Are your digital ads failing you?

You develop a marketing campaign 🎉. It’s amazing. It’s grounded in all kinds of insight, it aligns to business goals, everyone is excited about it and you launch your digital ads in market. 

Then 6 weeks in… they fail👎

The ads aren’t performing well. You aren’t getting conversions, you are spending precious ad dollars on something that isn’t converting and it’s safe to say your ROI isn’t there. 

So what do you do now? And how do you avoid getting into this situation? 

Here are 5 tips I swear by to help avoid these situations 🏆

Do your research 

Assumptions alone can’t predict what your audience will like/won’t. Take the time pre-campaign to check past ad performance as well as what trends are in market. SEM Rush and Meta Ad Library are also great tools to see what your competitors are doing. 

Use the right ad goals 

In setting up digital ads in most platforms you have an option of selecting the ad objectives. This is key if you are being measured on certain metrics. For example, if conversions are your business goal ensure your ads are set up to optimize conversions. This will ensure they are being delivered to users with the best chance of conversions and optimizing actions within the platform. 

Check in on your ads 

Especially within the first couple weeks you want to be checking those ads daily. Expect that it will take a few weeks to optimize performance but you want to ensure you have a pulse on performance so you can pivot if needed sooner rather than later. Setting up dashboards through tools such as Meta and Looker Studio can help in streamlining the process.  

Leverage A/B or Multi-Variate Testing 

When in doubt, test creative in market. This takes the guesswork out of what will do well as the platform will do the work for you. Especially if you are testing new concepts or branding this can be valuable as you will deliver variations in market at the same time and see how your audience engages. Based on that, you can then spend the bulk of your ad dollars where you will get the most impact and stop ads that can harm performance. 

Preview your creative 

This may sound straightforward but you would be surprised how often this happens. In platforms such as Meta when you upload creative it will apply that creative to multiple placements. Now if that creative doesn’t adapt to a story as it does a feed or other ad placements then you can have issues with creative getting cut off, videos not playing and more. No surprise that if your ads don’t look good, nobody is going to interact with them. 

Want to learn more about digital ads? Comment below or shoot me a message!