How Businesses Are (Unknowingly) Hurting Their Own Digital Ad Campaigns

When a business, especially a new and budding company, launches its ad campaigns on Google or social channels such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc, it's natural to get excited. You look forward to seeing the positive results. A digital marketing specialist or agency is going to take care of the ad functioning and performance from the technical point of view.

If you don't have a digital marketing consultant, consider hiring one. Never fall in the trap of doing everything by yourself. Digital marketing consultants are specialists for a reason. They are going to take care of the digital ad copy and corresponding creatives, keywords to be used, testing and optimization of ads, landing page review, ad quality score, tracking conversions etc.

Assuming your digital ads are now running. What do we do next? Usually as a business owner, we can't just wait and watch. We are curious to see how your ads look in searches. We anxiously start expecting sales / leads almost instantly. Below I talk about three common acts that businesses do out of ignorance that negatively affect the performance of their paid campaigns:

1. Searching for your own ad on the Internet

Out of curiosity, businesses attempt to find their own ads on google or social to see how it looks, or just to make sure that the ad is running as expected. More often than not, chances are that you won't be able to find your own ad on the internet. Or if by chance, you were able to view your ad on the internet the first couple of times, you won't be able to view it subsequently.

But you need not worry. It's actually an indicator that your ad is running as expected. And it is actually a feature of Google that serves ads to only people who are interested on specific topic or keywords. So if you repeatedly search a particular keyword or company name but don’t click on the ad, Google assumes that you are not interested in that ad and stops showing it to you.

Also, defined ad settings may prevent showing ads too, e.g. google showing your Ad A at 8am can be completely different from someone else's Ad B showing at 5pm. So you searching your ad will not only not show your own ad, but also hurt your paid campaign as well. Particularly when such ads are designed to be paid by each impression / view / click, it means for each time an ad appears in searches or each time an ad is clicked on, the company is paying for it. If multiple people are searching for an ad but not clicking, it lowers the click-through-rate (CTR) of the ad, thereby decreasing the quality of your ad, meaning your ad will be shown lesser in searches. Same applies for ads on social platforms as well.

To summarise, do not search for your ad and do not click on your ad if visible, as you are indirectly paying for such activities.

2. Considering 'sales' as the 'only' default ad objective

Don’t assume that if your digital ad is not giving you sales, then it’s a fail. Although the end objective of each business is to generate sales, however, each brand or offering will have its own journey. The objective of your ad is going to depend on at which stage is the brand / offering at a given point in time.

Example, if a brand new to the market, is planning to run the google ad, then the objective of your ad cannot be 'sales' or 'leads conversion'. It has to be 'brand awareness' since it’s a new brand or service. We need to create curiosity / interest in your brand first. So your sub-objective can be 'website traffic', 'awareness' or 'consideration' of your brand.

So depending on the where a brand / offering is in its journey, ad objective should be decided. Each brand has to undergo this journey, and skipping the milestones to directly expect 'sales' will do no good to your ad campaigns.

To summarise, objectively identify the key milestones of your brand's digital journey and set realistic goals from paid digital advertising.

3. Not allowing ads enough time

Here I would like to take reference from the 'cocoon and the butterfly struggle' story. It starts off with a man who is obsessed with butterflies. One day he came across a cocoon with a tiny opening, indicating there's a butterfly struggling inside to come out. Man watched this struggle for more than 10 hours but still butterfly showed no sign of coming out of the cocoon. Becoming impatient, he cut open the cocoon with a pair of scissors so butterfly could come out. He was overjoyed seeing the butterfly free, but it was not all OK for the butterfly - she came out with swollen body and weak wings. Man didn’t know that fluids formed in a butterfly's body during struggle help in her growth. Moral of the story is that even good intentions can prove disastrous if coupled with ignorance.

Similarly digital ad campaigns also take time to show the kind of results we expect. They need constant monitoring and optimization. A lot of things have to go right for a successful ad campaign.

If you are running digital ads for the first time, ensure all the vitals like correct ad copy, audience targeting, conversion tracking, landing page hooks, sufficient budget, keywords research, etc are in place.

Then allow the ads to run for atleast a week while continuously monitoring it so you can get sufficient data-driven insights from google analytics for ads optimization and AB testing.

To summarise, trust your digital marketing advisor and be patient with digital ad campaigns. Results will come at the right time. Also be open to learnings and its execution in the forthcoming ad campaigns.