Digital marketing rarely delivers the results you want without a bit of trial and error, what usually goes wrong, how do you spot what's wrong and how do you fix it?
"Theory is when you know everything and nothing is right.
Practice is when everything is right and no one knows why.
Here, practice and theory are united, nothing is right and no one knows why."
- Unknown
I'm getting low impressions on an ad
If an ad doesn't appear, we stumble at the starting line. We can't have a marketing funnel if the first step doesn't work. What can cause ads not to be shown and how do we solve it?
Too low bidding
How you bid compared to your competitors determines whether your ads are shown or not. To get impressions, it's all about how much you're willing to pay per action (click, impression, conversion, etc.). Digital marketing can be seen as a bidding war. If you bid less for an action, you lose the bid and your ad is not shown. Increase the bid per action.
In markets with many competitors, the one who is willing to pay the most for a customer wins.
Wrong format in relation to location
If you have an image format that requires the image to be cropped a lot, your ad will get fewer views. Examples include wide "landscape" images on Facebook or Instagram Stories, tall "portrait" images in a newsfeed, a Google display ad that doesn't fit a selected website, etc. Make sure that your ad is adapted to the formats in which it appears.
Facebook: Too much text in the image?
Facebook has a limit of a maximum of 20% text on an image, this also applies to thumbnails on videos. If you exceed 20%, you can still run the ad. The number of impressions you get will be limited. If you're not aware of the 20% rule, it's easy to get stuck scratching your head when your ads don't deliver, even if it looks like everything is set up correctly.
Too narrow targeting
If you target a small audience, you will naturally also get few impressions. As a rule of thumb, it may then be a good idea to use "targeting extension", which is a function available for digital marketing on both Facebook and Google. It can also be a good idea to use a wider audience if possible.
There are cases where "targeting expansion" doesn't make sense, such as with remarketing. If your remarketing list is too small, you need to get more people through your marketing funnel. This can be done by getting more traffic on other campaigns to, for example, get more users onto your website or more people onto your email list. If you sell to a small customer base, or have expensive B2B products, it may be worth looking at "ABM - Account Based Marketing" in connection with digital marketing.
I get too few clicks/sign-ups/purchases/etc. on an ad
Are you getting views on your ad? Great! That means you have a foundation in place for digital marketing. The next thing we want is for your ad to be engaging and clickable. We also want digital marketing and bidding to be optimized for the actions we want.
Wrong audience in relation to message
Is the message in the ad relevant to those who see it? This may seem obvious, but if you're selling makeup, you don't need to target men, and if you're selling from a shop in Bergen, you don't need to target people living in Oslo. Let there be a connection between message and target group. For example, make sure you don't try to sell to people who don't know who you are.
If you believe that a large part of a certain audience is not interested in your product or service, it is usually best to exclude them from your targeting.
Wrong bidding strategy
Be clear about whether you want impressions, clicks or conversions in an ad. If you optimize for impressions, this is exactly what you get, your ad will be shown to as many people as possible, expect that you will not get as many clicks. If you want clicks but optimize for sales, your ad will be shown to those who the algorithm thinks are more likely to buy from you, but you won't get as many clicks. On the other hand, if you optimize for clicks, you may not get as many purchases. All types of optimization have their place, make sure you use the objective that best suits what you want to achieve with the ad:
- Impressions, good for branding
- Clicks, good for building your remarketing list
- Conversions, good for getting leads and sales
An important point is that if you're optimizing for conversions, it's important that you have at least 50 conversions a week. Have different conversion events (sale, add to cart, fill out form, view content, etc.) and optimize for those that have more than 50 a week.
Old ad
If an ad has been live for a long time, it will usually get worse results over time. People get tired of seeing the same things over and over again. It's best to replace ads before the effect starts to fade.
Privacy policy
Today, privacy and GDPR can seem like limiting factors when it comes to measuring the impact of digitalmarketing. There are no perfect solutions here, but it is possible to limit information loss. This is a complex topic, so to begin with, it may be wise to look at features suchas Google's"Consent mode" and"FacebookAPI."
People land on my website, but then it goes quiet
Your ads are delivering and generating traffic, well done! But... your email list isn't growing, sales aren't coming in and people are leaving your website when they land on it. What's happening?
The landing page does not deliver what the ad promises
There's a name for ads that promise more than a landing page offers; "clickbait". Avoid this.
In the short term, clickbait brings a lot of traffic to your site and large remarketing lists, but at the same time you get few conversions. People who come into contact with your company in this way will also get a bad image of your company. In the long run, clickbait is damaging to your brand. Make sure you create ads and landing pages that work together. You don't want to spend money wasting the time of potential customers.
If you're interested in reading more about how good information flow strengthens your marketing and how you can build a marketing funnel focused on value creation, we recommend reading about "Inbound Marketing".
The content on the website is not good enough
If your website has a high "bounce rate", meaning that people leave the website as soon as they land on it, it may mean that the content is not good enough.
The content on your website is the most important and most difficult part of the entire sales process. This is where people make the final decision on whether they want to spend money on your product or service, and if you don't answer their questions and objections well enough, very few people will contact you for answers.
A good website does more than just deliver what an ad promises. For many customers, your website will be the only point of contact they have with your business. It's hard to emphasize how important a good website is.
The majority of searches on Google today are questions. Is your website answering the questions people have about your company well enough? A good website first and foremost needs good content that gives people answers to the questions they have, design is an equally important element.