At a high level, this is how we build ad campaigns:
Objectives and Strategy
Targeting
Creative
Landing Pages
UTM tagging, analytics, integration, goals
Pixels, optimization
Reporting
What is the goal of the ad campaign? What are we selling, and what is the process? We need to identify the key performance indicators that will determine the ultimate success of the campaign.
Who’s buying what we’re selling? Where can we best reach them? We need to build out a targeted persona(s), and decide which ad platforms are most likely to bring us success.
This is where key messaging comes in. We need to develop both ad creative as well as a landing page(s) for the campaign. The goal of the ads will be to get a prospect to click through to the landing page. But the landing page must take the transaction over the finish line. It must establish trust and credibility in order to get the prospect to take our desired action.
You cannot look at ad creative and landing pages separately. They must be seen as two halves of the same transaction.
Making use of powerful tools like UTM tagging, Google Analytics, and ad channel pixels can help provide valuable insights into the performance of your campaign. All of these technical elements need to work together to tell the whole story.
Typically, we do the following for each ad campaign:
Create a Google Tag Manager account, or gain access if one already exists.
Ditto for Google Analytics.
Create the “pixels” for each ad channel we’re using.
Implement Google Analytics and the pixels through Google Tag Manager
Create conversion goals within Google Analytics. This can include obvious ones like sales or form submissions, or leading indicators for success, such as session that last five minutes or longer, visitors who look at four or more pages, visitors who scroll beyond 75% of the page depth, etc.
Ensure that the newly created goals are set up properly within the ad channels.
Implement UTM tagging on all the ad creative URLs. This ensures that proper campaign, source, medium and content information find their way into Google Analytics.
Using Google Tag Manager can make this process a lot easier to manage going forward.
Once our campaign is in market, we need to regularly update it. Typically this involves “keeping winners and killing losers.” This process varies by ad channel, of course.
Within a search campaign:
What searches are bringing us results? Are they relevant? Should we exclude certain terms, and add in others?
Are our search terms grouped together appropriately? Search campaigns work best when targeted keywords are grouped together by similarity. This allows us you to tailor your ad language to more closely match these keywords. And you can also implement variations of your landing page to more closely match those keywords as well.
Which ads are underperforming? Can we tweak their content to test different language, or should we simply pause them?
Are we paying the right amount for our clicks? Should we adjust our bids to capture more clicks, or make them more affordable?
How are our campaigns performing with respect to demographics? Are there age groups, locations, genders, etc. that are top performers? If so, we can shift budget to them, and potentially stop showing ads to underperforming groups.
Within a social media campaign:
Which ads are underperforming? Can we tweak their content, imagery or video content to test variations?
Which audiences are performing the best? We can shift budget to them. We can also create new audiences based on new data, such as introducing a remarketing audience, or creating a new lookalike audience.
How are our campaigns performing with respect to demographics? Are there age groups, locations, genders, etc. that are top performers? If so, we can shift budget to them, and potentially stop showing ads to underperforming groups.
Within a display campaign:
Which ads are underperforming? Can we replace them with new creative?
Which topics, audiences and placements are performing the best? We can shift budget to them. We can also introduce new placements to test, as well as new audiences for remarketing or lookalikes.
How are our campaigns performing with respect to demographics? Are there age groups, locations, genders, etc. that are top performers? If so, we can shift budget to them, and potentially stop showing ads to underperforming groups.
As you already identified your goals and KPIs at the outset of the campaign, what you report on can, in theory, be relatively straightforward. The real challenge with reporting tends to be the tool you use, the frequency with which you report, and analyzing the data.
We like to use Google Data Studio. It’s an extremely powerful product, and with some third party help, can integrate with all the common ad channels (as well as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and much more).
We like to keep our client-facing reports as simple as possible. We resist the urge to complicate, and let me tell you – the struggle is real! Ad campaigns produce so much data. The temptation to hit your client with the fire hose can be overwhelming. But if you focus on the high level data that your client ultimately wants to see, you can produce a good report.
We focus on KPIs. If this is website sales, we show the number of sales, and the overall return on ad spend. Our client spent $10,000 on ads and sold $20,000 in product, which is a 200% return on ad spend. The client does not care what the cost per click, clickthrough rate, or engagement scores are.
That said, we also prepare a more detailed report. This does include data such as CPC, CTR, social media engagement, top performing ads, top performing keywords, top performing audience segments, etc. This report is particularly useful for two reasons:
It helps us to optimize the campaign on an ongoing basis.
It can be used to provide additional colour and insight to our client on a less frequent basis.
Highlighting to the client which audience segments, interests, behaviours, ads, keywords, etc. that produced the best results can be very interesting. We typically provide this information less frequently (e.g. monthly), and present it during a live meeting. This allows us to collaborate with our client on what the additional data means to the campaign and the client’s organization. We can then make decisions about what we should do going forward.
As an added bonus to this discussion, here is a list of software we use to streamline our processes:
Asana for task tracking and project management
Basecamp and Slack for project communication
Balsamiq for creating quick and simple wireframes (great for landing page ideation)
Instapage landing pages (Unbounce is great, too)
Google Sheets for developing ad creative (very valuable to tracking character counts and building UTM-enabled URLs)
Google Tag Manager for pixel installation
Google Analytics for website performance tracking
Google Data Studio for campaign reporting
Our clients also use Email (duh), Trello, WhatsApp, Monday, Databox and myriad other tools. We’re always happy to work within existing systems to make our clients’ lives easier.