Testing Your Online Lead-Generation Ad Campaign
You will need to do testing of multiple elements at the beginning of an online lead-generation campaign. An initial test campaign is essential because it tells you what works and what doesn’t. You can test different ads against each other to see which ads, and which offers, get the highest response. You can also use testing to tailor the elements of your campaign, so that you give your ads the best chances of success.
Each of the three online lead-generation advertising tactics provides you with different opportunities to test your ad campaign once it is deployed. However, some basic principles and common elements apply to testing all three tactics.
YOUR TEST TIME PERIOD
When you do a test of an online ad campaign, you should allow yourself adequate time and budget to test the effectiveness of your ads. I recommend a time period of one week for a test campaign. On search engine marketing, social media advertising, or display advertising, running one or more online ads for a week gives you an adequate time period to monitor the response to each ad, and to measure and understand the data you collect from the response.
TESTING YOUR BUDGET
Search engines, social media sites, and some ad-serving software tools used in display advertising allow you to set a daily or weekly budget for how much you want to spend on each ad you post, based on your PPC or CPM bid. Your ad will continue to run on a website, social media site, or search engine until it gets the maximum number of clicks to equal your set budget.
For example, if you post an ad on a search engine or social media site with a maximum budget of $1,000 at a PPC rate of $2 per click, the ad will continue to run on that site until it gets 500 clicks. Depending on how popular your ad is, it may get 500 clicks in one day, one week, or one month.
Online lead-generation advertising gives you opportunities to test your daily budget, to find out how much money you need to allow for each ad. I recommend setting a high daily budget for the first week of your campaign. If you can afford it, I recommend an initial daily budget of $1,000 for each ad you post. This is expensive, but your goal is to test the true effectiveness of your ads. You want to get an idea of the maximum number of leads you can obtain each day with your ad.
If you set a daily budget of $1,000 at a bid of $2 per click, your ad will run every day on the search engine, social media site, or website until it gets 500 clicks. If you’re lucky, on some days, you may get the maximum number of clicks. On other days, you may get less. For example, say you run an ad on Facebook for a product that appeals more to weekend users. On Friday through Sunday, you may get 500 clicks per day, but on Monday through Thursday, you may get an average of only 200 clicks per day. This is fine, because now you know the average number of clicks you can get per day with your ad. You can then adjust your daily budget rate down to around $400–$500 for those days when you know you will get only about 200 clicks.
But if you set a low daily budget for the ad, you may be throwing leads away. For example, if you set a daily budget of $50 with a $2 per click bid, your ad will run only until you get 25 clicks. You will get 25 leads when you could have gotten 200 or more. So it’s better to set a high daily budget for the first week of your campaign in order to get a sense of the highest number of leads you can obtain with that ad.
If you need to start out with a smaller test budget, you can still test your daily budget. For example, you could set a $200 daily budget for each ad, at a PPC rate of $2 per click. If your ad reaches its click limit (e.g., 100 clicks per day) on three separate days, you might increase the ad’s daily budget to $300. If the ad continues to reach its click limit (e.g., 150 clicks per day), you can keep increasing the ad’s daily budget in $100 increments every few days, until you know the maximum number of clicks (e.g., 500) you can expect from the ad on a given day. This testing strategy may take a bit longer to determine your maximum daily budget for each ad. But it may also save you money if you can’t afford a higher test budget.
OTHER TESTING AREAS
For each online ad campaign, you should test three other areas:
1. Testing Ads Against One Other: Test different ads, and different versions of the same ad, against one another to see which gets the best response. For example, you might test an ad with a “Buy one, get one free” offer against an ad with a “Buy now, get 20% off” offer.
2. Testing Your Target Demographics: If you’re not sure which target audience will be most interested in your ads, you can run variations on your ads for each group of target customers. For example, you might test one ad aimed at recent college graduates against another aimed at recent retirees, to see which demographic group gives you a better response.
3. Testing Your Ad Schedule: Search engines allow you to run your ads on days and times when people in your target audience are likely to see them. For example, you may choose to run a search engine ad aimed at college students Monday through Friday from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m.
In the next four chapters, I’ll talk about how to test each of these areas for the individual online lead-generation advertising tactics.
Now let’s take an in-depth look at a creative element that is an essential part of any online lead-generation campaign: the landing page.