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Working with some of the largest brands and agencies in the world has granted me insight into how different advertisers grow their presence online. I have learned from extraordinarily talented marketers and been left dumbfounded by the poor advertising decisions of others.
Regardless of how good or bad they are, however, most advertisers seem to fall short of perfection by making critical mistakes in their digital advertising strategies.
These are the 10 most common missteps among advertisers today:
10) Running Inconsistent Messaging Across Partners
Poor organization and careless planning are shockingly prevalent traits among advertisers of all sizes. Brands are regularly caught advertising price points that aren’t accurate or deals that are no longer available.
The large number of partners online advertisers are working with at any one time is certainly a factor, but this is far from an acceptable excuse for running incorrect ads.
Guaranteeing consistent and accurate messaging simply requires proper organization and efficient communication with all partners. Not doing so can result in low conversion rates, users who are turned off by ‘lies’ in the ads that had deceivingly lured them in, and missed opportunities when good deals aren’t properly advertised.
Digital advertising is a very competitive, and often difficult, medium. Advertisers shouldn’t make it harder than it needs to be by avoiding making mistakes that are within their control.
Advice: Be organized! Develop processes that let you keep track of the changes you’re making on every channel and frequently check to make sure that all live messaging is accurate.
9) Not Exploiting Seasonal Opportunities
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Black Friday, Christmas, tax season, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, the list goes on and on. There are dozens of different seasonal opportunities that advertisers take advantage of to generate above average ROI. Any advertiser who doesn’t realize the potential in running seasonal offers, and there are far too many who don’t, is simply being lazy and uncreative—not to mention foolish.
Seasonal opportunities give advertisers a free pass to easily connect with the general mindset of their audience, allowing them to easily engage with users a step or two farther down the funnel than they normally would. I have seen brilliant ad campaigns that exploit seasonality, such as a dentist who advertised teeth whitening before Valentine’s Day. These campaigns are very frequently a resounding success.
Unfortunately, I’ve also seen advertisers with much more obvious seasonal fits continue with an unchanged, boring campaign year after year, as well as online retailers who run zero Black Friday/Cyber Monday initiatives after Thanksgiving.
In an industry where connecting with a user’s intent and mindset is vital to succeed—search marketing has proven this with its wildly effective model—it is a huge mistake not to take advantage of seasonal opportunities that help establish a deeper connection with an advertiser’s audience.
Advice: Run campaigns for every seasonal offer that makes sense for your brand. A little creativity can go a long way in developing a relationship with a user who otherwise may not have been interested in your product.
8) Sticking To The Same Strategy
Digital advertising is a rapidly changing medium. The way marketers approached online advertising a year ago is very different from the way they treat it today, and it will change yet again next year. While many advertisers have chosen to evolve alongside their developing ecosystem, many others have fought the inevitable transformation and stuck with the same old strategy, which is a huge mistake.
Marketers who have been slow to adopt a mobile strategy, who refuse to look beyond their Google and Facebook campaigns, or who have had the same landing page for three years because it ‘works very well’, will either grow much slower than their competition, or die off altogether.
Testing a new channel or creating a mobile website requires work and costs money, but the investment won’t be nearly as expensive as the loss of a customer who can’t find you or who is unable to properly interact with your business.
Advice: Be open to testing new media and be nimble and ready to adapt to major digital shifts.
7) Not Attributing Performance Properly
Digital advertising has brought a historically unprecedented component to the marketing table: measurability of performance. Advertisers can know exactly how their ads perform and quickly act on data to improve their campaigns.
However, to accurately perform these optimizations, advertisers need to know more than just how they’re doing; they must also know who drove the performance. This is where proper attribution, which is incredibly important, comes in.
There are a lot of attribution models out there—first click, last click, shared credit, etc.—and understanding which model makes the most sense for them is a problem advertisers typically struggle with.
This struggle is particularly prevalent in mobile advertising, so I’ll focus on that by using e-commerce as an example. Smart e-commerce advertisers know that users, while slowly warming up to the idea, are still not entirely comfortable with shopping on their phones. They’re aware that same-session conversion rates will be drastically lower on mobile than on desktop, which is fine.
Smart e-retailers reach enormous audiences via mobile and know that those users will often convert shortly thereafter on desktop. Non-converting users can otherwise be targeted via e-mail remarketing until they do—or until they opt out. These smart advertisers will attribute this type of desktop sale, even if just partially, to the mobile campaign that brought the user to begin with. Less savvy advertisers will not attribute these sales to mobile at all, and often end up pausing mobile campaigns that are actually creating enormous value for them.
Understanding where performance is being generated is essential to making accurate optimizations and budgeting decisions.
Advice: Attribution requires a thorough comprehension of the digital space you’re in and of the way your clients interact with your product. Don’t just pick a trendy attribution model because everyone else is using it; determine a model that works for you.
