How to Avoid Losing Your Money on Advertising Campaigns

Natalia Tsvetkova Natalia Tsvetkova
Updated:
Reading time:  5  min.
1341
0

Internet advertising can either skyrocket your business or spell disaster for your budget depending on its effectiveness. That’s why every marketer wants to know how to launch a campaign. In this post, we’ll debunk some common myths and teach you how to avoid the most wide-spread advertising mistakes, how to stop losing money on your marketing campaigns, and even how to save money on advertising.

Don’t Consider Your Target Audience

Bad advice: Launch your advertising campaign without giving your target audience much thought. Why waste time on analyzing your customers and their pain points? You are the one who knows your product inside and out and can showcase all its benefits.

Good advice: Defining your target audience is the key to the success of your advertising campaign because it allows you to convey the right message to the right people. If you manage to market your product or service to the right audience, you’ll soon see an improved ROI and increased conversions. 

There are several tips on developing targeted advertising campaigns.

  1. Study your existing customer base, including age, location, interests, pain points, financial situation, etc. These can give you a lot of information on who else may be genuinely interested in your product. You can go further and tailor your marketing to buyer personas you’ve created.
  2. Listen to your audience and interact with them. Reply to all comments on your website and explore other sites in your industry. This can provide you with a lot of hints on what your target audience wants.
  3. Consider the location of your audience. Geotargeting can skyrocket the performance of your marketing campaigns as it makes your business locally relevant. For example, it is quite common to lose money on Facebook due to poor geotargeting, so make sure you leverage the variety of targeting capabilities provided by the platform.
  4. Analyze the performance of your digital advertising campaigns, especially their conversion rates. This will help you understand which campaigns are more effective in attracting customers.

Copy Your Competitors

Bad advice: You don’t need to go out of your way to create powerful advertising campaigns. Everything has already been done by your competitors. Just copy their marketing campaigns and reap the benefits!

Don’t wrack your brain looking for the most compelling phrases. Just use general expressions and trite clichés instead. They’ve been effective for years, why bother trying to be creative?

Good advice: It’s really useful to spy on your competition, but don’t just duplicate what your competitors are doing. By contrast, you should find out what problems they’ve failed to address and fix them instead. This will help you stand out in the niche and outperform your competitors.

To stand out, you also have to create enticing advertising campaigns. Grab your customers attention and make them an offer they can’t refuse. The more noticeable and striking your campaign is, the more likely people are going to remember your brand and become loyal customers. 

It’s vital to target the right keywords to outperform your competitors. Make sure you don’t solely rely on the words all your competitors are using. Do your best to discover keywords that are less common and easier to rank. For example, instead of targeting spain vacations, you can target barcelona vacation packages all-inclusive.

Ignore Your Campaign’s ROI

Bad advice: Don’t worry about budget allocation.

The best strategy is to invest equal sums in each advertising campaign or choose the ones you like most to spend your whole advertising budget on. Time will tell.

Don’t bother tracking how much traffic your campaigns drive. You have tons of other urgent tasks to do.

Good advice: Tracking the ROI of your advertising campaigns is the cornerstone of their success.

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) can help you find the best-performing marketing strategies and improve the less productive ones. It’ll help you make sure you don’t waste money on advertising methods which are no longer cutting it.

Though tracking ROI is a challenge and can be extremely time-consuming, you can leverage powerful tracking tools, for example, Google Analytics, Marketo, RapidMiner, etc.

Never Track the Campaign Right After Its Launch

Bad advice: There is no point in analyzing your campaign right after it starts because there is not enough data. Just wait until later. Give it a few weeks and then start collecting data. 

Good advice: It’s a common misconception that you shouldn’t check a campaign right after its launch. This mistake is on the list of the most common Facebook ad mistakes.

A lot of advertising mistakes can be detected at this level, which can save you loads of money. For instance, tracking allows you to discover that your ads are attracting visitors outside of your target audience who are not likely to convert. You can make your ad targeting more precise as a result. You can also identify misleading messages or the wrong choice in a marketing platform. 

Make sure tracking advertising campaigns from the start becomes a routine. In the long run, you’ll be able to make your marketing more cost-effective and avoid possible advertising fails.

Answer Calls and Messages at Your Convenience

Bad advice: Don’t strain yourself trying to answer the deluge of phone calls and messages. You’re offering a top-notch product, so it’s your customers who should try to get through.

Good advice: Estimate how many phone calls and messages you can process to provide a seamless customer experience. Make sure you distribute phone calls with the help of the voice menu so your customers aren’t waiting on the line.

Also, take care of your team members who may be hit hard by a never-ending stream of emails and messages. If so, think about hiring another person to deal with customer queries.

It’s also vital to not miss any phone calls because of your working hours. For example, see to it that you don’t miss any phone calls on weekends or when your workday is over.

Link Ads to Your Home Page

Bad advice: Always direct visitors to your home page. This will help your customers learn more about your brand and what you have on offer.

Also, your website is incredibly user-friendly, so visitors can always find what they are looking for without any hassle.

Good advice: Respect your audience and their time. Nobody wants to be tricked into roaming a website to find an offer. That is why misleading links can be off-putting and damaging for your brand credibility and conversions.

Instead, create a landing page for each product you’re promoting. Make sure your visitors get to the web page they expect to visit. For example, if you are promoting hiking equipment, create a separate landing page for each piece of equipment featured in your campaign.

In the Travelpayouts affiliate network, you can also direct traffic to any advertisers’ pages, not just to the home pages. To create the affiliate deep-link, use the link generator:

Please note that not all advertisers allow direct traffic from advertisements. Each affiliate program traffic policy is described in detail on this page.

How to Launch an Advertising Campaign and Lose All Your Money

So, you can see that wasting a lot of money on advertising is a piece of cake if you listen to the wrong advice. Follow our valuable tips, be diligent and creative when developing advertising campaigns, and pay attention to tracking and analytics.

It’s also important to not have any outdated information or advertise products that are out of stock. Soon, all your effort and investments will pay off and you’ll reap the benefits of your digital marketing.