DIY AD AGENCY: Launch
DIY Ad Agency is an article series focused on giving entrepreneurs and business managers some of the basic tools and strategies they need to start advertising their business products and/or services with the budget they have available. If your budget is tight, but you have the dedication and attention to detail to succeed, you can leverage this series to turn a small advertising budget into a profitable campaign.
Other posts in this series:
Part 1: Plan
Part 2: Launch
Part 3: Measure (currently viewing)
Bill Gates once said that if he had one dollar to start a business, he’d spend the first $0.50 on advertising. And if you’re reading this, you’re likely in the throes of an advertising campaign and are looking to understand marketing measurement, marketing key performance indicators and the Golden Question; “So? Did it work?” This means that we need to measure our campaign throughout the campaign and following the campaign. If we are only measuring at the end of the campaign (90 days) we are measuring correctly.
“Did it work” should be first measured against overall goals, beginning ten days after campaign start. In Part 1 of DIY Ad Agency: Planning, I addressed planning with a most basic thought process here:
Goals were set during planning and you can see them above:
10% growth in customers
Move to 46 sessions per month (currently at 17 sessions)
The Massage Therapist would have likely reformatted goals, knowing that he didn’t have the marketing budget to move his business with $375.mo in a three month period from 17 sessions to 46 sessions. It’s important to note that both 10% growth in customers and dramatically increasing from 17 to 46 sessions a month are aggressive goal-sets. When reviewing your goals against results (will get to the Therapists results soon), its important to always re-set expectations.
Some expectations that may have to “goal re-set” throughout the 90/day campaign period ($375/mo) budgets might include:
Drive more traffic to my site
Find relevant people who spend time with my content (improve time on site in google analytics)
Though these goals are not sales related, they are often Key Performance Indicators for future campaigns. Again, if you jump into advertising and only ran one campaign, there are more that need executing before non-anecdotal insights are made.
First 10 Days of Your Campaign
For the sake of measurement, lets assume the campaign was running three months with a total budget of $1125. Here’s some action items for each channel that we’re measuring.
During the first ten campaign days on:
Google:
Verify Ad Serving of your Keywords
Ensure your ads are serving impressions to your keyword list. An easy way to do this is to log into adwords and look at your impressions. A more advanced way is to visit your AdWords dashboard, select the campaign, then visit the keywords tab, select details and dropdown your auction insights. Here, you will be able to see how you are positioned in the market and against competitors. Here’s an example below from another Thought House (our WordImpress ad agency) campaign:
Note that this particular campaign, the client is receiving only 10% market share. That’s ok, because of large competition like Amazon and 800-pet meds. Sometimes lower share is necessary because you “just don’t have the budget”. When this is the case, we bid lower, to ensure our budget goes further.
Improve Your Focus with Negative Keywords
Improve on your “broad focus” by increasing relevance through “negative keywords”. As explained in planning, when setting up Google campaigns, we always want to “start broad, then get narrow”. A good way to get narrow is to use negative keywords. First, start at the campaign level, then select the keywords tab. The click details and drop-down ‘search term report’. You can then select the keywords that are “not relevant”, but receiving impressions and make them “negative”. This will stop the ad from appearing, reducing CPC and irrelevant traffic. Some folks would argue to start with “exact match”, but this goes against our broad to narrow principles and therefore we prefer this approach:
On Facebook
The first ten days on Facebook, as our strategy is opposite Google, “narrow to broad,” we need to focus on engagement and overall traffic lift.
Stay narrow if you have very small budgets
Because our spend was planned low for Facebook ($50/mo), our first ten days will likely “eat a lot of budget”. Therefore, if audiences are not responding, continue getting narrower with your audience segments to save ad dollars. This is very easy to do. Within the ad campaign, select, edit campaign, visit your targeting features, and delete some targets.
Twitter:
The first ten days of Twitter will open up your eyes to the way the world really works. This real time “UserAP” news feed for anyone who has an internet connection and a keyboard is fascinating.
Verify Your Ads Are Serving
The twittersphere moves really fast. Because the campaign only has a small budget ($50/mo) with a few hastags you need to ensure your ads are serving up. Verify how users are engaging with your hastags: #massage #badmassage #serenity #backpain. If those hashtags aren’t “engaging”, change them fast, do new research and get new targets. Maybe we need to target #travelling #planeride instead or in addition.
Improve Your Ads with More Hastags
If your engagement rate is less than 2% on Twitter, I’d suggest improving your ads. It’s very easy to do. Visit your twitter ad area, select modify your campaign and add in more hashtags.
