We love Paid Media. Done in the right way, it can be used to help your business shoot beyond a whole host of target objectives, from improving brand awareness to increasing website traffic to generating leads and of course, driving sales.
That said, the key part of our first paragraph are the words ‘done in the right way’. Despite the potential of Paid Media, it comes with a fair few pitfalls that have the insidious ability to motor through your budget without delivering the expected returns.
Whether you’ve got a couple of Paid Social campaigns, a smattering of Display activity or an all singing, all dancing Paid Search account, understanding the levers that cause this budgetary misery is the key to unlocking more efficient and more effective activity.
If you require the guidance of our team or an assessment of your Paid Media Campaigns, speak to a Paid Media Consultant by getting in touch.
Failing to Define Clear KPIs
Not all Paid Media tactics are born equal. If you benchmark all your channels and tactics against their ability to deliver direct revenue to your business, then you’ll soon find yourself whittling down the list to a very short shortlist.
Each Paid Media tactic you deploy should have a coherent objective in terms of what you expect it to deliver. If you’re investing in YouTube advertising to reach potential prospects in your industry, would you measure the success of that approach in the same way you’d measure someone searching ‘Buy XYZ’?
Tactics that are designed to drive reach should be measured against KPIs that determine whether reach was achieved. Look at Impressions, or View Rates or Frequency, not the amount of dollars it generated. Conversely, when you’ve got a tactic that aims to stimulate a response from the audience, the KPIs should be adapted accordingly – look at Click-Through Rate or Bounce Rate or Traffic Volume.
Underutilising Audience Targeting
Another common mistake is failing to target the right audience. It’s tempting to cast the net wide and attract more impressions or clicks, but really the only winners here are the platforms given it results in wasted spend on uninterested or largely irrelevant users.
Investing in detailed audience research and segmentation should already be part of any overarching Marketing Strategy and it’s critical in understanding
who your ideal customer is and how they behave. Readily available tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Audience Insights are a great gateway, but the value of your existing customer data can’t be underestimated in shaping what your future customers are likely to look like.
From there, you can segment your audience based on key variables like demographics, interests, and behaviours. The more specific your targeting, the more likely your ads will reach the right people – reducing waste and ultimately improving the effectiveness of your ads, whether they’re designed to drive top-of-funnel reach or bottom-of-funnel reaction.
Neglecting Ad Copy & Creative
An ad with poor creative or unclear messaging will fail to engage users, regardless of how well your targeting criteria is configured. Poor visuals, bland copy, or ads that don’t speak to audience pain points will almost certainly result in reduced Click-Through rates and higher Cost Per Click.
Effective ad creatives are engaging, informative, and tailored to audience needs. Regularly test different headlines, images, CTAs, and formats to see what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing is essential – try multiple versions of your ads (leverage ChatGPT to help stimulate thinking here) and track performance to understand what elicits response.
Additionally, consider personalising your ad content. This doesn’t need to be majorly dynamic or time-consuming – simple tweaks, like addressing audience pain points or including elements like user location, can make your ads feel more relevant and drive engagement.
Setting & Forgetting
Many marketers make the mistake of setting up campaigns and letting them run without regular optimisation. Paid Media campaigns need regular monitoring to ensure they’re performing efficiently, especially when audience behaviour and competitor strategy changes frequently.
Make it part of your daily routine to check-in on campaign performance or engage with your reporting platform. Top-level key metrics like CTR%, Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion are straightforward signposts to any potential issues, and with reporting getting closer to real-time, you can nip issues in the bud before they drain budget.
Overlooking Negative Keywords
In platforms like Google Ads, neglecting to use negative keywords can lead to your ads being shown for irrelevant search terms. For example, if you’re selling premium fitness equipment, you don’t want your ads showing up for users searching for “cheap workout gear.”
Negative keywords allow you to exclude certain terms from triggering your ads. This helps prevent wasted clicks and ensures your budget is being spent on users more likely to convert. Regularly review your search query reports to identify irrelevant keywords. Once found, add them as negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic. Continuously updating this list will help limit any ad spend wastage over time and improve the quality of your traffic.
