January 23, 2023
With more competition, more platforms, more ad formats and less hands on control than ever in Paid Marketing, we’re sharing our top tips to make your budget work harder for you in 2023.
1. Get to grips with recent trends
No, we're not talking about updating your wardrobe. Use all the data and insights at your disposal to plot out the weeks rather than months each year. Our favourite places to source this data is:
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- Meta Ads
- SEMRush
- Google Trends
- Industry Blogs
- Marketing Calendars
Look out for which weeks see peaks in your key metrics across the month and year. Does payday week always have a great CvR? Or does ROAS drop off throughout the month? Is your product seasonal so intent is low in Summer over Winter? All this helps you phase your budget into weeks that historically perform well and pull back in the rest.
2. Tighten up those targets
If you’re using Target ROAS as a bidding strategy, check what you’re actually achieving. So many times we audit a new account and the ROAS Target is significantly below the actual ROAS. Increase the target over time and cut out any wasted spend.
Also, what are you trying to achieve? For example, do you want new customers but have a high ROAS target? You may want to consider ring fencing budget for new customer acquisition and have separate targets for that objective.
3. Go back to basics
Review your search query reports… it's so basic but so often picked up when we’re auditing new accounts. With less control over CPC’s with automated bidding, keep an eye on unrelated or unstocked terms filtering in. We’ve seen new accounts come to us with wasted spend up in 4 figures for products that are no longer in stock!
For Paid Social, are you keeping an eye on your tracking? We’re frequently seeing a fair few active errors showing against the Meta pixel in audited accounts, which means it’s tracking incorrectly so account holders have been making data-driven decisions on ad spend, and the data is not correct - Ouch!
4. Daily budgets on Paid Social
By using daily budgets we’re able to take more control over when and where we’re spending the budget. These days if you have the opportunity to take back some control, grab it with both hands! Don’t get us wrong, sometimes that lifetime budget optimisation can work wonders, however, we’ve found that phasing budgets over weeks and breaking it down into daily budgets have enabled us to achieve better results for our clients. It allows us to be much more flexible with that spend.
5. Make the channels work better
PPC and Paid Social are sisters not twins, so don’t always give them the same objective. Rather than having them work in silo with their own budgets but the same objective, give them an overarching target. Together they can work more efficiently to share budget and drive users where demand is being seen in real time.
You can learn more about how a Holistic Approach to Paid Marketing can benefit your budget efficiency using the button below.
