Secrets of Optimizing Advertising Campaigns: How to Improve ROI?

What is ROI in simple terms?

Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important indicators of brand performance. It answers the key question: “How well was the investment used?” This metric shows marketers whether their investment — be it time or money — is paying off.

To determine the ROI, you need to subtract the marketing costs and divide the net profit by the investment costs, multiplied by 100.

• The average return on investment for Google Ads is 200%. This means that companies that advertise on Google receive an average of 2 dollars for every dollar invested.
• The return on investment of TikTok ads depends on the target market, advertising objectives, and market trends. In 2023, about 78% of small businesses have achieved a positive ROI thanks to TikTok. 75% of them have already made a profit within six months.

5 key ways to improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns

1. Using audience analytics services should become a habit

To get a complete picture of customer behavior and preferences and reduce the cost of ineffective strategy details, you should use advanced analytics services:

• Google Analytics 4. GA4 captures user behavior factors without integration with third-party analytics systems. In addition, the new version works with streams, in which all data about a user is summarized in one channel. This is practical for cross-platform and cross-device tracking.

• Heap Analytics. Helps segment critical customers based on key metrics (customer lifetime value, purchase frequency, average order value, engagement level, and demographics). The tool analyzes user behavior and improves customer engagement on websites and mobile applications.

• Semrush. Tracks marketing results, performs competitive analysis, and works with contextual advertising and social media marketing. With the One2Target report, the platform performs an in-depth analysis of CA and improves segmentation and targeting with audience analytics data.

2. Optimize your ads for mobile users as much as possible

With 55% of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s worth paying attention to the efficiency and optimization of mobile advertising campaigns:

• Adaptive design. It’s important to work through all available ad resizing options. Not only that: try to open all ads on your smartphone and analyze whether all elements are visible and whether the design encourages clicking from the phone (whether the finger reaches, for example).
• Good ad loading speed. Hubspot reports that the highest conversion rates are usually found on websites with a maximum loading speed of 2 seconds. To achieve this, it’s important to optimize the weight of the ads themselves. The tools on the Google Ad Manager platform are the most popular ad load speed testers.

3. Explore all approaches to optimize your ad budget

Digital advertisers waste more than $100 million a year. Don’t follow their example, optimize your budget and avoid losing millions:

• Start optimizing landing pages with tools from Google Optimize, Optimizely, and Unbounce that help you perform A/B testing, analyze user behavior on the site, and improve content.
• Work on increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Customer relationship management (CRM) programs — Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM — take care of this task.
• Research keywords. It makes sense to identify “minus words” and search queries that don’t represent value for the brand. Google Ads Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs can help with keyword selection and search query optimization.
• Improve your offer with AI. Use Adobe Target, Dynamic Yield, and Evergage to analyze data, personalize content, serve relevant ads, and cross-sell offers.
• Create personalized experiences with audience segmentation, dynamic content, and marketing automation tools — Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot.

4. Use business intelligence tools

Behind every successful marketing campaign is a thorough analysis supported by multiple auditing tools:

• Klipfolio, or Cloud Dashboard, is a practical reporting tool. It helps companies to integrate, analyze, and visualize campaign data from various sources in real-time.

• MarketingCloudFX attracts potential customers to your website and increases conversion rates. The platform integrates with other tools and has CallTrackerFX and VisitorRecorderFX features (automatic tracking and recording of calls and visitor actions).

• Improvely tracks marketing efforts and advertising effectiveness across multiple platforms (from Google and Bing to Facebook and Twitter) on a single dashboard. In addition, Improvely has a built-in A/B testing tool and fraudulent click monitoring.

These and other tools can help you determine whether it’s worth continuing to invest in a vendor or whether it’s better to reallocate your budget to more effective channels.

5. Expand your sales channels

According to HubSpot’s Social Media Trends Report, the top 3 platforms providing the highest ROI are Instagram (25%), Facebook (23%) and YouTube (14%). But there are also popular niche channels that shouldn’t be overlooked:

• Reddit is a forum with a base of 70 million daily users. To achieve high conversion rates, marketers can utilize Reddit Pixel, a promoted carousel, and interaction retargeting.

• Pinterest. More than 2 billion requests are made on the website every month. At the same time, 85% of users access Pinterest from mobile devices and spend up to 14 minutes a day on average. More than 80% of Pinterest users make purchases inspired by the platform’s content. Pinterest ads are long-lasting and remain in the feed long after they are completed. This enables a high return on investment.

• Twitch was the first in the world to provide the idea of “live webcasting.” For advertisers, that’s 30 million daily active users and more than 2.55 million concurrent viewers.

• Ecosia. This search network outside of Google reaches 20 million monthly active users. It’s emerging as one of the trends that will attract an environmentally conscious audience in 2024.

• Quora. The platform is visited over 300 million times each month, with 75% of Quora’s traffic coming from mobile devices. It helps advertisers target the right audience through thematic, contextual, and behavioral targeting.

Conclusion

Marketers realize that true brand value is more than just revenue: strong brands have the power to increase customer loyalty, and therefore ROI. Only by constantly analyzing ROI and optimizing your marketing strategy can you identify weaknesses in your sales funnel.