Campaign Maintenance

Are you or your automotive advertising agency currently running a campaign that isn’t performing up to your standards? Campaign maintenance is just as important as the initial build of the campaign. Once your campaign is live and begins to collect data, the algorithm starts to fine tune your settings to gravitate towards users that are ideal for your set targeting. However, we cannot rely entirely on technology. Understanding the data and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are coming out of your campaign, as well as how to make the necessary optimizations to improve those numbers, is the key to running a successful campaign.

Platform Changes

One need for campaign optimizations may be due to platform changes and updates. Although Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. changes are beyond our control, ignoring them can be detrimental to your campaign’s health. One example of this is Google’s transition to using Responsive Search Ads. Search campaigns that are not currently using the Responsive Search Ad format will continue to run, but edits are not going to be able to be made; therefore, restricting future campaign maintenance. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are constantly changing their targeting methods. A big part of campaign maintenance is understanding the changes made in the digital world and staying up to date with?digital marketing trends. As changes are made, we as marketers need to adapt our strategies and campaign settings to meet those new requirements.

Paying Attention to Budget

Budget should be a key focus during regular campaign maintenance. Monitoring how your ads are performing, by tracking how much they are spending can let you know if you allocated too much budget to a designated campaign or not enough. If a campaign is consistently underspending, try some of the below suggestions to enhance performance, or reallocate some of that budget to another campaign. Additionally, setting an ad schedule may be beneficial to your campaign as ads would only run during selected times in order to provide more budget to the campaign on your busiest days.

Finding the Ideal Target Audience

Before a campaign is built, a target audience is developed. Your ideal customer is out there; however, with data privacy restrictions it is becoming harder than ever to find them. Patience is so important when investigating your campaign’s targeting. If performance is low, it is possible that the geography needs to be widened or there are too few people in your designated audience. Using first party data and excluding users that are irrelevant can refine your audience to get closer to your “perfect” customer.

Creative

Creative is the key to getting clicks for display campaigns and social media campaigns. Eye catching ads that offer customers great deals are the steppingstones to up-keeping a healthy campaign; however, campaigns can not be created and forgotten. Creative needs to be updated consistently, especially with dealership offers and incentives. Staying up to date with your promotions gives you the best bang for your buck! Although not visually creative, it is just as important to refresh your search ads and ad copy. Users see multiple online advertisements during their consideration phase in searching for a car and it would be counterproductive to repeatedly show a user the same creative with the same ad copy. Creative updates are arguably one of the most important steps in campaign maintenance because it is representation of your brand. Being outdated could waste ad dollars and lose potential customers.

Setting up an advertising campaign is the first step in a long process of ensuring that your ads are optimized for peak performance. Once a campaign is up and running, it is important to regularly check in on your campaign’s KPIs, budget, targeting, and creative as well as stay up to date with platform updates. Campaigns requires routine maintenance and optimization to run their best for weeks, months, and even years! If you are looking for assistance in maintaining your Google, social and traditional media campaigns,?contact us?today.