Biggest mistakes I’ve seen on paid-traffic campaigns [Examples included]

Paid advertisement is an efficient way to reach your demographic and start a conversion. Paid advertising is desirable for online companies that are in the B2B or B2C market, because when you already know what you want (your target audience), paid ads can help A LOT in reaching your ideal customers.

However, not every company that jumps into the journey of putting one paid-traffic campaign takes care of some of the most important aspects a user, that could potentially be part of your target audience, faces on a daily basis; and ends up being part of the reason why they end up not converting from you.

Over the days, I spot the same scenarios and outcomes from brand to brand, so today I wanted to share them with you so you can:

• Optimize your performance in these terms if your primary sales channel is online.
• Be aware of these beforehand if you are looking to expand your operations and consequently, your presence to an online channel.

Awareness campaign for e-com with awareness type of campaign instead of conversions

One of the most important questions to ask new clients is “What are you hoping to achieve by running this media campaign?”

The answers we aim from them are either:

1. Trying to raise awareness and increase publicity for a newly released product or service.
2. They could be more established and seeking to improve online or in-person sales or generate more leads.

However, many clients express the need to increase awareness while also promoting conversions. The majority of companies aspire to produce a combination of awareness and conversion outcomes.

As any e-commerce owners’ goal is to transition people already educated about your product into customers, having a “run an awareness campaign” among the options displayed when creating a campaign, many would think that running this type of campaign is what they should do for educating the possible audience and consequently, having them consciously and independently converting into a client.

Wrong! There is a difference in objectives for both of them.

On the one hand, Awareness campaigns are created to introduce a brand, product, or service's distinctive qualities to its target market. Awareness campaigns address the “What’s in it for me?” question that consumers often ask. They adopt an informative and instructive stance, and which objective is set, among other aspects, to advance target audiences along the knowledge timeline, the goal is to build buzz, enthusiasm and interest. As well as gaining awareness on store location and the brand’s messaging.

Conversion campaigns, on the other hand, operate rather differently. It targets people whose likely to purchase your product or service. At the outset, it is presumed that a consumer has already circumnavigated a part of the awareness spectrum. In essence, the prospects are aware that there may be a solution to their issue, and they may even be familiar with the advertiser's brand. We predict that once they are aware of this, they will be more inclined to act or show interest in the good or service being pushed.

Despite needing to build an awareness strategy, it doesn’t mean that both the blueprint and ultimate goal should be conducted under the same set of tools that the awareness campaign offer.

Conversions are the ultimate objective of any overarching campaign plan. Even though a campaign is primarily aimed at raising awareness, the ultimate objective is to increase interest in a good or service and boost sales.

Apart from this, conversion strategies are usually easier to measure since KPIs like CTR, average time spent on site, video completions or engagement over sequencing rates of video watched and visitors to a specific site on your website are some of the data gathered that you can retrieve and use on your favor for the middle and bottom of the funnel.

No congruence between the landing page and link attached to ad (if any)

If you are promoting a specific product and you are simply sending visitors to a generic home page, you are not getting the most out of your advertising investment.

Your visitors are probably not going to take the time to search your entire website for the product or offer that caught their eye in the ad. Instead, they will leave.

To increase your conversion rate, you must ensure that there is a match between the message and the offer by using a specific landing page.

A landing page has one goal: to generate conversions.

To get a conversion, you must provide the user with a consistent experience. Simply put, the landing page's content should be a continuation of the message of your ad.

There should be a clear call to action (CTA) on your landing page that is specifically designed to support your business objective.

Take a look at how Kopari Beauty is doing it:

No different CTA nor offer for different stages of the funnel

It is true this one depends a lot on the type of product you have, is not the same as owning an app and running a paid-traffic campaign focused on App Install than an Apparel store with multiple products line to choose from when setting up the campaign.

Ideally, you want to start testing a few of them for your audience's initial introduction to your brand. Maybe these users want to learn a bit more about your products and services, so you should have an easy path to help them navigate to your most common and lucrative offerings.

Or perhaps they don't even know what they're searching for yet; all they know is that they have a problem and have just begun seeking for a solution. You should develop a convincing CTA to persuade these prospects to see a product overview video or download an eBook if they are interested in doing so.

On the one hand, a potential customer who is a little farther along in the sales cycle and willing to talk with a salesman could be available. You must have a clear call to action that directs these hand-raisers in the right direction.

Take a look at this difference in CTAs for a cold and warmer audience, despite being different brands, the example is very clear:

A/B testing

Paid advertising is not something you can set and forget. To determine which campaigns are most successful, you must run A/B testing and review the metrics.

Ads that are continuously optimized on timelines that are appropriate for your campaigns. To assess whether or not you need to pivot, it's ideal to let certain sets of advertising run for a few months.

Within your campaigns, a split test must constantly be done so you can decide which option will perform better over time by conducting this kind of testing during a campaign. For instance, if you have a pair of Facebook picture advertisements with identical copies, test them to discover which image your audience responds to the best.

See TULA’s example on this one:

Not having an optimized website to drive your audience to

The objective is to turn visitors to your site into paying clients, not to draw them to your website in the first place. If you can't convert visitors, all of your efforts will be in vain, therefore you definitely don't want to lose them halfway through that conversion pipeline.

I’ve shared tons of ways you can optimize the website, up to now, knowing that your website must:

• Be mobile-friendly
• Focus on the products you are advertising
• Have multiple CTAs that are clear and simple
• Place tracking codes on your landing page to keep tabs on completed conversions.

Should be no news. However, is not about knowing about the importance of this, is about actually applying it, your paid-traffic campaign is a catalyst of success if the rest of the online presence is on point.

If you run an e-commerce or your business runs merely online, this is the skeleton of your company, and having it updated is crucial to avoid being framed as sketchy, unprofessional, or ending up not converting, but then blaming the ads’ performance.

You don’t want a lot of eyes on your ads, you want the right eyes, the ones that are likely to buy your products or services. This means that you must spread your messages via channels that will expose them to the appropriate audiences. For instance, LinkedIn could be more advantageous for a B2B organization than Facebook.

If you want to take a look at a highly-optimized website watch this loom below where I audit and walk you through Love from Yours’ website

When you decide to pay for attracting new customers and leads into your business, no matter if it's a professional blogger or someone who is trying their digital campaigns for the first time, it does not mean that you already know everything about paid traffic.

The difference between easy and simple has never been more clear than now. Is really not a labor that would require 80% of your time to put together, but the key is in optimizing and iterating according to the market’s feedback. And not every business owner posses that.

So making sure the person taking care of your marketing approaches on paid-traffic campaigns is crucial if you want optimal performance at all times.

Now that you know this, how prepared do you think your team is?

If you want us to analyze how optimized your paid traffic’s outcome (and all the variables integrated to it), book a free discovery call on our website and we will be happy to give you our outside-of-the-company and expert perspective.