Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash
Google Ads. Facebook Ads. YouTube Ads. Bidding. PPC or pay per click.
If there’s one thing in common, it’s this: they all sound daunting.
For most business owners, one of the first things that come to mind when we talk about bidding and digital ads is that they can get costly.
But this isn’t the case. Thousands of brands are now putting ads on your social media newsfeeds and Google search results—for a good reason. With ads, they can drive traffic and eventually conversion into their website.
I won’t discount the fact that, yes, paid search and digital ads can get expensive. But only because of poor audience targeting and placements that are not relevant to your target audience.
This article will let you know what you need to know to avoid spending more than you should on digital ads and how you can make them so effective that they give you high conversions.
First, you need to know about funnels.
No two audiences are alike. In marketing, funnels are one of the critical concepts that you need to know and remember.
According to my article Growth Marketing Mindset: The User-centric Approach, your target customers go through a buying journey. They start with not knowing your brand to eventually becoming your brand ambassadors.
The goal is to guide them from just knowing you to knowing you better. They eventually become brand advocates, buying your products or services and becoming repeat customers.
This journey is called funnels.
Funnels show you that each level is not the same. And to push people further down the funnel, you need to talk to them differently. Your audience in Awareness isn’t the same as the ones in Interest. You won’t talk to people who know you so well already and have purchased your products or services the same way you will speak to those who are just hearing about your brand for the first time.
It’s important to remember that each stage of the funnel merits a different messaging, content, and call to action. See below on how you should approach ads based on varying stages:
AWARENESS
Audience: Users who haven’t been introduced to your brand. Lookalike of your existing customers.
Ad messaging: This should give them a sense of what you do and who you are.
Creative: Brand Video
Call to action: 50% Video View
INTEREST
Audience: Those who watched your video in the Awareness stage. Provide more information on your product/services.
Creative: Informational Whitepaper or downloadable checklist/guide
Call to Action: Whitepaper Download
CONSIDERATION
Audience: Users who downloaded the whitepaper in the Interest stage. Currently considering using your solution—show off the benefits of working with you.
Creative: Time Savings Calculator
Call to action: Savings Calculator Use
ACTION
Audience: Folks who utilized the savings calculator. Close to being ready to purchase but need a personalized chat.
Creative: Personalized Assessment
Call to Action: Assessment Request
Separating audiences yield more incredible benefits.
Being able to tell the difference among your audiences and separating your efforts based on who they are in their journey can yield more significant benefits:
- You’ll have a clearer understanding of your ads’ performance
- You can optimize each ad separately, based on: ad messaging, bids, placements, calls to action
- User experience is optimal as they’re only seeing messages that are relevant to them
- A better understanding of what stage users abandon or get stuck in the funnel
Define who your audiences are using existing tools.
If you feel like you haven’t defined your audiences well, the article Growth Marketing Mindset: The User-centric Approach may help you.
Know that chances are, you already have information about them within reach. Is your business on social media already? Have you set up your Google Analytics? Then these are the first places to look!
Google Analytics already gives you a ton of data if you spend the time to dig in. Social channels will help you find audiences for either your specific account or the entire channel itself. They have all these insights tools, which can help you find audience patterns within or across every channel.
Don’t believe me? Keep scrolling.
Google Analytics – Go to custom affinity audiences and find your audiences’ other interests.
Facebook Insights
LinkedIn’s website demographics
Pinterest Audience Insights
This info alone can give you insights on how to approach your ads, like:
- The kind of tone and messaging you can use in your ad copy
- Placements, or where to put your ads
- Format – majority like entertainment or movies? Even if your products or services can’t be any farther from these, you can make your creatives or message similar to what will resonate with these interests
- Sector/industry-focused, skills-focused, or job-function-centric based on what LinkedIn tells you
Focus on the intent, not their actions.
Page visit does not necessarily mean intent.
Just visiting an organization’s page doesn’t mean you will click the Call to Action. Some people go to websites because they’re just plain curious.
This is why it is super important to know what your visitors are doing inside your website, i.e., what they search for or where they click.
And if you’re wondering whether knowing these are possible, the answer is YES. You can track your users’ behavior inside your website through Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, heatmap tools like Hotjar, and many more.
The most important thing to remember on paid content is to focus on user INTENT. Not on the pages they visit, but the reason behind their actions on your website.
When it comes to digital ads, remarketing is the name of the game.
When people visit your site, the next thing to do is to nurture them. You don’t just let people in and out of your site. As a business owner and marketer, the next logical thing is to use information about your visitors to give them what they’re looking for when they first enter your site. Follow your audience’s curiosity by giving them more content than they initially sought.
This is where remarketing enters the picture.
Remarketing is a form of online advertising that enables sites to show targeted ads to users who have already visited their site. Past visitors will see these ads while browsing the web, watching YouTube videos, or reading news sites—keeping your brand top-of-mind and enticing visitors to return for more. [1]
Regarding remarketing, the most helpful tool is Google Tag Manager. This tool will allow you to track users’ actions and eventually create remarketing audiences based on user engagement.
Read Google Tag Manager – why you need to set this up for your website analytics.
Below is a sample of the various actions – or events in GTM language – that users have taken on a website:
Remarket to users with ads that speak to the actions they performed on your site or landing pages.
If a visitor watches your 10-minute video halfway through, then it must mean that they’re interested in learning more about the content of the video vs those who only watched the first 10 seconds. You can remarket to the users who watched halfway by creating intent-based remarketing audiences, say users who watch 50% of a video. These ads can show them similar videos with related content, or perhaps a free downloadable checklist or guide that will give them more information about what they first saw in the video.
Remember: Intent-based remarketing focuses on actions. Not pages.
Build funnels that can help streamline users from Awareness to Customer and gain more bottom of the funnel users.
Create audiences based on actions taken within each stage of the funnel. Once a user has completed an action from a previous funnel stage, exclude them from the previous audience.
Don’t forget about those users who fall out of the funnel or stall. Work their flow into your funnel building and increase their motivation for learning more about you.
Massive credits to Michelle Morgan and Joe Martinez for the screenshots and these key takeaways from the CXL course on Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaigns.
Side note: Seriously though – enrolling in CXL courses is one of the best things I’ve done for my continuous learning. Their courses and minidegrees (I’m taking the Growth Marketing one) are so in-depth I keep telling people that I would have never learned the things I know now elsewhere. (Yeah okay there are so many materials online, but getting the spot on ones from experts who know their thing? CXL Institute has done the work for us and brought together these experts to create super engaging content, videos, and slides alike.) I think after the Growth Marketing minidegree, I’ll be keen to do either Conversion Optimization or Digital Psychology and Persuasion. Learn more about CXL Institute and the various courses here.
If you liked this article and would love to learn more, leave a comment below. Email me@tinasendin.com or connect with me on LinkedIn!
