With over a decade in the Digital Marketing industry, I've crafted and put into market hundreds of successful digital marketing strategies, spanning from quick, week-long sprints to year-long evergreen campaigns. But launching a campaign is just the beginning of my journey. The real adventure lies in analyzing data, fine-tuning strategies, and ensuring every campaign reaches its peak potential.
That's why I thought it would be interesting to offer a glimpse into my thought process during a typical day or week. You'll see what I analyze, adjust, and optimize as I continuously strive to enhance campaign performance.
So, take a look inside my mind as I share some of the key questions I ask myself when managing campaigns—and the strategies I employ when the answers aren't quite what I expect.
1. Am I spending enough on my ads? Am I spending too much?
Why it matters: When we develop a digital advertising strategy, we recommend how much ad spend will be needed to be effective. This is built off the projected audience size based on our ad channel research and the goal for the campaign. Because this is just a projection, once a campaign is launched, we need to review how our ads are serving based on the daily and weekly ad spend allotted, since being off in those projections could mean spending more money than we need to or not having enough.
What to review: After about a month of data collection, we can review budget allocations by checking ad frequency (how often each user sees our ads). A frequency of 7.5 means the average person saw the ads 7 to 8 times. Depending on the campaign goal, this might signal a need for adjustments. I typically aim for a frequency between 5 and 7 per month for most campaigns.
How to solve for: If we notice the ads have a frequency of 20+ over the month, this would be a clear indicator that we have overshot the budget necessary to make an impact and can reduce the budget. This doesn’t happen often, but it’s something to remember when audiences are very small to begin with, as we don’t want to annoy our audience with too many touchpoints! On the flip side, if the ads have a frequency below 3 over a month, this is a sign that the campaign could use some more budget to get in front of our audience more often.
2. Why are some of my ads in an ad set receiving all the budget?
Why it matters: One thing campaign managers have to constantly keep an eye on with Meta campaigns (Facebook and Instagram) is how their algorithm automatically gives the majority of budget to some ads in an ad set and leaves other ads with next to nothing. Most digital ad platforms leverage AI to support optimizing your campaign, looking for indicators that users might be more likely to convert on one ad over the other. However, we’ve found that often, the platform takes action too early, not collecting enough data to make an informed decision.
What to review: Often times we’ll see one ad getting the majority of ad spend (like 80-90% of spend) even though it has a lower CTR, higher CPC, or fewer website conversions compared to other ads. This can even happen just hours into a campaign, where after just a few dollars worth of spend, the algorithm identifies a “winning” ad and begins serving it over the others.
In simpler terms, it’s not optimizing for the truly best-performing ads—it may even be doing the opposite.
We usually like to see each ad spend at least $50-$75 before we make any decisions because this would ensure each ad saw 15,000+ impressions—plenty to know if the audience is interested or not.
How to solve for: One of the best courses of action is to simply pause the ads that are receiving the majority of the budget and allow the other ones to catch up. Allowing our ads to each spend a similar amount makes it much easier to analyze their performance and determine if one is truly performing better than the others.
Luckily, LinkedIn’s ad platform avoids this issue by letting us choose between even ad rotation vs. performance optimization. We start campaigns with "Rotate Ads Evenly" and then, after spending a few hundred dollars and gathering sufficient data, switch to "Optimize for Performance."
3. Why is the CTR low on one ad compared to the others?
Why it matters: Click-through rates (CTR) are a great indicator of engagement, so we are constantly looking at this number and tracking it over time. The higher the link CTR, the more people we’re getting to the site.
What to review: So, let’s say we’re looking at an ad set of 5 single image ads on Facebook: 4 of those ads have a CTR over 1%, but one of them has a CTR of 0.5%. Should we be concerned?
When one ad is slightly underperforming, it’s not necessarily time to sound the alarms and pause the ad, but instead a great time to take a look at that one ad compared to the others to understand why it’s an outlier. Some things we consider would be:
- Is there language used in the other ads that make them more engaging?
- Is the graphic used in the underperforming ad less eye-catching?
- Could the headline be improved in the underperforming ad?
How to solve for: We will take some inspiration from the ads that are performing well to update the underperforming ad as a first step. Maybe we’ll try swapping out the headline or updating the body copy to see if this improves the CTR. If not, we’ll take a look at the graphic. Maybe we’ll try swapping out the image with an image from an ad that is performing well. After a few rounds of changes, if we’re not seeing improved metrics, it may finally be time to pause the underperformer and reallocate budget, ensuring we learn from each of our tests moving forward.
4. Why has my CTR dropped?
Why it matters: We already touched on the importance of CTR as one measure of ad performance. So, when we observe a decline in CTR, we’re likely also talking about a decline in traffic to the website and website conversions. Sometimes we’ll even see that what used to be the best-performing ad is no longer crushin’ it. What happened?
What to review: Check to see when this decline began. Was this gradually happening over a few months? Did this happen suddenly?
How to solve for: If this occurred gradually over a few months, it’s likely that the ads have just become stale and it’s time for a refresh. In this case, we’ll whip up some new, slightly adjusted copy and designs to re-engage our audience.
If this occurred suddenly, we’ll check to see if there were any negative comments left on the ads that might be harming our performance and either respond to them or hide them. If that’s not the issue, we’ll try duplicating and restarting the ad, as we may have just experienced a glitch, and this could help get the ad back up and running.
