To help you maximize your advertising ROI, we’ve gathered twelve insightful strategies from industry leaders, including founders and CEOs. From the simple formula for profitable PPC ads to tracking campaign success with KPIs, these experts share their proven tactics to ensure a high return on your ad spend.
- Try a Simple PPC Ad Formula
- Conduct A/B Testing
- Leverage Organic Success for Paid Promotions
- Maximize ROI with Planning and Tracking
- Continually Refine the Ad Spend
- Test to Better Understand Your Audience
- Partner with Complementary Businesses
- Craft Resonating Content
- Optimize Your Landing Pages
- Boost Search Campaigns with a Quality Score
- Prefer Manual Bidding Over Automatic
- Track Campaign Success with KPIs
Try a Simple PPC Ad Formula
There is a simple, yet effective, formula that I use to ensure my PPC ads are profitable. This starts with figuring out how much I can spend to acquire a new trial sign-up. I look at the lifetime value of a customer and multiply that number by 20%. As long as my trial conversion rate is above 35%, then my ads will be profitable.
Let’s say my customer lifetime value is $500. I multiply that number by 20%. $500 x .2 = $100. I know that I can spend $100 to acquire a trial sign-up. How do I ensure it is profitable? If my trial conversion rate is 35%, this means I need about three trials to get one paying customer. At $100 per trial sign-up, it will cost $300 to get one paying customer, but that customer will have a lifetime value of $500, so I will profit $200.
Adam White, Founder, SquidVision
Conduct A/B Testing
The mystical art of turning ad gold! Step into my ad-sorcerer shoes. A/B testing is my wand-waving secret. I sprinkle it liberally like digital fairy dust. By crafting two ad versions and sending them on a magical quest for clicks, I unveil the champion.
Once, I summoned A/B testing for a client’s campaign. Version A was as catchy as a cat meme, but Version B was like a stand-up comedian at a silent disco—unexpected and engaging. Guess what? Version B brought home a whopping 40% more clicks!
A/B testing isn’t just a fancy term; it’s the enchanted path to ROI glory. So, cast your spells wisely, and watch those clicks multiply like rabbits.
Himanshu Sharma, CEO and Founder, Academy of Digital Marketing
Leverage Organic Success for Paid Promotions
To ensure a high return on our advertising investment, we often capitalize on what’s already working for us. If a particular piece of content has gained significant organic traction, we consider it prime material for paid promotions.
This tactic leverages the natural appeal of the content, ensuring that when it’s presented as an ad, it doesn’t feel forced or overly promotional. Audiences are more likely to engage with content that feels genuine and relatable. By reusing organic successes in our advertising efforts, we ensure that we’re putting forward content that resonates, maximizing our ad spend’s impact and return.
Jaya Iyer, Marketing Assistant, Teranga Digital Marketing
Maximize ROI with Planning and Tracking
Ensuring a high return on investment with any advertising efforts is reliant on two core metrics: planning and tracking. Most advertising, specifically digital, only has three variables: demand, cost, and conversion rate. Providing the appropriate tools are used prior to set up, forecasting can be a great way to avoid wastage and improve the efficiency of the campaigns straight out of the gate.
Even with this level of proactive planning, much of the effectiveness maximization comes post-launch. The single most important tactic to maximize your investments with digital channels lies within how success is tracked.
By nature, digital advertising is fast-paced and reactive. Data needs to be accumulated, and decisions made from said data. Setting up crystal-clear tracking that pulls through to your digital platforms and allows for a greater understanding of what your campaign needs to improve is not optional.
Sam Rourke, Paid Media Director, Paramount Digital
Continually Refine the Ad Spend
One tactic we employ to ensure a high ROI for our advertising efforts is continually refining our ad spend, weeding out areas that aren’t providing sufficient return. Regular audits of our campaigns allow us to identify underperforming elements and reinvest in more profitable areas.
In order to maximize ad effectiveness, we focus on aligning our ads and landing pages with our audience and their intent. We make sure the content, design, and call-to-action resonate with their expectations and needs. In addition, we exercise control over our Google ad structures by creating small collections of keyword clusters. We ensure each cluster aligns closely with finely tuned adverts, matching the keywords exactly.
This targeted approach increases ad relevance, improving both quality score and performance. Last, while we primarily employ exact or phrase match keywords, we also selectively use broad match keywords to accumulate data and unearth new keyword opportunities.
