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In marketing, it’s easy to just throw money at a problem and hope it to go away. But if this is your strategy, soon enough, you'll exhaust your resources and be left with no effective long-term solutions.
So if you are going to spend the money, spend it the smart way—track the results of your marketing efforts, and design a strategy to make the most of your investments.
That is definitely the approach David Meerman Scott recommends you take with paid advertising. If paid ads are working for you, that’s great. But there is only one way to find out if they are—by measuring results. Here are two goals you should aim to achieve in paid advertising and how you can measure whether you're being effective.
1. Paid Ads Should Generate Leads and Revenue
The first purpose paid advertising serves is to generate leads and sales for your business. How can you measure whether ads are successful at bringing in new leads and sales? You need to keep track of the click-through rate of your ads and then monitor the conversion rate of the landing pages to which you are sending traffic. Don’t forget—traffic should always be targeted to places where you can capture more visitor information, like landing pages.
2. Paid Ads Should Result in Brand Awareness
The second goal of paid advertising is to increase brand awareness for your business. When launching such campaigns, you should measure whether more people have become aware of your brand from that campaign. While this is a bit more difficult to track than lead generation, there are still ways you can do it. It’s important to follow the correlation between ads for brand awareness and your other marketing channels. For instance, are more people searching for your company’s name in search engines? Or are you attracting more of a following on your social media channels? If so, these are good indicators that your company's brand awareness is increasing.
Ads can play an important role in a mixed marketing strategy, but they shouldn’t dominate it. “Ultimately, the best way to generate attention is to create content yourself rather than paying for attention through advertising,” says David.
Are you using paid advertising to complement your overall marketing strategy? How do you effectively measure results?
