Performance-Based Digital Marketing Campaign Management

There are two types of digital marketing companies – those that have developed a highly efficient assembly-line approach to manage their client’s campaigns with as little effort or thought as possible and those who manage each campaign based on data and campaign performance. Companies using the assembly-line approach may still build campaigns based on vertical-specific best practices, but they tend to give each client of a specific type the same campaign and then take a set-it and forget-it approach or make haphazard adjustments without digging into the details or applying data-informed critical thinking. Companies utilizing the set-it-and-forget-it approach may optimize campaigns on a set schedule or wait until a client complains about campaign performance before taking action. If one of their thousands of clients leaves due to inattentiveness or lackluster performance, so what? It’s just one small-time HVAC contractor in Podunk central Texas – there are hundreds more where they came from. Digital marketing agencies that use a performance-based digital marketing campaign management approach will build ad groups and write ad copy by hand, proactively optimize campaigns and will have no problem maintaining transparency in their dealings with clients. This type of campaign management leads to better campaigns, less wasted ad spend and higher ROI. When you get on the phone with your digital marketing service provider, are you speaking to the person who built your campaign? Ask them how often they touch it. Ask them what the latest optimization was, or the last budget or targeting adjustment. If you’re talking to an “account manager” in a call center setting who doesn’t know your name and has never opened the AdWords dashboard in their life, you may be with the wrong digital marketing agency. Setting SMART Goals and Understanding Performance Data Digital marketing is not great just because it allows businesses to reach consumers in many new, exciting ways. The trackability afforded by digital marketing is simply unparalleled and may be even cooler than having virtually unlimited and round-the-clock access to potential customers. However, in order to get the most value out of tracking you must understand the metrics and performance data involved. We think data is really cool and believe it is truly empowering for SMBs, which is why we make it a priority to share that knowledge with our clients. Sure, this information helps them succeed, but it also gives them a clearer view of just how awesome our team of paid media professionals are when it comes to driving leads to their business. During our onboarding process and while we’re developing campaigns for our clients, we help them understand how to calculate ROI and explain concepts like close rates and expected cost per lead. A digital marketing company that takes a performance-driven approach to campaign management should absolutely explain these concepts to new clients, because they should want their clients to understand all the great things they’re doing on the client’s behalf. Signs Your Digital Marketing Provider May Be Failing to Provide Performance-Based Campaign Management

• You never discussed campaign goals at the start of your campaign
• They don’t address poor performance until you bring it up to them
• They “fix” underspending campaigns by increasing budgets across the board
• When something like tracking numbers, lead forms or a pixel breaks or ads are disapproved you lose out on weeks or months of campaign performance because no one noticed it
• All campaign decisions are based on recent performance

Signs Your Digital Marketing Provider Offers Performance-Based Campaign Management

• You discussed and set SMART goals before they started building out your campaign
• You get on a reporting call and they explain your campaign was underperforming, why they think it was underperforming and what they did to address it – before you noticed or asked
• They address underspending campaigns by targeting budget increases on the best performing pieces of the campaign, not just arbitrarily raising bids or budgets
• You get a call or email from them telling you the pixel on your site isn’t firing and needs to be fixed, or that your ads are disapproved and what they’re doing about it – not weeks or months later but within hours or days
• They base their reporting, analysis and optimization suggestions on month-over-month, year-over-year, three-month trends, mobile vs desktop and demographic performance instead of relying solely on the latest performance data

Seasonal businesses frequently fall into the short-term reporting trap. If you’re a retailer running a ski shop you likely don’t have a ton of business during the summer, but people may start shopping for the upcoming season starting in September or October. A lackluster digital marketing company may brag about what an impressive increase in leads they drove your way in October compared with August. What they should really be measuring your October 2019 performance against is your campaign’s October 2018 and October 2017 performance.
Examples of What NOT to Do Example One - Let’s say you have a campaign with a $200 monthly budget and the average cost per click is $4. In this example, you will only get 50 clicks a month. It’s two weeks into the campaign and the 25 clicks you’ve received so far are split between desktop and mobile. Should your digital marketing provider implement negative bid adjustments on desktop?

The answer is no – there simply isn’t enough performance data to decide a negative bid adjustment for desktop is an appropriate course of action for the campaign yet.

A performance-based digital marketing agency will urge you to wait until enough data has been gathered to make an informed decision. An agency with a short-term mentality may make a knee-jerk reaction based on short-term performance rather than wait to make a data-driven informed decision.

Example Two -You’re running a conversion-oriented low funnel campaign (targeting people in the evaluation phase of their customer journey). The campaign has a $4,500 monthly budget. Roughly $85 of the spend has gone towards “cost” search queries. Should your digital marketing agency add cost as a negative keyword?

No, they shouldn’t. They may think that cost is more of a top of the funnel research-phase type query, but the bottom line is you’ve only spent 1.8 percent of your budget on cost queries. Depending on the cost of other keywords, $14 clicks may or may not be an efficient use of your funds. In this scenario more information is required; did those clicks result in a conversion action? Were those qualified leads? It’s important you trust your digital marketing partner to make the decisions that is in the best interest of your campaign – your performance will not only reflect on them, but it will also dictate whether or not you continue to remain a client. Cost should only be eliminated if:

1. It’s clear those clicks are irrelevant to reaching your goal
2. Bottom-funnel searchers aren’t interested in cost (which is dubious logic) making those clicks unlikely to result in conversions or leads
3. Those clicks are far more expensive than queries with equal or greater value/relevance to the campaign

Get Goal-Driven and Data-Driven Digital Marketing Services REV77 doesn’t take a cookie-cutter, assembly line approach to digital marketing. We start every client relationship with a conversation about goals to ensure there’s no confusion about what you want to accomplish with your marketing dollars. Our entire campaign approach will be designed to meet those goals and ensure your precious ad spend is precisely targeted at the people you want to reach. We put an emphasis on transparency and client communication and perform daily checks and ongoing optimization to ensure no client, regardless of their spend, ever falls through the cracks. Request a free digital marketing audit and find out how you or your clients can get the most out of your marketing dollars.