News this week highlights that digital advertising spend is on the up, while other forms of marketing spend are down. In the IPA’s latest quarterly Bellwether survey, there is an overall net balance increase of 22.7% on internet marketing spend, which is the highest since 2007.
However, the IPA warns of uncertainty in the future and possible downward spend in advertising in the future, along with the economic uncertainty created by Brexit. In line with this, we recommend that as always, marketing needs to be looking at the wisest use of their budget. This is no rocket science as a concept, but there are systems to support you and make sure that what you spend on digital ads through Google Shopping, Facebook etc can bring about the most returns as possible.
How do you do it?
Determine the right level of segmentation for your products
Ensure you have a structure that is suitable for your Product Level Advertising (PLA) campaign. Splitting products into various ad groups and campaigns plays a key part in spending efficiently. Different product sets have different profit margins. Some categories are more popular than others. Some have very different conversion rates. Our platform allows you to easily structure your campaigns, as well as make decisions on a product by product basis.
Data Quality is key
No-one likes to be deceived when clicking on a shopping ad when they select an item with one price and then find the price to be different, out of stock, or going to the wrong page! Customers want easily findable items and want to be able to quickly filter out listings they don’t need. Cut back on wastage spend by ensuring your data is rich and well attributed.
Speak your customers’ language
Product titles/descriptions/images are among some of the most important factors that influence the performance of your digital channels. Use a content experiment tool such as Intelligent Reach’s, to run sophisticated A/B tests which determine what your customers react to the most. First normalise and then include your customers’ language – what better way to ensure you are spending wisely then showing customers ads they actually want to see?
Strong bidding strategy
Our extensive reports and performance module helps you execute a strong bidding strategy. Make full use of the system to reduce bids on products that aren’t converting. It only makes sense to cut back spend on products that are not converting and pump more spend into the top sellers.
A suitable campaign structure, rich and well attributed data, a good understanding of your customer and a sophisticated bidding strategy is the recipe for a strong ROI – our platform allows you do all of this in one single place. By getting systems in place to do this well now, if you do have some of your ad spend hit, you will be well-placed to deal with it and to still focus on getting good returns from every dollar or pound spent. Read about a company that is getting an 85% increase in revenues on their Google Shopping, by being wise with their spend.
