Understand what is or isn't working

Utilising Advertising Results

What are good advertising results?

Fortunately a lot of businesses understand good advertising results aren’t concerned with click-throughs to websites, they’re concerned about bringing relevant traffic (potential customers interested in your products or services) to your site, engaging with them over a period of time and generating a lead or sale. There are a number of tools online to support you in measuring each stage of this customer journey.

Why do I need to measure advertising results?

Like any marketing channel, without effective measurement it’s very tricky to identify what is and isn’t working across your marketing campaign. We discussed all the ways Google Analytics could be used to measure the success of your website. In much the same way, this tool can be used to measure your advertising results, in addition to the tools provided by some of the software used to create your advertising campaigns.

What benefits will my business see from measuring advertising results?

Using these tools effectively, will allow you to not only see if your campaign’s performing as effectively as you think it is but also allow you to identify areas for improvement, to make it even more effective.

You’ll be able to analyse the platform, whether it’s Google Ads or Facebook, through understanding:

  1. The performance of the advert itself in driving traffic to your website, through the tool’s analytics.
  2. How effective the website is at driving this traffic through to conversion, analysing the data on-site.

How do I measure advertising results?

To understand the performance of your adverts using the site tools, first familiarise yourself with the back end of Facebook’s Ads Manager.

Using Facebook’s Ads Manager, you’ll be able to evaluate the:

  • Budget spent.
  • Number of engagements – number of people who liked/ loved or reacted to your post.
  • Number of people reached – number of individual people your post reached.
  • Number of impressions – number of times your post showed up in people’s Facebook feeds (one person can see a post multiple times).
  • Cost per Result – How much it’s cost to get your desired result.

Secondly, you’ll need to analyse how your Google Ads campaign is performing. This data is monitored in Google Analytics. Link your Google Analytics and Google Ads account and setup conversion tracking.

Once this is completed, you can open your Google Analytics account to view the performance of your Google Ads campaign, including:

  • Conversions from Google Ads.
  • Return on Investment through assigning a value to your conversion.
  • All the actions traffic from your Google Ads have taken on-site including pages visited, time spent on a page and bounce rate.

You can analyse the performance of your Facebook Ads traffic in Google Analytics, through identifying the traffic source under Acquisition (in the left navigation bar), All Traffic, Source/Medium and how many conversions this led to.

Here you can also view which other marketing channels are successfully contributing to conversions, so you can continue to invest in the correct places.

We understand setting up and using Analytics can be daunting to begin with. If you would like us to configure your Analytics and/ or show you how your existing advertising is performing free of charge, along with producing some recommendations to improve your sales and lead generation, get in touch here.

What else do I need to know?

Analysing how your advertising channels are performing alongside your website, is critical to improving their performance and understanding if the messages in them, resonate with the pages on your website.

For example, a Google Ads campaign may be very good at driving traffic to a pet food retailer. However, this traffic may not be converting into a sale. Further investigation may tell the retailer, that competitors are selling the food at a much more competitive price. Once dropping the price, the food starts to sell again.

Alternatively, a wedding venue created a very broad advert, advertising an ‘outstanding venue’. They ran this alongside an advert which showcased ‘a summer wedding barn’ and found this had a much higher conversion rate due to it’s very specific messaging, which resonated with the audience. Therefore, they dropped the first advert, increasing conversions and profitability through running the second one by itself.

At Need to Know Marketing we love providing information for SME’s so they can grow. We also understand this work can be time consuming and difficult to begin with. To assist you, we provide a free of charge one hour consultation, where we have an open discussion about your business objectives and what you’re looking to achieve.

Following the consultation we will provide you with a marketing strategy, advising how we recommend meeting your business objectives through marketing. If you are interested in knowing the cost of our services, you can use our calculator as a guide.

“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”

Walt Disney knew telling a story is always always easier with pictures. It crosses all barriers. The best story tellers are always the best at engaging their audience.