The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Ads

Table of Contents

1. What is Ad Optimization?
2. Why is it Important To optimize Ads?
3. What are the various Ad platforms?
4. How to Optimize Google Ads and Facebook Ads?

1. What is Ad Optimization?

Ad optimization implies creating and improving relevant advertisement campaigns for higher ROI based on best practices and data metrics including KPIs on various ad platforms including :

• Google Ads
• AdRoll
• Bing Ads
• Facebook ads
• YouTube Video Campaigns
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Yelp Ads
• Reddit Ads

KEY STATISTICS

• 95% of ad clicks on mobile devices go to Google Ads’ campaigns (WebFX, 2021)
• US social media ad spend reached $43 billion in 2020. This was a 20% increase from 2019. (Source eMarketer)
• 80% of businesses focus on Google Ads for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns (Tech Jury, 2020)
• Global digital ad spends will reach $389 billion in 2021 (Source eMarketer)

2. Why is it Important to Optimize Ads?

Optimizing your ads is important for getting new business and can increase your sales. Some of the key benefits include:

• Get higher ROI, maximize budget, and increase sales
• Explore new customer segments that you didn’t realize were interested in your offering
• Produce content that is more resonant and compelling to your target customers
• Boost your branding with more relevant ads
• Get frequent feedback on and measurement of your campaign’s performance and make improvements accordingly

What are the Different Ad Platforms and Ad Charging Models?

The various Ad charging models are explained below:

• PPC/CPC(Cost-per-click): Each time a valid user clicks on your Ad on Google/Bing search you pay for the click according to your campaign
• vCPM(Cost-per-thousand viewable impressions): Pay for every thousandth time ads appear to valid users
• CPA(cost-per-acquisition): Every time a user clicks on your Ad, you pay Google, and the billed amount gets optimized automatically according to the cost needed to gain a customer or a similar conversion from your website
• CPV(Cost-per-view): Each time your video ad on YouTube gets views, engagement, or clicks, you pay Google.

What is Media Buying?

Media buying is the procurement of media space on traditional channels like radio, television, newspapers and digital channels including social media and websites for advertisement campaigns. Effective planning of media buying is essential for reaching the target audience with the right message.

3. What are the Various Ad Platforms?

The different Ad platforms include:

Google Ads

Google Ads allows you to place your ad campaigns on different web properties:

• Search Ads appearing on search engine results
• Google Search
• Display ads through Google Display Network campaigns
• Google Shopping Ads

The PPC campaigns allow you to customize your target audience, set your budget, and personalize keywords for the searches that you want your ads to appear.

Google Ads allows business owners in:

• Precise Targeting: Show their ads only to their potential customers
• Target specific devices: To select the types of devices on which their ads will be shown
• Pay Only For Results: Businesses pay as per pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model i.e. pay for the clicks on their ads, rather than impressions.
• Performance Tracking: Businesses can monitor the performance of their ads. The number of users that view and click your ad can be tracked.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads allows you to place sponsored ad posts on the user’s newsfeed. You can customize your target audience, budget, and ad composition. It helps you achieve business goals like increasing website traffic, brand awareness, and store visits.

YouTube Ads

YouTube ad campaigns include 6 or 15-second video ads shown before, during, or after the YouTube content video.

They are generally inserted in streaming video content, but you can run your video ads as standalone videos as well.

You can share your business story and reach your target audience. You can start your YouTube video campaign on Google Ads.

On average, though, YouTube advertising costs are $0.10 to $0.30 per view or action, with an average daily budget of $10. That means every time someone views your ad or engages with your ad, like by clicking on a call-to-action, you pay around $0.10 to $0.30

Twitter Ads

Twitter Ads work in a similar way as Facebook Ads. On Twitter’s PPC ad platform, you can choose between eight diverse platforms to achieve business goals like gaining new followers, better engagements on tweets, app installs, and increasing website traffic.

Instagram Ads

Instagram ads are posts or Stories that promote a product or service to Instagram users. They can also include a CTA button to boost traffic or conversions for your business.

AdRoll

AdRoll is a performance marketing platform where digital marketers can reach their target audience on the web and boost conversions using AdRoll’s products. A few features in their product suite include:

•  Artificial Intelligence bidding
• Native Ads
• Ad charging models
• AdRoll prospecting
• Retargeting
• Custom design services
• Dynamic ads
• Integration

AdRoll has various and diverse ad formats, using which you can find the best combination of the creative size and messaging to improve your ROI. AdRoll’s remarketing campaigns are economical. It allows you to set your budgets, create the segments and campaigns, and control the content. Its interface is very user-friendly offering you everything that is required to comprehend your customer data.

Affiliate Marketing
One of the prominent techniques to generate traffic and leads to any business or an ecommerce website is affiliate marketing. It is an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services. In affiliate marketing, an affiliate earns a commission for marketing the products and services of any business. Some of the best affiliate marketing platforms include:

• CJ Affiliate (Formerly Commission Junction)
• Rakuten Marketing (Formerly LinkShare)
• FlexOffers
• ShareASale
• Awin (Formerly Affiliate Window)
• Amazon Associates
• Walmart Affiliates
• eBay Partner Network

4. How to Optimize Google Ads and Facebook Ads?

Optimizing Google Ads

Here are a few ways to optimize your Google Ads:

• Optimize Keywords and Improve Quality Score

Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions. The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores. A low-quality score means fewer clicks and fewer chances to convert.

• Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are certain words that the advertiser doesn’t want to appear in their ads in the user searchers. It helps you reduce the loss of wasted clicks and focus the budget on target keywords that drive value.

Let’s understand this through an example.

Suppose you own a luxury car dealership and only sell new cars. So, if users search for used cars, you don’t want to show your ads to them since they’re irrelevant. To prevent this, you will have to add ‘used cars’ as a negative keyword.

• Targeting Parameters

One of the benefits of using Google Ads is the granularity through which advertises target ideal prospects. Although Google Ads are quite powerful, you will still need to optimize ads so that they are viewed by the right audience and at the right time and place.

Besides optimizing keywords for targeting prospects, Google uses several different parameters for marketing campaigns.

• Optimizing Geolocation Settings

Google helps in refining geolocation settings to target prospective customers.

For instance, your luxury car store is in San Francisco. So, the primary area of your business will be in San Francisco and other nearby towns. Through geolocation targeting, only ideal prospects in or near San Francisco will see your Ads besides the organic search results.

• Optimizing Dayparting Settings

You can also optimize the days or timings of your ad campaigns to be viewed by ideal prospects through the insights you gather about your target customers. Suppose the Ad visits to your website are heightened on Thursday and Saturday. So you can simply schedule Ad campaigns and choose the days of week and timing for your Ad to be publicized.

• Ad Text and Landing Page Optimization

This is the most significant part of optimizing Google Ads.

The best Ad texts:

• Have an appealing CTA that directs the actions of the ideal prospect
• Use a relevant keyword in their headline
• Convey the unique selling proposition to the prospects

Landing pages are call-to-action pages generally designed for a specific product or service. Visitors “land” on it after clicking on a link in an email, or ads from Google Ads Network.

Landing pages provide a call to action (CTA), or branding information, which makes landing pages an ideal option for maximizing the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns and reducing your cost of acquiring a lead or sale.

• Optimizing Ads and Landing Pages Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment means when a prospect adds product(s) to the shopping cart but doesn’t proceed and leaves the site without any transaction. It is vital since businesses lose profits or it indicates the need for a better user experience.

Besides adopting techniques for transparent checkouts and enhanced user experience, you can try ad optimization methods like retargeting ads, email, and SMS remarketing.

76% of users are more compelled to click on reappearing ads instead of standard display ads. Retargeting ads by offering free shipping services, bonus coupons, or a free complementary product significantly reduces the chances of shopping cart abandonment.

Best Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ads

Here are the best ways to optimize your Facebook Ads:

1)   Optimize the Likes and Shares of Your Facebook Ads

Likes and shares under your Facebook ads and posts are a pure form of social proof. If others like the ad, it means the audience likes your products and services.

While setting up a Facebook ad campaign, you get two options:

Create new ads for each campaign “Use Existing Post” option often appears. “Use Existing Post” allows you to combine post engagements for all campaigns under a single ad.If you’re wondering how some advertisers have hundreds or thousands of likes under their Facebook campaigns, chances are they’re using the same optimization hack.

2)   A/B Test Your Ideas

One of the key parts of ad optimization is figuring out what works for your business. It is important to monitor and discover the best-performing ad creations or messages by running Facebook ad A/B tests. When looking for Facebook ad A/B testing ideas, think about which ad factor can have the greatest impact on CTR and conversion rate.

To get started, you can run A/B testing with the following ad elements:

• Ad design
• Campaign objectives
• Ad copy – especially headlines
• Ad placement
• Your unique value offer
• Bidding methods
• Call-to-action button

3)   Optimize Your Ad Placement

When you advertise on Facebook, your ad placement has a huge impact on advertising costs. Once you’ve identified your high-performing ad placement, go ahead and optimize your campaigns accordingly:

• Increase your bids on high-performing ad placements
• If ad placement performs less than expected, just remove it from your ad set

4)   Optimize Your Target Preference

You must identify the right profitable target audience, move those leads to the next level of your marketing funnel and target them with new messages.

5)   Display URL Optimization

A display URL is a URL that your target audience will see when your ad appears. The display URL gives potential users an idea of what they will be offered when they visit the landing page. Therefore, it is very important to choose it carefully. Adding keywords to the display URL is a good idea because if the synchronization of the keyword search matches with it, it gets highlighted and bolder by the search engine.

6)   Select the Right Bidding Option

To get started with bid optimization, you need to understand which keywords you are getting from conversions and how much you can bid on each keyword. It helps you understand how much you can spend per click to reach your goal, depending on your budget. You need to keep track of the performance and analyze the data to help you come up with effective bids. It is a time-consuming process but who doesn’t want the money to be spent wisely and get maximum results.

7)   Ad Targeting

If your ads aren’t targeting your ideal customers, then your campaign doesn’t have a chance to succeed. During the initial campaign setup, you’ll find all the relevant keywords that you think your ideal users are looking for, but you’ll never be sure unless you don’t run ads.