Advanced optimisation of a digital marketing campaign requires thinking on your feet.
There are so many metrics available on any platform, that you need to pick and choose what’s most appropriate at any point for you specifically.
For example…
Does your site work best on tablets? Then perhaps optimising for devices is your best bet. Only advertise on tablets, or increase your bid when tablets are used.
Is your site/service better suited to towns than the countryside? Then perhaps more granular geo-targeting makes sense. Target specific cities or postcodes, and cut out uninterested users.
To take your optimisation to the next level, you need to take a wider view of what you are advertising and how. Then use this knowledge to focus your optimisations on what is most important to you.
If you don’t have this knowledge off-hand, then take a look at your Google Analytics account. Find areas (called dimensions in GA) where you get lots of ‘good’ users. This usually means ones who have a good conversion rate or have a low bounce rate.
Then try to target them by copying the city, device, day of the week or whatever that they have in common.
Similarly, you can look in your Google Search Console for ideas – what searches does your website perform best for? Use those words in your ads, and to inform your targeting.
Technical Information
For many advertisers, pretty much every option available should be used to improve campaign performance. However the more types of optimisation you apply at once, the more they become dependent on each other to work.
For example, if you are only targeting tables in London for the keyword “fish fingers”, then the results you get probably won’t be applicable for desktop users in Germany for the keyword “fish sticks”.
Therefore if you create a complex combination of targeting to improve performance, you should try to keep a ‘vanilla’ option running too in order to gather more stats.
Break out the best performing combination of options into their own campaign/ad group/ad set so you can test it out. However, also always keep a small amount of budget running normally for comparison and data gathering purposes.
Top Tips
If you want to take a more advanced view of optimising your ad campaign, there are a couple of metrics which don’t actually appear anywhere (as we made them up). These metrics are derived from common data available to you.
These bespoke metrics are called VfM and CPC to CPM. Both can be very useful to improve performance.
These metrics (unique to The Online Advertising Guide) are especially useful if you are unable to track conversions for whatever reason, but still want to give your ads the best chance possible.
Follow the links below to try them out.
Summary
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