January 26, 2016
With the 82% rise in ad-blocking software, marketers are increasingly re-allocating resources away from digital display ads and drawing their attention to social. If you do have a slice of marketing budget assigned to social advertising, the rewards may very well be fruitful, and it is data that can assist in supercharging this activity.
With effective tracking in place, variable testing to find your top converting channels, campaigns, audiences or content types can happen instantaneously.
Learn from your data
If you ask any digital marketer who specialises in concocting creative social ad campaigns, it is guaranteed that they will see data as the backbone to delivering success.
The beauty of social ads is that behavioural, demographic, performance and spend data is available in real time. As a result, optimisation and decision making can also be made in real time. Within 48 hours, you can get an idea of the best performing ad/social channel/device/content type and re-balance budgets accordingly.
As soon as you notice that one particular audience type, group of keywords or content format is not delivering the desired results, data empowers you to take action. It’s not good enough just to publish one or two ads and leave campaigns to run until your budget is spent. The key here is to test, learn from the data, and making optimisation decisions based on fact.
Human intelligence goes a long way
It’s far too simplistic to measure engagement rates and click-through rates, without knowing the ‘why’ behind your results. If you recognise that Twitter, for example, is more effective in converting leads (compared with LinkedIn, for example) think about why that might be. What else can be done in addition to re-allocating budget? What learnings can be made? Is there a particular piece of creative content that resonates better and is more effective in delivering those highly sought after leads? There is no room for complacency, and always room to learn and excel when it comes to enhancing your social ad campaigns.
When we talk about the importance of data in driving decision-making, it is worth bearing in mind that your audience is more than a click, an impression or a number. It is easy to lose sight of the needs of your target audience, when systematic data analysis and optimisation take place through a tool. That’s why, when mining your data, human intelligence is essential to extracting golden pieces of insight that will inform campaign strategy and ultimately drive conversion.