6) Not Paying Enough For Traffic
Partly due to the obsession with low front-end costs and partly because of advertisers treating everything like a Google Search campaign in which bids are their main lever, a big problem among advertisers is their obsession with low CPCs. But why do high CPCs matter if performance is good? They don’t!
Most great ad channels offer multiple types of optimization levers for campaign management. If an advertiser’s only approach to improving performance is to bid down across the board, they’re probably not managing their campaign successfully.
Although seemingly counterintuitive, bidding up can often result in better performance for an advertiser. Higher bids can unlock access to superior, more competitive inventory or to better, more viewable ad placements. Good traffic is often more expensive because it performs well and advertisers are actively competing for it. Bad traffic is cheap because it doesn’t work. Folks seem to forget that.
Advice: Don’t be afraid to bid high! Test different bidding levels to identify if you’re missing out on higher quality traffic. And don’t be afraid to ask the channels you’re on for some sort of bid landscape—you might not get it, but it never hurts to ask.
5) Focusing Too Much On Front-End Metrics
Front-end metrics are disturbingly popular in mobile among app advertisers who obsess over cheap—and often incentivized—installs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. This focus on front-end value affects advertisers of all kinds, mobile and desktop alike, who place a stubborn emphasis on cheap leads instead of realizing that more expensive leads can turn into higher value customers and much more profitable campaigns.
Let’s do a quick exercise to illustrate the problem. Which of the channels below is more lucrative?
This is elementary school level problem solving, but many advertisers don’t look beyond lead/install cost. Advertisers who harp on front-end metrics while ignoring the importance of measuring lifetime user value and back-end conversion rates are making an enormous mistake and are doomed to fail.
Advice: Determine the lifetime customer value of your channels and set your front-end goals accordingly. In channels where users convert at very low rates, a seemingly low lead cost may actually be far too expensive when the full funnel is evaluated, while a high cost channel might turn out to be a bargain because of how much value its users bring.
4) Not Auditing Their Conversion Process
An advertiser can have a brilliant ad campaign with captivating ad messaging that has high user engagement and leads to a crisp landing page, but if it’s not easy for users to perform a desired action (a purchase, a lead submit, a signup, etc.) upon arrival, then it all goes to waste.
Too often have I seen advertisers drive ad campaigns to terrible conversion processes and then blame the inevitably poor performance on the quality of the traffic they’re buying when the problem is in the page itself. I’ve also frequently heard advertisers say that they’re done testing their flow, claiming there are no more changes to be made.
This mentality couldn’t be more foolish or shortsighted. There are always tweaks and improvements that advertisers can make to their conversion process; it’s a constant process that should never stop.
Advice: Webpage optimization services are not just for landing pages. They can help advertisers audit how users react to every page on their website, and can drastically improve the efficiency of their ad spend as they optimize user data.
3) Not Optimizing Their Landing Pages
Many advertisers do a great job of luring new users into clicking their ads and visiting their site. Sadly, some of these advertisers then do a terrible
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job of keeping these users around for long once they get there.
When a person clicks on an ad and reaches a landing page, the advertiser only has 500 milliseconds to convince them to stay. This means the advertiser must very quickly convey a visually appealing experience, a very clear call to action, and a great value proposition. It’s not easy to create this fully encompassing message and share it with new visitors in half a second, but it can certainly be accomplished.
Advice: Use webpage optimization services (such as Optimizely and Adobe Target) to improve the performance of your landing pages and make a killer first impression.
2) Not Testing Properly
Those who are active in testing are a step ahead of their competition, but maximizing its value can only happen if the tests are done properly.
This includes setting up fair A/B tests and effecting final evaluations on results only after statistically significant data has been collected.
I’ve often witnessed advertisers looking at the data before it’s statistically significant and making drastic changes to their strategy simply because initial results look promising. This is a huge mistake; it can result in a bad decision that would have clearly been erroneous had they waited for the test to be fully significant.
Advice: Make sure your tests are both fairly structured (set up a control group, split evenly via A/B testing, etc.) and that you collect statistically meaningful data before using the results in decision making.
1) Not Testing Enough
Online advertising has left print and outdoor advertising in the dust and is set to overtake TV spend by 2016. There are various factors behind this takeover, foremost being the ability to granularly measure the performance of ad campaigns. Online advertising allows advertisers to know exactly what’s working and what’s not, and to track all levels of user behavior along the way. This allows them to tweak campaigns and determine if those tweaks result in positive results.
Unfortunately, advertisers don’t exploit the power of data nearly as much as they should. They should test ad text, colors, wording, landing page design, conversion flow, pricing, and every other variable in the book—and they should be testing them all the time.
Advice: Test, test again, and then test some more! The access you now have to determine what works and doesn’t work for you, and to proactively act on it, has never been this affordable and available. Make testing your best friend and you will very quickly witness the results pay off in your favor.