Take these very simple steps to optimize your campaign during the first ten days and you’ll likely improve the outlook and spending ability of your limited budget for the entire campaign.
After 30 Days of Your Local Marketing Campaign
So, your campaign has been running for 30 days and you’ve spent the first $375 of your $1125/budget. Since 33% of the budget has been flushed into the Google, Facebook and Twitter ad machines, its time to look at traffic, business lift and measure that original goal: Get more sales!
If you haven’t setup your Google Analytics and conversion goals correctly, go here immediately and get them setup!
Once your conversion goals are set up correctly the focused questions should be:
Did I get visitors into my campaign conversion funnel?
Are visitors engaging with my content?
From which source are these visitors converting the best?
To determine these answers, I prefer to utilize my Google Analytics account rather than the programmatic buying engine each of the publishers. This allows me to holistically analyze the campaign.
These screenshots tell a story that needs more discovery and digging:
In the screenshot above, I like to start with the Acquisition portion of Google analytics. This screenshot — from an anonymous client — shows several items from the campaign over the last thirty days. First, it’s clear my organic, referral and direct traffic have better viewership and engagement than “paid ads” and “social traffic.” As an action item, I would strongly recommend,
Look into how these campaigns are setup. 24 and 51 seconds respectively are much lower than organic or referral sources.
Dive into both those social and paid channel areas and explore what is driving “time on site” so low.
On the flip side, look at who the main referrers are and determine why that audience engaged so well.
This screenshot tells an insightful view and begs several questions. 1) Why are paid ads and links just flat out not performing here? When time on site is so low, bounce rate is so high and the difference in conversion rate is so stark between referral and paid campaigns, we have a direct indicator that creative and messaging (actual content and media on the pages) are not performing with our intended audience. If this is occurring, that should trigger a red flag. Make an action item to do something about your creative and/or content!
In addition to browsing Analytics I would look into your last thirty days leads and customers pool. Can you directly attribute any of your new leads and clients to paid campaigns. In the first month, I would simply be looking for a “sniff that I’m getting traction.” Do not, do not, DO NOT, stop the campaign if you have yet to generate a lead or sale. Instead optimize with the practices mentioned above.
If you were confused or didn’t understand this section or the references, check out Google’s free Analytics academy.
After 90 Days of Your Local Marketing Campaign
Now that you’ve got a good grasp on the advertising platforms of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, your marketing campaigns will have likely improved upon your local marketing practices. Regardless, its now time to measure holistically.
Start with the beginning. Where’s the beginning? Well, it’s not when the campaign first launched. The beginning is when you started planning. Start with:
Did I perform the research to reach the right audience
Did I talk to folks who love and hate my product?
Then follow up with: How do I think my creative and messaging worked to target these visitors? Did I change it throughout the campaign or did I let it run regardless?
Now, prior to looking at the sales data against your $1125 total budget, consider a few things:
Was the time and energy I put into this worthwhile and did I get something out of it?
Or should I really look for a freelancer or professional agency to handle my marketing?
This might seem like an obvious question, but it’s a really important part of balancing the time you spend as the business owner. These profound questions must be considered when asking the question, Did it work?
As for KPI’s over the campaign, I would create a spreadsheet that has the following data.
Total Ad Spend month of month
Total internal hours spent every month
Traffic traffic to my website month over month (and compared to the previous year)
Traffic breakdown based on paid channels (Google, Facebook, and twitter)
Total conversions generated
Cost per conversion based on channel
Now, in light of all of that, keep the goals and budget of the campaign in context. Considering your small budget and your overall Brand lift, there is a lot of context to keep in mind. For example, indexing against your total reach or population can also be great indicators. But since this is your first campaign and your Brand might be near 0% in “unaided awareness”, I wouldn’t make generalization about impressions from Facebook against search engines. Perhaps after you’ve done 5 or 6 campaigns like this, you’ll have better data to compare and draw conclusions from. For now, just focus on learning from the experience and collecting the data to help drive your next campaign.
Lastly, you’re most likely not going to be able to answer the question yet: “did it work”. So keep at it! You didn’t learn how to code, sing, skate, surf, golf, play an instrument or homebrew beer, until you played the game and participated in the activity over and over and over again. Keep participating in advertising and you’ll improve. Over the course of a year, you’ll look back and have gained more insight into your customers and your business than you ever thought possible and all by “DIYing” it!
Here’s to DIY Advertising.