Anytime you use advertising to drive traffic, you’re risking your money. One bad part of your process can destroy any shot at transforming a click into a sale. Yet, the buzz from taking someone who doesn’t know you and convincing them to buy is one of the greatest parts of doing business online.
The effectiveness of any advertising is based on a specific process, no matter where you’re spending your budget. Banners, email or solo ads, even PPC. It’s exactly the same.
In this post, we’re going to go over how to reduce the feeling of “gambling” with your budget and boost the performance of your ads with less risk.
Test Smarter
It only makes sense to test your media (banners, emails, headlines, and ad text).
Yet, most don’t know how to test properly.
Either you aren’t testing at all (huge mistake) or you’re testing too much.
The secret is to test one thing at a time. Only one thing. That includes everything in the sales process you’ve developed from your ad all the way through to the thank you page.
That means that you shouldn’t be testing different ad variations if you’re testing out the headline on your landing page.
Test. One. Thing. At. A. Time.
Unless you’re using software for multivariate testing (Odds are 99% that you’re not), you can’t effectively test more than one thing.
If you’re testing different audiences or keywords for an ad and testing the landing page at the same time, it’s impossible to know which part of your sequence isn’t working properly.
Do some basic testing of your landing page and any additional offers with a reliable traffic source. Your best bet is going to be email traffic from a source you’ve used successfully in the past. When someone opts into an email list, that’s a solid indicator of them wanting to know more about a topic.
Once you have refined your sales process enough to get the numbers where they need to be, then you can begin testing your media.
Always test only one thing at a time to ensure any steps you take to optimize your advertising actually improve your results.
Adjust Targets
Whether you’ve pulled the info from your customer database or setup an avatar based upon your competition, you have to have an avatar to advertise to before you can comfortably spend money advertising to them.
Yet, what if a variation on that avatar would perform better?
It’s possible to do this with ease on most advertising platforms.
All you do is clone your entire campaign and adjust the targeting. Try some new keywords or use a different customer avatar and see how it goes.
If it’s a winner, raise the budget.
If it’s a loser, try a new variation.
Even better, you can test as many variations as you want as long as the avatar is completely different from the one you’ve been using.
This also allows you to refine your ongoing customer avatar by giving you the ability to see how your ads perform with different audiences.
Remove Some Variables
The more variables you have in your processes, the more opportunities you have to screw up.
The more steps you have in your funnel, the easier it is to turn off a prospect or new customer. Obviously, turning them off will keep them from buying from you.
The more pieces you have in an ad (images or graphics, headline, descriptive text, more descriptive text, etc…), the easier it is to make a mistake that will cost you the click, the lead, and the sales.
How do you remove some variables without screwing up your ads?
The easy answer is to buy traffic from us. Give us a landing page URL, the amount of clicks and the market. Pay the fee and we take care of the rest.
Depending on the advertising network, many times you can leave out some of the options. On Facebook, you don’t need to use a second text description. Use the primary one and leave the other one empty.
Review your funnels and your ads and get rid of any extra stuff that can be pulling attention away from your primary message.
Leave a Reply