If we’re still experiencing low engagement, it might be time to revisit some of the campaign messages, visuals, or offers overall.
5. Am I reaching the intended target audience?
Why it matters: Audience relevancy is everything! How do we know we’re reaching the right people? Are there any segments that are interacting with the campaign more than others? Any early indicators that we’re reaching our tended target audience through ad or website data, ahead of that tied to purchases or leads, are important for a campaign manager to review.
What to review: Answering this question is easier on LinkedIn than most other platforms because it provides detailed user data, helping us fine-tune campaigns. Although LinkedIn is pricier, the insights into who engages with our ads are invaluable.
For example, LinkedIn's demographic reporting by Industry shows impressions, clicks, and CTR. If one industry gets the most impressions but has a low CTR, we’d consider adjusting targeting, messaging, or the offer.
This same type of LinkedIn analysis can be done for Job Function, Job Title, Company, Company Industry, Job Seniority, Location, and more.
For other ad platforms that offer less of this data, we have to look at other indicators to know if we’re reaching the right audience. Some things I like to look at:
- Quality of leads captured: We typically recommend asking for job title and company name on any forms.
- Engagement metrics by age or country: This may help narrow in the audience to just focus on the highest-performing age groups and locations.
- Comments by users: We always look at the comments on the ads and consider whether the users’ profiles or comments themselves look or sound in-line with those of our intended target audience.
- Website engagement data in GA4: Are website visitors performing the actions we’d expect? Are they bouncing often when they get to the website?
How to solve for: Using the data available, we’ll then make tweaks to the targeting inclusions and exclusions, the ads themselves, and more to improve performance over time, especially when we feel we’re not reaching the intended target audience.
Additionally, sometimes we will break the audience down further into segments to compare performance. For example, if we wanted to see the difference in engagement between doctors and nurses compared to physical therapists, we could break them out into separate ad sets and compare.
6. Is my retargeting audience matching well and large enough to serve ads to?
Why it matters: When building out audiences, we are always cognizant of the audience size, and we do our best to expand our targeting as much as we can to ensure we’ve got a sizable pool to serve ads to. This is no more important than with retargeting audiences, in which an idea will sound great on paper but not be possible to launch once we’re able to review our client’s actual data.
Some common retargeting audiences we consider are:
- Retargeting those who visited specific web pages
- Retargeting those who visited our dedicated landing page but did not convert
- Retargeting those who abandoned their cart
- Retargeting those who watched 25% or more of a campaign-related video
- Retargeting customers who have not purchased in 3 or more months
What to review: This is best vetted at the campaign planning stage, as some ideas just won’t have enough data to be powered. For example, if we’re trying to retarget those who visited a specific web page, but over the last year there were fewer than 100 visitors to that page, we likely won’t see much success running ads to them.
We’d start by building out the retargeting audiences, either in the ad platform or by sending an audience through from a marketing automation tool or customer data platform like Marketo, HubSpot or Lexer. Once we see it in the ad platform, we can set up a mock campaign to get a sense of how many impressions they’d serve on average.
How to solve for: If an idea is too small to warrant targeting, we may need to go back to the drawing board and see if there’s another relevant audience that is a little larger. Otherwise, we may just need to wait until the audiences have enough members in them to begin retargeting, potentially adding to them through other ads and targeting in the same campaign. Patience is a virtue!
7. Are my placements resulting in junk traffic?
Why it matters: Some ad platforms have an expansive list of ad placement options, including some placements that are on external websites and apps. Meta and LinkedIn, for example, allow us to serve ads on third-party mobile apps. We never run ads on these placements, though, since it’s highly unlikely that someone would want to pause a game or exit out of an app they’re using to learn about another company—and if they do click on the ad, it’s probably accidental, and they will quickly exit out.
We are also very intentional with our placements because we typically design ads specifically for each since each placement has different specifications. For example, the story placement on Instagram is a tall placement that fits the entirety of the screen with just a graphic, while an in-feed placement is wider than it is tall and has copy that accompanies it. If the wrong placement is chosen, the platform may auto-resize, leading to poorly formatted ads.
What to review: It’s crucial to double-check placements before launching a campaign, as the wrong placement can significantly harm performance. Some platforms, like Meta,
show the performance of the campaign by placement, so if the audience network has been turned on (AKA those third-party sites), the reporting will show that.
Also, reviewing the performance of the campaign in GA4 might show low engagement from certain ads, such as a high bounce rate over 90%. This can be an indicator that the placements may need to be tweaked. (This is also why it’s so critical to leverage link tagging via UTM parameters so you can quickly identify which placements might be seeing poor engagement website-side!)
How to solve for: Simply adjust the placements accordingly to ensure the ads are serving in the correct places, and turn off all audience networks as they will almost always result in junk traffic.
Is that all that’s going on inside my brain?
Of course, not! There are hundreds of other questions that I’m asking myself and researching when I’m managing campaigns, but I would need to publish a book the size of a dictionary to share them all. However, I hope this offers some insight into my world as far as just a few of the things I’m running through on a day-to-day basis.
If you want a team of strategists on your side who eat, sleep and breath digital advertising—and know all the questions to ask— connect with us today!