10 Reasons Why Your Online Ad Campaigns Are Failing
March 14, 2024
Tags: digital marketing agency, lead generation online, online marketing, pittsburgh digital marketing, search engine marketing, social media advertising,
Are new business leads not coming in like they used to?
Do you have tired ad campaigns, boring creative, or worse – revenue decline?
Your ad campaigns can be way better.
Here are the “10 Reasons Why Your Online Ad Campaigns Are Failing.“
Number One: You Never Installed A Pixel
Come on friends, this is an absolute must and part of marketing 101. How did you think you were going to track performance from the online ad to the final destination?
Every marketing channel, like Google or LinkedIn Ads, has a pixel which is just a piece of code. Slap it up on your site, create conversion actions, such as tracking phone calls or a form submission, and see how your marketing campaigns are performing.
Do you want an easy way to test the events you track on your website? Check out Google Tag Manager, it houses all of the pixel codes in one place, and installation is super easy – install one plugin and hit activate. Boom – you’re ready!
Number Two: Your Audiences Are Too Narrow
Perhaps you’re a small business, and you can identify the top prospects who would use your product or service. You can name your exact target audience when creating a campaign.
Maybe your product or service is so niche and only a handful of people would buy from you at any given time.
My recommendation is to think about expanding your reach and going more broad. Online advertising channels are so sophisticated now, it’ll pick up on who’s engaging with your ad, and most importantly, who’s converting.
Once the ad systems have meaningful data, it’ll prioritize showing your ads to the most relevant audiences. Let it work its magic.
And while we’re at it – I love remarketing audiences and lookalike audiences. Best to test them against each other though to see which one wins out.
Number Three: You Have An Uninspiring Offer
Individuals respond to offers that seem tailored to their wants and desires. The offer needs to be urgent, in limited quantities, with social proof, and provide unparalleled value to the target audience. You get major bonus points if you can launch a guarantee – a full money back guarantee is best!
Offering a free consultation alone is played out.
Try to follow the guidelines set forth by the direct marketers of the world: Create an offer so outstanding that people would feel a deep regret if they didn’t take advantage right away.
Number Four: Your Creative Is Boring
For ads, people are peppered with messaging over 5,000 times a day according to USC. According to Time Magazine, the average attention span is 47 seconds.
Given these stats, you need to be interesting, different, fun, with an outstanding offer.
The general rule of thumb in digital advertising is that you must capture the user’s attention within the first three seconds of the ad or else you risk losing them completely.
Test different photos, videos, memes, graphics – you won’t know what will work until you get it out in the wild.
Need help with graphics or editing? Check out Canva, Adobe Spark, or Envato. All have photo and video templates that you can swap out for your own brand identity and messaging. Keep the creative assets fun and engaging!
Number Five: You Blew Your Budget
All marketing channels have daily or lifetime spends. This is very convenient and a great way to have control over your budget; but I’ve seen budget miscalculations like spending an entire month’s budget over only a handful of days. You don’t want to blow your budget quickly!
A best practice would be to test the waters and start with the end goal in mind. Use a conservative conversion rate, and calculate the number of website visitors that it would take to get a lead. Figure out a cost per click average, and determine the budget you feel comfortable with to get the desired results.
Make sure you double check your ad spend – daily and monthly. Google Ads can spend up to 110% of your daily budget, so don’t freak out if your spend seems a bit high – it’ll even out over the month.
When you see a campaign that works, and delivers a positive return on ad spend, start increasing your ad spend. Let’s get those results!
Number Six: You Didn’t Try New Placements
You’re probably familiar with Google Search, Display, and YouTube Ads.
If you’re a Meta user, you get hit with ads on the Feed, Stories, and reels all the time.
Did you know there are over 20+ placements on their properties including on the Marketplace, on the Explore page, or on the Audience Network?
While you may think that one placement is better than another, you won’t know unless you test various ad placements. Most marketing channels will have a “recommended” placement list – it’s probably a good idea to let the channel discover what will work best for your campaigns. However, if you want to pick and choose the placements, you can.
Definitely test various ad placements on different marketing channels and analyze the results. Are there placements that just don’t seem to work for you? Are there any surprising placements that work really well?
Go on, start testing!
Number Seven: You Chose the Wrong Campaign Objective
Before you launch any campaign you have to understand what your final goal is. Do you want awareness? People landing on a specific landing page? App downloads?
As a lead generation agency, we focus on conversions, contacts, leads, and sales.
Make sure to choose the right campaign objective when you’re building out campaigns.
If people have no idea who your business is or what product or service you have, don’t expect leads and sales to come from an “Awareness” campaign. Similarly, if you want people to watch your video, a video views campaign is the right way to go. Maximize clicks is different than maximize impressions.
Know what you’re getting into before building out the ad campaigns.
Number Eight: You Didn’t Test Marketing Channels
We all know the 600 pound gorillas in the room – Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok…But have you tried advertising on X, Bing, or Reddit?
It’s essential to test various marketing channels if your budget allows it. You may think one channel will perform better than another…but until you launch, how will you know?
Here’s a tip – get baseline performance from an ad campaign and understand your cost per click, click thru rate, and most importantly your conversion data. Did you get qualified leads and sales?
Once you have the baseline, go on and test other marketing channels. Who knows, you may beat your original stats – and that’s a win!
Number Nine: You Didn’t Utilize All Headline and Description Options
Google Search Ads allow for 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Meta Ads uses machine learning to mix and match different variations to find a winning combination.
You know how many ad accounts we review that don’t utilize all of the opportunities to write creative elements?
The copy that we think may be best, may turn out to be the least liked variation by users.
Let your audience and the data decide the winning combinations. You can then use the best headlines and descriptions to inform other marketing decisions and creative.
Number Ten: Another Party Didn’t Review the Strategy and Campaigns
If you create the online advertising strategy, build the campaigns, and hit publish without having a second set of eyes to review it, you’re missing out.
Small errors such as spelling mistakes, a nonworking URL, or choosing a wrong call-to-action happen regularly.
A major error could be having the wrong bid strategy that may cause severe monetary pain.
At HBT Digital, there’s always two sets of eyes on a campaign before the client gets a chance to review all of the ins and outs. By the time we hit “publish,” at minimum three people will have had a chance to review the strategy and campaigns.
We are in search of quality!
HBT Digital is Pittsburgh’s premier online advertising agency. Hit us up if you want explosive new business growth!