Making a pool out of a puddle: advice for Advertisers
Maor Sadra here with a tip for Advertisers:
Advertisers measure their return on investment (ROI) by calculating how much money they spent to generate a new lead/sale and comparing it to the lifetime value of the user. In today’s online advertising world, everything can be tracked and measured to measure ROI, so why do so many Advertisers limit their use of marketing tools and splash around in the same tiny puddle they are used to?!
Why not dig in deeper and create yourself a nice pool?
I used to work at a place where almost 80% of the online media budget went to Email Marketing. Over time, this limited our abilities to increase sales, as while Email Marketing is a highly effective method, you can easily saturate a market and even damage your brand name.
So while results were great in the short run, we soon got stuck with no ability to grow as we were recycling the same media again and again… and making our little puddle quite muddy.
To solve this problem, we began expanding our reach into different channels: PPC, Banners and Lead Generation, and found that our ROI was not the same for every channel, even when using the same CPA rates. We needed to adjust the target CPA by channel, thus working on 8 markets x 4 channels = 32 different CPA targets.
As complex as this sounded, using a pool of marketing tools and not just one helped the company expand, appeal to new users that were entirely unaware of the brand, and reach a steady positive ROI overall.
Today, I run across too many advertisers which refuse to run on specific media types, since they’ve tested it using the same target CPA they have for their best performing media type. One thing I always ask is: “Why limit your reach when you can simply adjust your rates to compensate for your ROI targets?”
With the variety of marketing tools available online today: Banners, Email, SEO, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Social Media and more… the potential is as limitless as the combinations! After you multiply these different channels by the amount of countries Advertisers sometimes cover and the amount of different media companies Advertisers work with, you realize you should be working with hundreds of different CPA targets!
With that said, my tip for the day, and every day, is: Test Everything! Measure your ROI by channel and re-adjust your rates to allow a steady positive ROI. A major side effect of this approach is that in the long run, the more channels you run on, the more affiliates will run your offers. One of my favorite parts of affiliate marketing is that what works for the advertiser, works for the affiliates!
So, when it comes to choosing an online ad strategy, why splash around in that dirty little puddle when you could be lounging in your pool (complete with waterfall), drinking a Jamaican Smile with a paper umbrella sticking out of it?