Why Paid Ads Can Take Time To Get Fully Optimized

Paid digital ads, either through Google or social media platforms, have quickly become a very common component of strong digital strategies for companies of just about any size. As companies continue to migrate larger portions of their marketing expenditure to online options, it’s easy to assume that digital ads simply take the place of traditional advertising methods.

Digital ads easily differentiate themselves from traditional ads by allowing companies to better target and modify their ads to produce quantifiable data and results. However, many companies abandon their digital ads before they’ve had the chance to fully produce the results they’re capable of. In the end, it comes down to having the patience to allow paid digital ads to incubate and cultivate the data available, which will then lead to maximized clicks, leads, and web traffic.

Paid Ads Can Be Worth The Wait

While you can achieve significant success through organic search marketing, complementing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and online content strategy with a comprehensive paid online advertising strategy will put you in a position to get more traffic, achieve better brand visibility, and bring in more qualified leads and eventually sales.

Why Progressive Business Owners Invest in Online Marketing

Online advertising is very attractive to business owners. Not only is it easily measurable, but it’s also highly sophisticated with the ability to focus on dynamic audience segmentation and targeting. With paid ads, it’s possible to target very specific parts of your demographic for more effective marketing. The benefits to having this ability are obvious your marketing dollars will only be used to entice customers that are more likely to buy your products or services. Essentially, you’re only paying for traffic that comes to your site.

If you start using paid ads, however, and are disappointed by the results you initially get, you need to be patient. As mentioned, it will take time for your ads to be fully optimized, regardless of the budget you start with. This is why:

• When you start a new paid ad campaign, you’re not yet getting enough clicks and hence your click-through-rate (CTR) may be lower. It takes technique, monitoring and data analysis to build this metric for your ad.
• When a new ad is created, the ad source will also track secondary metrics such as keyword to ad relevancy, ad to landing page relevancy, and website load time.
• Until your campaign can be graded, it won’t be equally shown along with other advertisers that have proven track records and high performance scores.
• Generally, it can take up to 21 days before your paid campaign really starts to gain momentum and demonstrate its potential. Of course, it may not just be the incubation period that’s slowing down your new campaign. If you’re not seeing a steady increase as you approach the three week mark, then it’s time to review your campaign and make changes to improve effectiveness. An experienced and qualified Paid Ads partner can certainly help you maximize and optimize your ad budgets. If you have been using a DIY approach with not much success, we invite you to discuss your campaign with us.

How To Improve Your Paid Ads Success

In addition to giving your paid ads time to become ranked and evaluated, it will also take some trial and error before landing on the most effective ads for your business. If you find, over time, that your ads are still not performing as expected, try to make changes in some of the following key areas.

1. Structure of the Campaign.

First, you need to set the structure of your campaign based on your advertising goals, for example: a call campaign to encourage people to call you; or a display campaign to raise awareness of your products.

2. Bids.

If you’ve set the wrong bids at the start of your campaign, it won’t matter how much time you wait, your campaign will never perform.

• If your average position is below six, you’re most likely bidding too low.
• Similarly, if your ad position is consistently positioned at one, you may want to review data as the chances are you are getting some tire kickers and wasting your ad dollars.
• In addition, If you bid too high, you risk limiting your budget and not getting as many clicks out of your daily budget as you could with a lower bid. It might sound contradictory, but by decreasing your position and CPC, you’ll sometimes see an increase in clicks.
• If you have a lot of keywords where your bidding is below the first page bid estimate, consider increasing your cost-per-click (CPC).

3.Budget.

Most small businesses set their budgets relatively low and are then met with high bidding requirements that can cripple their chances for success. If you’re bidding for a top position and your budget is being exceeded every day, try these options:

• Lower your overall CPC on high-spending keywords.
• Pause high-spending keywords to allow cheaper keywords to get more clicks.
• Pause broad match keywords.

4. Keywords.

If the keywords you choose don’t come up in many daily searches, your campaign will never really gain traction. You can review your keyword list and remove keywords with that are labelled as having low search volume.

Need More Help Finding The Best Way To Optimize Your Paid Ads?

Using paid ads can be a big game changer for your business, but it does require knowledge and strategy to create ads that work. You’ll need to revise your approach often, not only at the initial onset, but also in the later stages of your campaigns. If you’re not confident that the paid ads you’ve created are being properly optimized, it could be time to connect with an expert in the field who can help you get the return on investment you’re after.

Measure Marketing helps clients across the GTA and North America and Europe build digital strategies that will grow their company, generate qualified leads, increase revenue, and bring you the results you want. To learn more about our expertise and how our digital marketing services can help fuel your business, contact us for a consultation.