At Fingo, we continually strive to provide valuable insights to help our clients succeed in the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
Yesterday, we hosted an engaging webinar titled "Under the Bonnet of a Biddable Campaign: Decoding Performance Marketing." Our Director of Client Success, Marissa Freeman, and our Head of Performance, Lorenzo Brach del Prever, presented the session with actionable strategies and practical knowledge.
Here's a recap of the key takeaways.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is a results-driven approach in which advertisers pay based on how well their ads perform. Depending on the campaign's goals, this could mean paying for clicks, impressions, or conversions. The essence of performance marketing lies in its measurable nature, enabling marketers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns in real-time and make data-driven decisions.
The Marketing Funnel: A Framework for Success
A crucial aspect of performance marketing is understanding and leveraging the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel visualises the customer journey from awareness to conversion and helps in structuring your campaigns to meet your objectives at each stage:
- Awareness: To raise awareness of your brand or product, attract a broad audience. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are ideal for this stage.
- Consideration: Engage potential customers who are considering your product or service. Use platforms like LinkedIn and Google Demand Gen campaigns to provide detailed information and nurture leads.
- Conversion: Drive action, whether it's making a purchase or signing up for a service. Google Search, Bing Ads, and retargeting ads are effective here.
By aligning your performance marketing strategies with the stages of the marketing funnel, you can ensure that you are effectively guiding potential customers from initial awareness to final conversion.
The Power of Biddable Campaigns
Biddable campaigns are the backbone of performance marketing and play a pivotal role at each marketing funnel stage. They involve purchasing ad space through real-time auctions, where advertisers bid for placements that will generate impressions, clicks, and conversions. Here’s why biddable campaigns are essential:
- Targeted Advertising: Platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and Programmatic Display Networks allow you to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. This ensures your ads reach the right people at the right time, enhancing the effectiveness of each stage of the funnel.
- Cost Efficiency: Unlike traditional advertising, where you pay a flat fee regardless of the outcome, biddable campaigns charge you based on performance. This means you only pay for actual results, making it a cost-effective strategy across all stages of the funnel.
- Flexibility and Control: You can adjust your bids, targeting options, and budgets in real time, allowing for greater flexibility and control over your campaigns. This adaptability is crucial for optimising performance as potential customers move through the funnel stages.
The Importance of Goal Setting
Setting clear, measurable goals is essential to maximise the effectiveness of your biddable campaigns and ensure alignment with the marketing funnel stages. Here’s why goal setting is crucial in performance marketing:
- Direction and Focus: Goals provide direction and focus, helping you to align your marketing efforts with your overall business objectives. Whether your goal is to increase brand awareness, drive more leads, or boost conversions, having a clear target ensures that your campaigns are purpose-driven and strategic.
- Measurable Outcomes: Clear goals allow you to measure your success and make data-driven decisions. For instance, if your goal is to increase conversions by 20%, you can track your progress through KPIs such as conversion volume and adjust your strategies accordingly. This continuous monitoring helps in refining your approach to achieve optimal results.
- Accountability and Motivation: Goals create accountability, ensuring that your team is working towards the same objectives and can be evaluated based on their performance. This not only fosters a sense of responsibility but also motivates your team to achieve and surpass the set targets, driving overall campaign success.
Metrics vs. KPIs: Measuring Success
Once you have set clear goals, it's crucial to understand the difference between Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other valuable metrics to effectively measure your campaign's success:
- KPIs: KPIs are the critical indicators that align directly with your business goals. They provide an explicit view of your campaign’s performance. Examples of KPIs include Return on ad Spend (ROAS), Conversions, and cost per acquisition (CPA). KPIs help you understand whether you are meeting your objectives and driving the desired outcomes.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): This measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It helps you understand the efficiency of your ad spend and how much revenue your ads are bringing in.
- Conversions: The number of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, after clicking on your ad. Conversions are crucial for measuring the success of your campaigns in driving specific actions.
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): The cost associated with acquiring a new customer through your campaign. A lower CPA indicates a more efficient campaign.
- Metrics: Metrics are individual data points that measure specific aspects of your campaigns. These can include click-through rates (CTR), impressions, bounce rates, and more. Metrics provide valuable insights into how different elements of your campaign are performing but don’t always offer a direct picture of success or failure—they may help understand the wider picture, though.
All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Focusing on KPIs ensures that your performance metrics align with your strategic goals, providing clear indicators of success and areas needing improvement. While metrics can help identify trends and areas for optimisation, KPIs are vital for assessing overall campaign effectiveness and achieving your marketing objectives.
Data-Driven Decisions: The Path to Optimisation
In performance marketing, leveraging data for optimisation is essential for continuous improvement and achieving better results. Here’s how to make data-driven decisions that enhance your marketing efforts:
- Utilise Machine Learning and AI: These technologies rely on data-driven attribution models to understand the effectiveness of different touchpoints in the customer journey. Machine learning can enhance A/B testing by providing deeper insights and faster results, allowing you to identify what works best for your audience quickly.
