Avoid These Online Advertising Mistakes and Save Your Marketing Strategy
These days you don’t need to head to Hollywood to make it big. You just need a YouTube account and something of interest to share.
With the right technology, anyone can do anything, including online advertising. What used to be exclusively used by advertising companies can now be managed by anyone. You just decide which platforms to use and sign up. Businesses are increasingly going it alone in attempts to add online advertising to their marketing strategy.
But these tools that are making the world more accessible, are adding to its danger. If you’re going to play the stock market and don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to end up broke. Online advertising is not something to do on a whim.
Take note of these five common mistakes and avoid them.
- Not Understanding of Failing to Notice Location Options
How many times have you seen an ad on Google that had nothing to do with your location? Chances are, it was a result of a marketing strategy not using targeted location.
When setting location in AdWords, look out for the small + tab. This opens up advanced options. The default setting will be “People in, or who show interest in my targeted location.” So if you place an ad for rings and the searcher is looking for engagement rings, they’ll see your ad, even if they are in Iceland. Avoid this by choosing “people in my targeted location.”
- Placing Ads on Your Own Sales Sites
AdSense is a pretty easy way for websites to fill their marketing strategy inventory and make a bit of extra money. It’s typically a good fix for bigger news websites, blogs and sites that don’t usually sell online.
Often, though, you’ll find these ads on small business sites that don’t realize the ads can do more harm than good.
Placing ads on selling sites doesn’t tend to generate much revenue and, even worse, it takes customers away from your site. It also opens an option for your competitors to promote their goods on your site.
- An Advertising Yes-Man
Being a yes-man is a no-no. A lot of advertising platforms tend to highlight features that sound amazing but may not really work to your advantage.
Take AdWords as an example. When opting for the bid strategy, you’re able to use “Enhanced PC.” What this does is allow AdWords to raise your bids as much as 30 percent to get you better placement.
Sure, it does that, but if you set a particular budget and forget about this setting, every time you raise the budget means you will be increasing the 30 percent allowance.
- Failing to Understand a Platform’s Algorithms
You really don’t need to be an engineer, but you do need a general gasp of how your chosen platform will work for your marketing strategy.
Going back to AdWords: searching is based on relevance, or the Quality Score. So the more relevant your ads, keywords and landing page, the higher the quality score. That also means the less you will have to pay per click.
Looking at Facebook, every user has an actual value based on how active the users are on the site. Users who spend money on Facebook have higher values than those who don’t. Let’s say you have an audience of 100k users and even though the suggested bid is $2, you place it at $0.50. What you’re doing is telling the algorithm that you only want to show users who have a value of $0.50.
If those users make up 10% of your entire audience, your true audience is actually 10k users and not 100k. Since your budget is set to reach 100k, it’s only going to show the ads to the 10k $0.50 users in your audience repeatedly. Your frequency eventually gets too high and you end up spamming the audience, making your costs higher. The worst thing is that you won’t ever even reach the value audience you wanted to begin with.
- Your Own Competition
Talking about bidding, it’s way too easy to get carried away. Most of the online platforms make it very easy to overspend by suggesting you pay to beat the competition.
So you fear that if you underpay, your ads won’t appear as often. But that doesn’t mean you should be overpaying.
Bid according to your marketing strategy ROI, don’t bid according to ego. Overpaying puts your competitors into overdrive and raises bids for everyone.
Sure, there may be cases where your competition is trying to buy your keywords. Just make sure you have a higher quality score than them and beat them to it.
Should You Take On Online Advertising Alone?
It depends on the scope of your business, your budget, the results you’re hoping for and your willingness to get online advertising spot on. There are advantages to running your own campaigns like monitoring your branding and spending but be aware that it takes a good amount of preparation, time and very possibly, frustration. You need to do your homework, have an intimate understanding of the inner workings of the platforms you choose and which settings to opt for.
If this all sounds incredibly daunting, outsource your online advertising to a professional. Rosy Marketing can take you through the entire process and ensure your brand and business gets the online advertising recognition it deserves while steering you towards favorable marketing strategy ROI.
Get in touch for a free consult.
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