Are Your Digital Ads Designed for Success?

Published August 28, 2019

Digital advertising has swept conventional advertising off its feet and will likely overtake advertising channels that have been around for generations. Your business is probably already using this new form of advertising, but are you using it right? In this short article, we will show you the importance of designing these ads for a specific goal. Doing this right will reduce your cost and increase the effectiveness of your advertisements!

Define your goal for each campaign. All of the digital advertising platforms start with this step, and it’s for a reason. Setting the goal of your advertising campaign tells that platform how it should measure the success of your ad, who it should show the ad to, and ultimately how it will be charging you. A campaign designed to reach the most people will charge you based on impressions or reach. An ad campaign that targets a specific action like clicking a website link or becoming a new follower will charge based on how many people perform that action from your ad.

For example, we ran a Facebook Ad campaign of two identical ads, both with the same budget, target audience, and content in the advertisement. One had the goal of “reach” and the other was had a goal of “website link clicks”. These goals are two of the most common goals used in digital advertising. A mistake people often make is to automatically set the goal to reach the most people possible. This makes sense at face value, but if you actually want people to click the link to your website, getting link clicks is more valuable than the number of people seeing the ad.

In our example Facebook Ad campaign mentioned above, the ad designed for reach reached over 11,078 individuals in our target audience and got 13 link clicks. The ad with the goal of link clicks only reached 2,345 individuals but got 32 link clicks. Designing the ads with the wrong goal would leave you with 59% fewer link clicks or 79% fewer people reached. That shows you how easy it would be to spend money on a less effective campaign!

Designing the ads with the wrong goal would leave you with 59% fewer link clicks or 79% fewer people reached.

This is an example of the difference between just two of the goals you can choose for your advertisements. There are many different options for the goal of your digital advertising, and choosing the correct one can be critical to your ad’s success. The differences between these options can be confusing, so if you need help with digital advertising, send us an email and we’d be happy to work with you on designing your ads for success.