So, you’ve decided to run a digital advertising campaign to boost sales leads from your site. That’s great! Digital advertising is a great marketing tool for lead generation and for increasing brand awareness. Digital advertising also gives you insights into user behavior and engagement that is not possible with traditional advertising. Digital advertising, executed properly, is one of the most trackable ways to drive new leads and measure the ROI of your marketing spend. However, it’s important to have a plan. Creating visibility and a door into your site is the function of the digital ads. However, if you don’t have a place to send users that engages them, then your digital ad spend will be a waste.
Here are 3 things you should do to your site before you start running digital ads:
- Create Dedicated Landing Pages Creating custom landing pages is the most effective way to provide highly relevant content on your site that is geared specifically toward your digital advertising audience. Having a dedicated page with content related to why they found your ad, and how the content within your ad is relevant to them, will help keep the user engaged with your content and more likely to fill out a form or contact you. A good landing page’s design and copy should synergize with your digital ad copy and design. If you use an image in a banner ad, use a version of that graphic on your landing page. These are easy ways to create a consistent experience for the user and lets them know that clicking on the ad has taken them to the right place. The copy on your landing page should also align with your digital ad copy. Including your digital ad campaign’s target keywords and using the actual ad copy within your landing page will further reinforce to the user that they are in the right place. (Keywords are phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines or digital ads.) It’s essential to provide users with all the information they need in one place to help them get the information they need quickly without having to search through your site.Not all visitors will be ready to contact you after reading for compelling landing page content. That is why it’s a good idea to also provide users with a path to learn more about you and possibly other services that you provide that they may be interested in. By providing users with links to relevant content elsewhere on your site, you give them a quick and easy point to access that information.
- Add an Online Form Users coming to your site from digital ads should have a way to easily convert the moment they have become engaged with the content. Adding a form to your landing pages provides users with a quick way to contact you while allowing you to leverage the greatest strength of digital advertising… the data! Users that click on digital ads are oftentimes browsing and with the ever-increasing use of mobile devices, they are doing more scanning than actual reading. Providing fewer steps, and less scrolling to contact you will result in more conversions on your site. Users should be able to easily find what they are looking for, and convert in as few clicks as possible. A dedicated contact form will also provide you with useful information about your leads allowing you to refine your digital marketing strategy as your campaign evolves.
- Set up Tracking with Google Analytics The ability to measure ROI is one of the greatest advantages to digital marketing. Being able to see how many impressions and leads were generated by your advertising dollars is essential to measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. Google’s Analytics platform provides a free solution for measuring conversions on your site and attributing them to your digital advertising efforts. By setting up goals in Google Analytics, you can track how many form submissions came from your digital ads and what ads they came from. By using goals in Google Analytics you can also test different versions of your ad’s design and copy. This process of testing different variants of your ads is known as A/B or split testing. By presenting different segments of your audience with alternate versions of your ads and comparing the conversion rates of those variants, you are able to see which ads perform the best. For more information on Google Analytics goal types and how to set them up, check out this article by online marketing author Neil Patel.
Conclusion
Running an effective marketing campaign requires you to make sure that all the pieces are in place to maximize the effectiveness of your efforts. For an effective digital advertising campaign, having your website in a good place before you start to drive traffic to it is a key step in “setting the table”; you don’t want to drive quality traffic to a website that is not ready or your bounce rate will increase. By creating a landing page for your ad traffic, utilizing a dedicated online form for your landing visitors to fill out and setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics, you’ll be on the road to running a digital ad campaign that generates high quality leads from your website, and be able to better track the ROI of your digital campaign. Now that we’ve given you the steps to get your website ready for running a digital ad campaign, you may feel motivated to dive right in and stop reading this blog. But on the other hand, if you prefer to partner with a team of marketing experts who can provide support and expertise as you continue to focus on other parts of your business, reach out to us. From digital advertising strategy, ad creation and ad management to website development, tracking and reporting, we can set up campaigns that drive results.
