How to Optimize a Digital Campaign

There are many ways to optimize a digital campaign. But in this blog, we walk through a few tips to quickly make the biggest impact on the performance of your online marketing initiatives. But first, let’s walk through the basics.

What is campaign optimization?

Campaign optimization is the process a marketer takes to attempt to increase performance in different digital channels. A few examples of these marketing channels include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, etc. By following a digital marketing strategy framework, your team can quickly increase performance and drive more revenue through paid digital channels.

Which KPIs are most important while optimizing digital channels?

Before you do any channel optimization or optimize any specific marketing campaign, you must first decide what key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to improve. From platform to platform, those KPIs will vary. However, there will always be a few constants. For example, here are a few KPIs that you will want to optimize whether it’s Paid Search, Display, Facebook, etc. These KPIs will be a major part of your digital marketing strategy.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

This is your conversion value compared to the amount spent on ads. This is a great indicator of how efficient your entire paid marketing pipeline is, from the first click to the checkout process.

Cost per Click

Although it is always important to pay the right amount to beat competition for those premiere spots, you never want to pay too much per click. If you are overpaying, it will be nearly impossible to have a profitable campaign in any channel.

Conversion Rate

Getting people to your site is only half the battle. From there, it is vital that you look at every small detail on your site to maximize conversion rate so you can drive in revenue. Consider making your check-out process as seamless as possible, adding compelling headlines and images, and social proof to the deal. People want to know what they’re getting into is worth the investment, so it’s your job to convince them it is.

How to optimize Google Ads campaigns

In this section of optimizing digital campaigns, we will be focusing on Google Ads. When optimizing a digital campaign in Google Ads, there is a very easy way to go through the necessary steps to cover your bases. Here are a few of our recommendations.

Add Negative Keywords

The first place to start in a campaign is to see what search terms are being searched based on your keywords. Oftentimes, you will find that many search terms that trigger your ads are not completely relevant to your business and are therefore wasting marketing spend. Negative keywording the phrases that are causing irrelevant searches will quickly optimize your marketing spend and increase conversion rate and Return on Ad Spend.

Use Auction Insights

If a large majority of the search terms are relevant to your business, we would recommend looking at the Auction Insight report next. Oftentimes, there will be a competitor that is outranking you regularly and causing you to have a lower Click-Through Rate and even Conversion Rate. If this is the case, increase your bids on your keywords, or you can go as far as changing your bid strategy entirely to see if that can help overtake your competition in Impression Share.

Increase Quality Score

We have written other pieces on how to improve your quality score. In summary, your biggest ally in increasing quality score, which will lower your Cost Per Click, will be testing different ad copy. By testing additional ad copy in your ad groups, you will slowly start to increase your ad relevance. When you are creating this ad copy, ensure that you are including the keywords you are bidding on in the Headlines and Descriptions. In addition, ensure that those keywords are also present on the landing page you are sending users to.

One of the many great things about Google Ads is if those new ads don’t perform as well as the original ad copy, Google won’t show them as often, so there is no reason why you can’t create additional ads to attempt to increase your quality score!

What is Ad campaign optimization?

Ad campaign optimization utilizes best practices to improve online ad performance and ensure that the organization’s goals are met. An optimized ad campaign tells audiences a compelling story about the product or service and draws in positive online attention. Campaign optimization affords premium level conversion rates and click-through rates (CTRs) for paid search.
Ad optimization allows organizations to save time and money by positioning Google or Bing ads correctly. Search engines showcase the product or service to relevant users easily, making the ad a sound investment. A range of optimization strategies exists from simple keyword targeting to bidding on Google, as shown in this infographic.

To generate a good quality score and produce optimal metrics, an ad campaign includes negative keyword lists to ward off unwanted digital traffic, targeted ad groups with relevant keywords, clear call to action and a defined objective.

Key business benefits of Ad campaign optimization

By analyzing their needs and optimizing ad campaigns, organizations can achieve the best return for their digital advertising investment in the following ways:

• Improved metrics. Write effective ad campaigns that attract digital traffic, increase click-through rates (CTR’s), conversion rates, and raise the quality score on Google ads. An ideal quality score, which is the sum total of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages, can result in a cheaper cost per click (CPC) and better ad positioning in Google.
• Build out keyword lists. Through optimization, organizations can create a database of keywords to pull from, saving time for future ad campaigns.
• Better Google bids. Using data from past ad performance, organizations can decide how to bid better, saving time and money.
• Streamlined advertising strategy. Organizations can understand the impact of ads better with the additional data resulting from optimization efforts.
• Ad value. Optimization provides data that allows organizations to enhance their ROI.
• Precise targeting. Organizations can build user profiles of target audiences through the trial and process of optimization.