It doesn’t matter whether you’re spending £20 or £200, you need to create goals for your digital ad spend, and here’s why:

 

1.    Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)

Creating goals will give you insights into the ROI for ads you publish. Measuring how much you spent against the number of people that clicked on the ad, and then comparing this to your original goals, will help you understand whether the money has been well spent. If you were expecting 200 people to click, and you only received 80, you may want to adapt elements of your ad campaign or adjust your goals to be more realistic.

Of course, it’s often tricky to know how many people clicked on your ad and spent money with your business, because people may click off your landing page but then purchase something in-store or online later-on. But as shown with the example above, monetary ROI isn’t necessarily the only return you can generate. Likes and shares of your ad or your page can result in a wider audience reach, and lead to indirect purchases.

Some analytics/lead management platforms (such as LOCALiQ’s Local Insights platform) show you real-time data regarding your ads. This includes likes, shares, website visits etc. which gives a more in-depth and detailed analysis of your spend vs results.

 

2.    Goals give more meaning to work

Everyone needs to have pride in their work, especially if that work is going to be published in front of the masses. Creating ad goals can heighten the quality of content, as it’s for a more specific purpose, and reaching goals can offer a greater sense of achievement for those that planned and produced the work.

Even if goals aren’t met, it can still call to the competitive nature in people so they can work to improve the content for next time.

 

3.    Negotiating your marketing budget

Achieving certain goals and providing the ROI of digital adverts can give you a stronger negotiating position for increasing your marketing budget. Even if you didn’t achieve the targets you set out to, you could still try to negotiate from the angle that a slight increase in budget could help achieve those initial goals, either by upping the PPC budget, or by using it for more effective content (using an external company to produce videos/artwork etc.). Providing data regarding the success of your ad from an analytics platform, will strengthen your arguments and can provide further talking points about how to maximise digital ad effectiveness.

Even if you’re only trialing a digital ad to see how it works out as a marketing tool, setting initial goals will offer some guidance on what you can expect to achieve. Much of goal setting is guesswork, but understanding how many social media followers you have, along with how many website visits you receive each day, and targeting specific groups of people, can help you to create more specific and realistic targets.

To find out more about creating effective digital ad campaigns, talk to us today.

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