Reversing your Advertising Process

Most of the time advertisers work in one direction. We come up with an advertising concept or message, create an ad that matches, and then fill in the missing pieces between that ad and a completed scale: landing pages, forms, lead magnets, promotions, sales collateral and so forth. Then we want to improve things, we go back to our pieces and try to figure out how we could improve them. Poor CTR – Try tweaking the ad copy. Not enough sales – offer promotion.

Many big companies recognize this and use surveys or focus groups to try to get inside the heads of their target audience. However, that sort of in-depth research can be a bit hard to pull off. So we end up taking our best guess and making tweaks instead. This works well enough most of the time, but what do you do when your best advertising ideas still aren’t delivering adequate results? In this situation, it may be helpful to try reversing your advertising process. Instead of coming up with different ways to catch your customer’s eye, start by looking at what your customers are responding to on your website and landing pages.

Google Analytics – The easiest way to do this is to take a look at the messaging on the top-performing pages of your site. Landing page reports tells you how many people landed on a particular page and then went on to convert on your site. In other words, regardless of how they got to your site, these people saw something they liked on your site and converted. Once, you’ve identified the elements that make a particular page deliver the results you’re looking for, you can use that information to come up with a great ad.

Right Ad Strategy – When you get right down to it, you don’t really want people to click on your ads. You want people to convert. If people aren’t converting, every click you pay is a waste of money. Typically, most people recommend that you match your landing page to your ad and then split test your landing page. Instead of keeping the ads the same and testing the landing pages, keep the landing page the same and test different ads.

Identify one of your top landing pages and come up with a few different ads that match the messaging of your landing page. Then, set up a split test in your ad platform of choice and see which ad produces the best conversion rates. Most online advertisers see the journey from click to conversion as two separate processes, CTR and Conversion rates. Since we’re trying to reverse-engineer our advertising, we’re going to assume that the conversion rate of our landing page is directly influenced by the type and quality of traffic we’re sending to it. So, if our ads send better traffic to our landing page, our conversion rate will naturally improve.

Limitations – Reverse-engineering your ads from your landing page and site content comes with its own set of disadvantages. Conversion data only tells you what worked for the people who have converted, it doesn’t tell you much about what might work for new audiences. This approach is most helpful when you have quite a bit of existing conversion data and want to use that data to come up with new advertising ideas.

Online advertising is something of a tricky process. You know what you want to say and who to say it to, but figuring out the best way to say it can be hard. Your current customers have already given you a lot of information on what makes them want to convert. All you have to do is use that data to reverse-engineer an advertising strategy that really speaks to your audience.