5 Paid Advertising Secrets to Supercharge Your Next Campaign

Whether you are thinking about running paid ads for your business for the first time or looking to revamp your marketing strategy to spice up your campaigns, paid advertising is something that eludes many of us.

If strategized and executed right, it can help you gain a good amount of qualified leads and revenue.

Follow along to know the top five secrets about paid advertising that could help you reach your goals. 

When do people have a reason to spend money?

Analyze and take advantage of different times of the year, which comes down to specific content creation. Look for the seasonal opportunities which can help your business generate spikes in qualified website traffic at this predetermined time of the year, usually through sales and promotions.

Take a look at big retail stores worldwide: you may not find selling products at sale price a great idea at first, but did you know customers often return to the same brand or company when they need similar products or even services regardless of whether they are running an ongoing sale? 

Seasonal marketing is not just for eCommerce businesses. Service-based companies can broaden their customer base by leveraging peak times of the year.

If you are not ready to give discounts, start thinking about tweaking the text copy and creative assets of your ads during the holidays.

For example, we tested new ad copy variations for a local dementia home care company around the holiday season when family members meet, spend quality time together, and can discuss their parents’ dementia care.

Advertisers usually fail to lay the groundwork. Start preparation months before the seasonal opportunities. If you ask me, BFCM (Black Friday/ Cyber Monday) is not that far now…

Here are some tactics you can get started with:

• Start discussion internally, with your clients and strategize your campaign for these peak times.
• Ensure your conversion tracking is working.
• Have budgetary discussions.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that cost-per-click and cost per purchase/conversion tends to be higher during the holidays due to the demand and competition. A quick tip I’d suggest to copy from the big brands is to create “urgency” through showing low stock and limited-time offers.

In addition to holidays and big events, I’d recommend advertisers also take advantage of the times when the search volume is higher for the products and services they offer.

For example, a casual clothing brand can take advantage of increased demand during summer music festival season. If you sell soccer team jerseys, expect a spike for searches in the lead up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup this November/December.

Are you offering a frictionless experience to your consumers?

The second question here is, are you optimizing for mobile?

When we say mobile optimization, we often think about websites…you just did, am I right?

But are you optimizing your ads for mobile?

You are running Facebook and Instagram Ads for your eCommerce business but do you always check the ad preview on different placements to see how your ad is looking?

Ensure your carousel ad headlines are not cutting off in mobile placement. Along with that, also make sure the creatives you are designing and using are properly visible and readable for mobile viewers. 

Now let’s talk a little bit about the frictionless experience, which includes analyzing the purchase journey.

The rule of thumb we advertisers follow is to put ourselves in customers’ shoes. If you were the customer buying chew toys online for your first puppy (after staying up all night and finishing a full-time job), would you get up from a couch to get your wallet for the payment? In this scenario, a frictionless purchase journey could be other transaction capabilities like Apple Pay, PayPal, or perhaps Google Pay. 

Test, test, test

A/B test everything you can. This means testing out different text copy, creatives, call-to-actions (CTAs), formats, placements, audiences, location, ad destination, and so on.

While testing assets, we should also remember that things that worked for one industry may not work for another. For example, A B2B business may fit well on Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, while a B2C business can explore Instagram Ads and TikTok Ads. 

Test using different website landing pages as ad destinations. We use Google Optimize to test out ad destinations for our campaigns, where we create different versions of one landing page as experiments, take our ad visitors to these different versions and monitor the performance.

Test running FB/ IG Ads with the call-to-action (CTA) “add to cart” instead of “purchase.” This also applies to the event we configure when setting up ad sets for respective ad copy variations. This helps get your ad sets out of the learning and learning limited phase (which needs enough optimization events to be fired; in this case, more add to cart clicks!).

As proven by Baymard Institute, 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. This means that for every 100 potential customers who click add to cart, 70 of them leave without making a purchase. Given this data, why not indicate what visitors are most likely to do and work on a strategy to target those who abandon the carts and show personalized ads to them! This is a win-win outcome.

Test giving away a free home evaluation, free insurance quote, free lawn care estimation, or a free trial for your service or SaaS businesses. Use this as your CTA. If you are B2B, do your customer research and add value to your website landing page that your competitors aren’t giving for free. For B2C, share buyers’ guides around the holiday season, show items that are frequently bought together, etc.

Use free experiments and A/B test elements of your native ads platform. For example, through Google Ads experiments, you can test different bidding strategies, while with the Facebook A/B test, you can test out different ad copy assets. Eliminate the guesswork! Let your tests run, gather data and give you the metrics so you can use the winning strategy to achieve your business goals.

Authentic over illusive

We all know that algorithms prioritize original and relevant content, right? Why not apply that when creating ads?

What is authentic content?

• Authentic content is usually aesthetically imperfect
• It’s raw, more like it’s created by a brand user
• It’s more trustworthy
• It’s unfiltered and gives an authentic look and feel of the product
• It tells a story
• It’s less stylish yet increase consumer’s confidence on products

This is a winning content! Sharing more candid moments like behind the scenes (BTS) gives opportunities to present your brand genuinely in front of your target audience. 

Remember that Google Pixel 6 ad featuring Simu Liu, Canada’s very first Mandarin campaign? His mother added his nickname in the video, which was unscripted, completely authentic and added so much value to the entire campaign with a 136% increase in Pixel sales! Here is the BTS of that campaign and some great results.

Distinguish yourself from your competitors

Your business and ads should stand out from others in the same marketing auction, whether by creating more relevant ads, spending more budget and bidding aggressively, or highlighting consumers’ pain points and offering them solutions. All good suggestions, right? Even after trying everything, your competitors’ ads are showing on top of yours in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and you do not see an increase in your sales; it’s time to revisit your strategy. 

For Google Ads, evaluate the metrics like Impression Share (IS), IS (budget) & (rank), check the auction insights to see other brands competing with you in the same marketing auction, etc. For FB/ IG Ads, check the Ads Library to view what kinds of ads your competitors are currently running. 

Along with some free features provided by the native ads platform, we at seoplus+ use a couple of different paid tools to get to the bottom of this and help our clients achieve their business goals. Tools like SEMrush & Spyfu through which we can conduct advertising research to analyze competitors, their estimated paid traffic cost, their average cost-per-click and positions on SERPs, their top paid keywords and not just that, also their live ad copy variations and landing pages being used as ad destination.

Through this competitive research, we put together a new strategy and action plan to outbid others in the auction. However, do not duplicate your competitor’s efforts as it could ban your entire ads account. For many of our clients, we also strategize their audience targeting based off of their competitor’s website traffic to beat this cookieless world, and there’s more to it.

If you are looking for some support implementing these secrets and strategizing your next paid advertising campaign, reach out to us, and we’d be happy to help your business grow!