine learning and AI built into digital ads now and they’re trained to look for early engagement signals.
The algorithms will start giving you an increasing amount of exposure because they’re trained to make money — and engagement makes money. The key to this step is to always test new creatives and find what works best for your company. For example, what didn’t work a year ago could work now, so don’t be afraid to revisit past failures and try to breathe fresh life into them.
If you’re struggling to create your own creative, draw inspiration from other industries. If you’re in e-commerce, a good step would to analyze what’s working well in the mortgage or auto insurance industry. Those highly competitive industries breed insane amounts of innovation because failure to innovate means falling behind the competition.
Creative fatigue is real and happens faster than you think, particularly on fast-paced content sites like Facebook and Youtube. People want to see something new, and your brand new ad is only new for a day.
The house always wins
I’ve sat through countless demos for all the major bid management platforms. Marin, Kenshoo, Quantic Mind, and more.
They’ll all try and convince you how they’re better at bidding than Google. But they all have one thing in common: they have really good marketing and sales teams who come up with all kinds of slogans, testimonials, and case studies. Their entire job is convincing marketers their systems can outperform Google.
One of their sales guys gave me this great analogy for Google’s Target CPA algorithm:
Target CPA is like buying a car and telling the salesman the highest price you’re willing to pay right at the beginning. Of course they’re going to sell you the car at that price, but you could’ve gotten it for less.
Technically true, but if you’re not using Target CPA, then you’re leaving conversions on the table. Google’s bidding solutions crush companies like Marin and Kenshoo for one main reason: Google optimizes at the search query level.
Read more at TheNextWeb
