During the holiday season, there’s a special focus on the naughty and nice list.
Successful campaigns gain access to additional resources, while failed initiatives pivot or back down.
This month’s question gets to the heart of optimizing and scaling digital marketing. Garland from Orlando asks:
“When is a campaign test considered a failure? B. $5,000 spent on data and little return on spend.”
In this post, we’re going to dive into understanding success/failure signals and how to establish them for your brand.
This question invites many variables, so we’ll do our best to address the most common ones.
Set up appropriate tests
Before you start any digital marketing test, it’s really important to establish metrics of success and failure.
The most important fundamental step is to confirm what is absolutely known (i.e. do you trust your conversion tracking, are your form filling processes working, is your sales team solid, etc.).
If these basic elements aren’t set correctly, it doesn’t matter how well the variables you’re testing are performing.
Because of this, it’s important to bake for at least a month or two for setup.
Beyond completing learning phases, you ensure that your performance reflects true success.
It’s also important that tests only test one variable at a time.
If you test everything at once, you will struggle to draw definitive conclusions about whether the variables had a positive or negative impact on campaigns.
Finally, it is important to note that all digital ad networks have different learning times and rules of engagement to communicate effectively with the algorithm.
For example, Google requires a minimum of five days, while Facebook (meta ads) requires a conversion threshold to be met.
Define successes and failures
Once you have your basics in place, you can begin to see what success and failure look like.
If you’re testing for improved conversion rate (CRO), testing is likely to focus on the following levers:
- home pages: Do they inspire more, fewer or the same number of engaged users?
- To sue: Do they have a healthy click through rate (CTR) to conversion rate?
- Targeting Options: Does the targeted group of people represent a better, worse or the same conversion rate? and Value?
ROAS (return on ad spend) testing focuses on the following options:
- auction price: Do the auctions the campaign participates in result in better, worse, or the same ROI?
- user journey: Is the user guided in a way that leads to a higher, lower or equal conversion value?
- Creative: Does the creative help pre-qualify customers better, worse, or the same as before?
Testing a new channel requires slightly different considerations:
- Easy maintenance: Can you reasonably build and maintain a campaign on the new channel, or will it require entirely different resources?
- market value: Does this channel have a high concentration of your best customers or is it new territory?
- budget: Did you allocate enough budget for the channel?
- target: Is your target audience on this channel?
You should give each initiative at least 60 days to prove itself; However, if there are clear signs of failure, you should make an adjustment.
Clear signs of failure
The following should be taken as clear signs of account failure.
- The campaigns cannot be issued after more than five days.
- In-account conversions are not resulting in quality leads/sales.
- Spending spikes are much higher than normal spending gradation.
- The tested variables give poorer results than the control.
Last takeaways
It’s easy to feel that all expenses that don’t result in income are a waste – but it’s never a waste when you’re learning something.
Make sure your basic data points are established and initial success/failure signals are addressed.
Do you have a question about PPC? Submit them using this form or tweet me @navahf using the hashtag #AskPPC. I’ll see you next month!
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Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Shutterstock
