Here’s how the magic happens

At a high level, this is how we build ad campaigns:


Objectives and Strategy

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.

Targeting

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.

Creative & Landing Pages

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.

UTM tagging, analytics, pixels, integration, goals

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:

Using Google Tag Manager can make this process a lot easier to manage going forward.

Optimization

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:

Within a social media campaign:

Within a display campaign:

Reporting

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:

  1. It helps us to optimize the campaign on an ongoing basis.

  2. 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.

Software Tools

As an added bonus to this discussion, here is a list of software we use to streamline our processes:

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.

Let’s Chat About Your Next Campaign