The Drop Everything, Must-Do, Can’t Miss,
Online Advertising Checklist
Plan:
Developing a complete understanding of your target audience, where they spend their time
online, and how your offering solves their problems allows you to target your ads and utilize
your budget more efficiently. Your planning process can be broken into three distinct phases of
understanding: customer, product, and funnel.
Demographic research: determine location, age, gender,
marital status, and income of your ideal customer.
Psychographic research: determine interests, habits,
Determine your ideal
customer
attitudes, emotions, and preferences of your ideal customer.
Determine which platforms, devices, and websites your
prospects spend the most time on.
Determine the benefits customers derive from your product
or services.
Conduct analysis of your top competitors (learn about their
offerings, pricing, tone, and key features) to uncover where
Survey the
competitive
landscape
you have a distinct advantage (and where they beat you).
Develop your brand’s USP (unique selling proposition); this
will help you stray away from feature-centric ad creative that
blends in with the other players in your space.
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Top of funnel: These are high-volume, low intent
opportunities. Leverage your demographic and
psychographic research to introduce new prospects to
your brand.
Middle of funnel: Nurture! Build a relationship with prospects
Match the right
language and offer
to each stage of your
marketing funnel
in research mode by sharing targeted content (like user
testimonials) that highlights benefits and builds trust.
Bottom of funnel: High-value, high opportunity. Signaled by
keywords with clear commercial intent, direct phone calls,
or actions taken on your site. Make their path to purchase a
frictionless experience.
Measure:
When developing a strategy that spreads across platforms and devices, knowing which ads
people have clicked and which actions they’ve taken is the key to optimization. Now that you
know who you’re trying to reach and how you’re going to do it, it’s time to make sure your results
are measurable.
Google Ads & Analytics: Track conversions and build
remarketing audiences by pasting your account’s Universal
Analytics code in the header of every page on your website
and creating conversion goals in Google Analytics.
The Facebook Pixel: A highly customizable tool for
conversion tracking and audience building. Alter it for pages
Append the
appropriate code
and pixels to your
website (and make
sure it works)
on your website where different actions represent different
levels of value (for example, a sale and an email address are
both worth tracking, but one’s certainly more important to
your business).
WordStream Tag: Confused by too much code? WordStream
Tag streamlines conversion tracking by offering a single
container, allowing you to measure the success of paid
search and social campaigns without calling your web
developer as your business evolves.
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Single-Click: Credit the final conversion entirely to one
interaction (first or last). It’s simple and easy to understand,
but it doesn’t give you a full view of the impact of your ads on
a user’s path to conversion.
Multi-Click: Assign partial credit to every interaction that
Choose the right
attribution model for
your business
leads to a conversion. How you split the value of each
conversion into fractions depends on which model you use,
and options range from time decay (assigns credit over time,
weighting the most recent action as most important) to
position-based systems. More complex (and accurate) than
single-click attribution).
Focusing on key performance indicators is the best way
to guide optimization. If you sell things online, perhaps
return on ad spend (RoAS) is your source of truth; for lead
generation, volume, CPA, and the rate at which a contact
Track the metrics
that matter most to
your business
converts to a sale might end up being more actionable ways
to gauge success. While performance metrics like CTR are
important in guiding ad-level decisions, at the end of the day,
tying your investment back to revenue is going to help you
get more out of your online advertising efforts.
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