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!

Other Bid Adjustments

If you have done all of the above, and are still not getting the results you’d like, there are probably other ways to cut out wasted spend. For example, pull a report on your campaign by day of week/time of day. There is likely a time during the night or a certain day of the week where performance is much lower. By eliminating serving ads during these times, you will quickly increase performance by funneling your spend into high converting times.

There are many other ways to increase performance in your Google Ads campaigns, but you will find that these are the highest impact, lowest effort methods to get the quickest impact on your KPIs that matter to your business.

By following these steps, your team can systematically optimize your digital marketing campaigns and overall strategy and drive more revenue for your business. To learn more, visit our pages on improving your cross channel marketing performance.

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