5 Hacks To Massively Boost Your Online Advertising Performance

You heard online advertising is way more effective than traditional marketing.

You set up your account, and put all your marketing budget into a paid campaign.

It didn’t work.

You got some results, but not as nearly as good a return on investment as you expected.

And you expected boom.

FACT: The boom can happen.

But you have to work your way to it.

Online advertising is a complex strategic process. It takes some time to pick up on things and learn from your own experiences. It also requires some quality research and strategic planning beforehand.

To help save some of your precious time, here are five crucial hacks that you can start implementing immediately to boost your PPC campaign performance.

1. Target the right people: Get your audience to know you first

People don’t buy from strangers.

Not just like that.

It doesn’t matter how great your campaign is, if they don’t know you, or even worse, wonder why you’re ‘jumping out’ of their social channels, all your efforts will be wasted.

The crucial component of great paid campaigns is very precise targeting.

How do you do that?

Aside from knowing your audience’s age and demographics, there are more things to consider. What are their interests?

What are their needs?

Which stage of buyer’s journey are they in?

And the last, but not least: how do you get them to know you?

You need to grow a qualified audience for your PPC to perform great.

That is achievable through lead generation efforts and content creation. You’ll create blog posts, ebooks, guides, checklists, host webinars, offer free consultations, make a giveaway…

You’ll use them to generate sales qualified leads, segment lists according to campaigns in your CRM, and after a while, you’ll notice having valuable lists of people who are for sure interested in what you have to offer.

With those lists, you’ll be able to target that exact audience who already knows you, recognises value you provide, and needs your services or products.

That way, your efforts will go in the right direction.

2. Make your PPC campaign strategic

Include your paid campaigns into your overall marketing campaign. Plan accordingly:

Align your content, lead generation, and online advertising efforts.

You don’t want to write blogs about alternative education paths, create a guide to studying abroad, and promote an advanced business class in one campaign.

If you started off with alternative education, create a guide that covers the broader topic, and then later on, you can add your segmented audience when creating a paid campaign for Certificate I enrolment.

3. Do your maths.

First of all, define your paid campaign goal.

Do you want 300 new hot leads? Or do you want 30 sales conversions? Do you want to raise your brand awareness?

The goal needs to be clear and defined before even starting to plan further.

And that’s not all: the goal needs to align with your overall marketing goal.

Do you want to enrol 30 international students into your course?

Then you need to do the maths.

Rely on your previous data (if you have any) to determine how many leads you need to generate in order to get 30 of them to enrol. If you don’t have any data, devote a few quarters to testing.

Say you need 600 leads to convert 30 into customers. Now, based on your time frame, set the monthly lead goal. For example, you’ll need 100 leads per month to acquire 30 customers in 6 months.

Then you need to plan how much content you need to create and promote in order to drive leads. And it’s just after you’ve done all this that you plan your paid campaigns.

Back to your paid campaign goals — once you determine your campaign, you’ll know if you’re aiming for followers, leads, or customers.

Depending on that, do your dollar maths. How much money do you need to invest, and is your ROI effective? If you doubt it, then you need to work more on your planning.

4. Test your ads to find what works best for your business

Once you setup your ads, don’t simply leave them be.

Test what works best instead.

For example, when you create an ad set within a campaign, create 3-5 ads, all containing the same headline and caption, and try testing 3-5 different images. Leave it for a week or 10 days to see which one works best, and then use that image in all ads, but try 3-5 different headlines. Once you determine the headline, test 3-5 different captions.

After a while of doing this, you will start recognizing patterns in your audience’s behavior that will enable you to create way more compelling ads impossible not to click on.

5. Make sure your website offers value and speaks clearly to your buyer persona

Oftentimes, when someone clicks on an ad, they end up exploring the website they landed on.

If you’re promoting a free offer, make sure the navigation menu isn’t on the landing page, so that you provide no space for distraction. Once they convert and land to Thank You page, the navigation menu should be waiting there. You want them to stay on your website.

If your goal is to sell through your paid campaign, be aware that a lot of people won’t buy right away, mostly because everyone needs to do their own maths and decide if they can afford it. But they’ll like to stick around, see what you do, how exactly can you help them…

This is where it’s of crucial importance to have a well navigated website that responds to user’s needs and provides a great user experience.

Make your blog and content offers visible and easily accessible. Maybe your prospects still can’t buy, but once they recognize the value you offer without asking for anything in return, they’ll appreciate it, and you’ll be their number one choice when they step into decision stage of their journey.

Why these hacks work

Because they are comprehensive.

They are tightly related to each other, and represent your long term investments.

Every piece of content you create matters. Every post you publish on social media matters. Every step of the way is important.

It’s better to walk slow, than to walk in the wrong direction.

It’s better to postpone a paid campaign for a few months until you build your content and audience, and then double your campaign ROI comparing to if you did it right away.

Stop deluding yourself with thoughts that paid campaigns bring success overnight, and focus your efforts on long term investments. Now you got all information you need to start planning your PPC campaigns and optimising for stellar results.

Wait for it… Wait for it…

Boom.