Are you throwing ad money away?

(If your website isn’t set up for tracking visitors… The answer is yes.)

Moving potential customers from social media to your website is a common practice to capture value. To do this, you may be using paid advertising. However, if your website isn’t set up to track and retarget visitors then you're literally throwing ad money away! 

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half” 

- John Wanamake or Lord Leverhulme??

This was advertising before the digital age. Businesses paid for exposure without any definite metrics of who was engaging with it. Unfortunately, many businesses today are advertising like this. The superpower of digital ads is their ability to track who is engaging with them. The operative word is engaging. These are people that have shown interest. Retargeting them makes sure that you stay top of mind when they’re ready to buy or buy again. This helps optimize your advertising budget by increasing your conversion rate (i.e. difference between how many people that engage with your ad and how many people buy/add value). Always allocate ad money for people that have engaged with your ads. Think of this as doubling down on who is already interested. Doing this helps you narrow your target audience which is another ad money saving activity.

Now the moment you’ve been waiting for… Here’s how to start the process of stop throwing ad money away. Firstly, if you are currently running any ads and your website doesn’t have the proper tracking code, pause your ads. You need to make sure that your website and/or landing page(s) has the tracking code of whatever platform that you’re advertising on or intend to. This piece of code is usually referred to as a pixel or tag. The tracking code monitors how people are engaging with your ad, website, and landing page. These engagements can be clicks, page views, sign ups, shares, purchases, ect.. When considering how valuable this data is to your marketing efforts, running ads without capturing it is costly. For this reason, your tracking code should always be set up before you start running any ad campaigns.  

Installing your tracking code. Check out these short videos from four major platforms that you may already be advertising on.  

Once you have your tracking code installed and start back running ads you want to look at the data that is being collected by the code. Within this data lies insights to help you optimize your future ad campaigns and money. 

Join The Digital Age newsletter to get exclusive content to help you get the marketing system your business deserves.