- Historical Data Utilisation: Analyse historical performance data to optimise bids and make informed decisions about budget allocation. By understanding past trends and outcomes, you can predict future performance and adjust your strategies accordingly.
- Goal Alignment: Ensure your bidding strategies align with your specific campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to maximise conversions, using a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) strategy can help you focus on acquiring customers at a cost that meets your profitability targets.
- Flexibility and Adjustments: Be prepared to adjust your strategies based on real-time data and changing market conditions. Flexibility is key to maintaining effective campaigns. Regularly review your performance data to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to optimise results.
- Enhanced Tracking and Analytics: Implement advanced tracking mechanisms such as Conversion API and Enhanced Conversions to capture comprehensive data on customer interactions. This ensures that you have accurate data to inform your decisions and enhance the effectiveness of your machine-learning algorithms.
- Cross-Platform Comparison: Use tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to compare performance data across different platforms. This helps you understand the overall impact of your campaigns and make more informed decisions about where to allocate your budget for maximum ROI.
By leveraging data-driven insights, you can continuously optimise your campaigns, improve your targeting, and ultimately drive better results. Data-driven decisions are not just about making adjustments; they are about creating a culture of continuous improvement where every decision is informed by reliable data and aimed at achieving your strategic goals.
Optimising Your Landing Pages
Driving traffic to your site is only half the battle. Ensuring your landing pages are optimised for conversions is crucial to turning visitors into customers. Here’s how to optimise your landing pages effectively:
- Site Speed and User Experience: A fast-loading site is essential, as slow loading times may frustrate visitors and cause them to leave immediately. Ensure your landing pages load quickly and provide a seamless user experience. Optimise images, leverage browser caching and minimise redirects to improve load times.
- Mobile Optimisation: With a significant portion of users accessing websites via mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure that your landing pages are mobile-friendly. Responsive design, easy navigation, and quick loading times are key elements of mobile optimisation.
- Alignment with Ad Campaigns: Your landing pages should align with your ad messaging and branding. Consistency between your ads and landing pages helps build trust and ensures that users find what they expect. Use the same keywords, headlines, and visuals to create a cohesive experience.
- Clear and Compelling Call to Actions (CTAs): CTAs guide users towards taking the desired action. Make sure your CTAs are prominent compelling, and clearly state what you want the user to do, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form. Use action-oriented language and make your CTAs stand out with contrasting colours and strategic placement.
- Effective Use of Visuals and Content: High-quality visuals and clear, concise content are crucial for engaging visitors. Use images, videos, and infographics to highlight key points and make your content more digestible. Break up text with headings, bullet points, and white space to improve readability.
By focusing on these elements, you can create high-converting landing pages that effectively turn visitors into customers, maximising the ROI of your biddable campaigns.
Quick Wins for Immediate Impact
If you’re running your campaigns in-house and need quick wins to boost performance, consider these tactics:
- Saturate Main Platforms: Before expanding to new platforms, ensure you are fully utilising the potential of your main advertising channels like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This means optimising current campaigns, exploring all ad formats, and using advanced targeting options available on these platforms. By maximising the performance of these primary channels, you can achieve substantial gains without the complexity of managing multiple new platforms.
- Analyse Spend-to-Opportunities Ratio: Continuously monitor the ratio of your ad spend to the opportunities generated (such as leads or sales). Identify campaigns or channels where you’re spending too much without enough return and reallocate those funds to higher-performing areas. Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can help you track and analyse these metrics effectively.
- Review and Learn from Past Performance: Dive into your historical performance data to identify patterns and insights that can inform your current strategies. Look at what has worked well in the past and replicate those tactics. For example, if a particular type of ad creative or messaging resonated well with your audience before, consider using similar approaches in your current campaigns.
- Leverage Campaign Budget Optimisation Tools: Utilise tools that automatically optimise your budget allocation across multiple campaigns to ensure that funds are directed towards the highest-performing ads. Platforms like Google Ads offer automated bidding strategies that can adjust your bids in real time to maximise conversions or other desired actions.
- Implement Shared Budgets: Use shared budgets across multiple campaigns targeting similar goals to ensure that your budget is used efficiently. This approach allows you to dynamically allocate funds to the best-performing campaigns, enhancing overall performance without manual intervention.
- Automate Campaign Management: Set up automated rules within your ad platforms to manage campaigns based on performance metrics. For example, you can create rules to increase bids on high-performing keywords or pause ads that are underperforming. Automation can save time and ensure your campaigns are optimised continuously without constant manual oversight.
By implementing these quick wins, you can significantly improve your campaign performance, drive better results, and achieve a higher return on investment with minimal additional effort.
We hope these insights from our recent webinar equip you with practical knowledge and actionable strategies to enhance your marketing efforts. If you missed the webinar or want to dive deeper into any of these topics, feel free to reach out to us at hello@fingo.co.uk. We’re here to help you make smarter marketing decisions and achieve your business goals.
Stay tuned for our next webinar!
