6 Reasons Your Digital Ad Budget Gets Wasted

Digital, Services

To understand how to improve your ROAS (return on ad spend), it is important to avoid strategic and spending mistakes. Many choose to partner with a knowledgeable marketing agency to develop the plan and content (many businesses seeking a digital marketing agency in Ohio choose FSM).

What is Wasted Ad Spend? 

Wasted ad spend refers to money spent on advertising that doesn’t deliver the desired results or doesn’t align with an organization’s goals. These six steps will help you avoid wasted spend and reach your intended audiences faster – getting the most out of your advertising budget. 

6 Reasons For Wasted Ad Spend

A good strategy – including a partnership with a solid marketing agency – will help you determine what is the right story to tell and what is a good ROAS percentage (the statistics that will determine whether your campaign is a success). To build that strategy, avoid the following mistakes. 

1. Poor Goals or Metrics

What is the goal of your ad campaign? Do you want people to click and buy? Do you want to generate interest and fulfill awareness? Do you want to persuade someone to subscribe to a newsletter, or schedule an appointment? Be sure that it is clearly defined because that will help you determine what campaign and types of ads and platforms you will choose. Advertising on platforms where your target audience is not active will likely result in wasted ad spend.

Likewise for metrics. Which ones are you using to measure the effectiveness of your digital ad campaign? Click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, cost per impression, cost per acquisition – are just a few of the many metrics you should discuss with your digital marketing partner. Another metric is ROAS – return on ad spend – which can be low if your campaign performs poorly due to unclear goals and metrics.

2. Poorly Crafted Ad Copy

For various reasons, some ads just don’t connect to the intended audience. It could be that the message has not been carefully crafted to resonate with what that person’s wants or needs. A frequent copywriting mistake is to showcase features, but not elevate benefits. All consumers are busy. They may want to learn about a product’s features at some point, but to properly get their attention, a good ad will hold up a mirror to that person and reveal – here’s something that will help solve your problems.

Good copy demonstrates empathy (“I understand your pain and desire”) and offers a solution (“This will solve your problem”). If it doesn’t start that way, then you’re less likely to get the prospect’s attention. Good copy and design tell a story that your audience wants to relate to – which then leads them to be curious about the product or service that you want them to say yes to. 

3. Not Updating Ad Creative

Update the messaging – at least every few months if not sooner. It’s simple and it’s smart. If your goal is to meet customers and prospects where they are, you should remember that where they are is different today than it was 4 to 8 weeks ago. Life doesn’t stand still for anyone. Seasons, circumstances, and real world conditions change. Take advantage of these natural cycles to freshen your messaging. This will likely be more engaging to your audiences. It will also give you an opportunity to make your message timely. In particular, if your ads are being shown as part of a remarketing campaign, it is important for audiences to see fresh messaging. If they see the same ads over and over, they will become bored or annoyed.

4. Poorly Designed Landing Page

Always remember that the experience from the ad to the landing page should not be jarring, like leaping from one universe to a completely different one. What makes a poorly designed landing page? Several things: the story doesn’t match the messaging of the ad that led people to the landing page, or the text is too bunched up and heavy, making it neither engaging nor skimmable, and you’ve lost your audience. Maybe the content doesn’t adhere to brand guidelines. For higher conversion rates, make sure the promise of the ad is fulfilled on the landing page.

5. Unrefined Audience

Don’t put all your energy into selling cat toys to dog lovers. Target the right audience so that your ad messaging is hits the mark and drives engagement. Using detailed targeting options ensures you focus on the right demographics, interests, and behaviors, as well as geographic regions. Whatever criteria are applicable – consider them and refine them. Sometimes the audience is targeted too broadly and the result is that you can spend too much money on people who aren’t ready or are unlikely to take action. 

6. Broad Keyword Targeting

Broad keyword targeting is a Google Ads keyword match type that allows ads to appear in searches related to the keyword, even if the search doesn’t contain the exact keyword terms. The benefit of broad match keywords is that they can help you reach a wide audience and discover new opportunities. The drawback is that they can also trigger irrelevant or low-quality clicks that waste your budget and lower your conversions. A good digital marketing agency will focus on high value keywords, using long-tail keywords and negative keyword lists to filter out irrelevant searches.

Maximize Your Ad Performance with Full Spectrum Marketing

To maximize your effort and advertising dollars, be sure to check all these boxes and create a campaign with strong goals, well-defined audiences, great copy, well-designed landing pages, clearly defined audiences, and frequently updated messaging.

Providing all of these services is why Full Spectrum Marketing is one of the fastest-growing advertising agencies in Akron, Ohio. Contact us to see how, together, we can check these boxes to maximize your budget and achieve great results.

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