Matt Janaway, CEO, Marketing Labs
Test to Better Understand Your Audience
Ensuring a high return on investment for your advertising efforts can be achieved by having a clear understanding of your target audience. Knowing who you are marketing to and what their needs or wants are can drastically improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
One specific tactic that I use to maximize my ad spend is A/B testing. By creating two versions of an ad and testing their performance, I can identify which version resonates more with my audience and adjust my strategy accordingly.
This approach significantly reduces waste in ad spend and increases the likelihood of achieving a high return on investment. Keep testing, keep learning, and keep refining your ads for the best results!
Ray Schultz, VP Marketing, Liquid Rubber
Partner with Complementary Businesses
Collaborating with complementary businesses can maximize the effectiveness of your ad spend. By partnering with businesses that offer complementary products or services, you can tap into their customer base, share advertising efforts, and split costs.
For example, a clothing brand can collaborate with a shoe brand to create joint advertising campaigns, reaching a wider audience interested in fashion. This approach increases the likelihood of a higher return on investment as it expands brand visibility and attracts new potential customers.
Ben Lau, Founder, Featured SEO Company
Craft Resonating Content
To guarantee a substantial ROI for our advertising efforts, a multifaceted approach is imperative. At the core, we meticulously craft our advertising content to resonate with our precisely defined target audience. This involves understanding their preferences, pain points, and communication style. Complementing this, we deploy captivating graphics and design elements to not only grab interest but also elicit action, ultimately yielding a higher ROI.
In addition, a data-driven approach further fuels our advertising success. We employ advanced analytics to continually monitor and optimize our campaigns in real-time. This entails tracking key performance indicators and swiftly adapting our strategies based on emerging insights.
By continuously analyzing the performance of various channels, audience segments, and ad formats, we can allocate resources to the most effective avenues. This dynamic approach allows us to capitalize on trends and opportunities, thereby maximizing the value.
Prachi Zalani, Marketing Manager, Naman HR
Optimize Your Landing Pages
To ensure a high ROI for our advertising endeavors, we adhere to a strategic approach that revolves around optimizing landing pages and continually enhancing conversion rates.
Our first step involves fine-tuning our landing pages. We understand that getting visitors to our site is just the start. The real magic happens when we create landing pages that turn these visitors into actual clients. No matter how efficient our traffic-generation techniques are or how judiciously we manage Quality Score, if our landing pages fail to captivate and convert, our efforts would fall short.
We also consistently work towards improving the conversion rate of our landing pages, incorporating insights gained from user behavior, A/B testing, and industry trends. This continuous effort to fine-tune our pages ensures that we are always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, aiming for higher and more sustainable ROI.
Samantha Hawrylack, CEO, SJ Digital Solutions
Boost Search Campaigns with a Quality Score
The Quality Score significantly impacts the cost-efficiency of your search campaigns and plays a vital role in determining your ad rank. Unlike other campaign metrics, the zero-to-10 Quality Score involves a range of factors.
Quality Scores depend on several factors, including keyword relevance, ad copy, landing page quality, and historical performance. By focusing on these elements, you can refine your ads to match user intent, resulting in a more satisfying user experience.
Align your keywords with ad groups and ensure they correspond with the content of your landing pages. This coherence establishes a clear connection between what users are searching for and what your ad offers.
Write compelling ad copy that resonates with your target audience. Address their pain points and needs directly, while highlighting unique selling points. A strong call-to-action can also boost engagement.
Vipul Gupta, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist, Taazaa Inc
Prefer Manual Bidding Over Automatic
One major way to help increase the ROI of your ad spend on paid search is to manually bid, as opposed to using automated bidding strategies.
With manual bidding, you are better able to control the expenditures in your ad account and not have to rely on AI to manage it for you. AI is a powerful and helpful tool in marketing and advertising, but the automated tools in paid search have yet to catch up to skilled manual bidding.
Joe Karasin, CMO, Karasin PPC
Track Campaign Success with KPIs
The key to ensuring you see a high return on investment for your advertising is to develop key performance indicators that dictate the success of your campaigns. If you have these numbers to work with, you can easily tell if your ad campaign is worth the money.
For instance, you could determine reach, clicks, and engagement metrics and track your paid ads when they launch. I found that this strategy saved us time and money because we didn’t waste money month after month on ineffective ads. If we don’t see the engagement we hoped for, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try again.
Syed Balkhi, Founder, WPBeginner