Focusing on Short-Term Gains
Many businesses focus on quick wins, driving traffic or leads in the short term, but fail to build a sustainable long-term strategy. This approach is not going to work over an extended period of time and can lead to burnout of both your budget and your audience.
While we recognise the importance of achieving short-term success (we’re Performance Marketers after all), it’s a strategic imperative to build campaigns that focus on long-term growth. This includes investment in brand awareness, stimulating mental availability across the 95% of prospects who aren’t in the market to buy your product at this point in time.
For example, instead of simply focusing on driving one-time clicks or conversions, build a long-term retargeting strategy aimed at upper funnel prospects. Use data from website visitors to nurture them over time with targeted ads that keep them engaged with your brand and more likely to convert in the future.
Not Utilising Conversion Tracking
Without proper conversion tracking in place, it’s impossible to know which ads or campaigns are driving real business results. Many businesses miss out on valuable insights because they’re only tracking clicks or traffic, not the actual outcomes (such as sales or lead generation) that matter most.
Whether you’re using Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, or any another platform, setting up conversion tracking should be a top priority. Define what counts as a conversion for your business—this could be a sale, form submission, or any other key action like a piece of downloaded content.
Step-by-step guides are available to support the tracking of these conversions in your analytics and ad platforms. As a consequence, you’ll gain insights into which campaigns are driving you towards your desired KPIs and focus your budget accordingly. You’ll also be able to spot any campaigns or ads that aren’t delivering value and pause or optimise them.
Over-Reliance on Automated Bidding Strategies
Automated bidding strategies like Google’s Smart Bidding can save time, but over-relying on them without sufficient oversight can lead to wasted budget. These strategies aren’t always tailored to your specific goals or audience and at least to some degree, are designed to get you to spend more budget.
While automated bidding can be useful, it’s important to combine it with manual adjustments. Regularly review the performance of automated campaigns and adjust bid strategies as needed. For example, if your Cost Per Acquisition is too high, consider switching to manual bidding to regain control over your budget and deploy a new approach.
Lack of Campaign Restrictions Based on Timings & Weekly Performance
As we know, Paid Media campaigns require regular optimisation and monitoring to ensure they’re running at peak efficiency. Platform reporting can give you insights into campaign performance at certain times of the day and days of the week, allowing you to increase bids at the moments you see strong engagement and scale back when core metrics are weaker.
This is particularly valuable for brands with lower Paid Media budgets who can’t afford an always-on approach, but regardless of the depth of your pockets, wasted spend is wasted spend and having an understanding of audience behaviour can contribute to a higher ROI over time.
Failure to Utilise Audience Lists & Remarketing
Remarketing should be the first line item on any Paid Media plan – these are customers who have already engaged with your ads and visited your website, making them the highest value prospects in your acquisition funnel. With this in mind, they’re typically the highest converters at the lowest cost per lead so having a strong plan in place is essential.
Remarketing works best for organisations driving a significant amount of Paid Media traffic as it takes time for audience pools to build, but even a trickle of traffic can be effectively nurtured with the right strategy in place. Without that strategy, the likelihood of a competitor picking up your engaged prospect increases exponentially so ignore at your peril!
Avoiding Extensive Budget-Expanding Brand Campaigns
Opinion is usually pretty divided on this one and there’s no single answer that applies to everyone, but having Paid Search campaigns focused on your Brand keywords can be a drain on budget and often cannabalise conversions you’d have generated anyway (usually via Organic Search, which always seems to be on the losing end of such scenarios).
Where competitors are present on your Brand keywords, the temptation to knock them off the top spot and reclaim your rightful position is strong, but in reality, conquesting campaigns from competitors, while annoying, rarely generate volume or value. Having a strong organic presence for your brand is more effective and can allow you to divert spend to generic keywords.
Running Paid Advertising With Poor Landing Pages
It sounds counterintuitive, but one of the biggest mistakes we regularly see is not looking beyond Paid Media tactics when it comes to optimisation. The most relevant and engaged traffic in the world can be obliterated by a poor onsite experience and getting a click on your ad is just the first part of the overall journey towards conversion.
We don’t pretend to be CRO experts, but working in tandem with your web teams or agency should result in a roadmap of A/B tests, best practice implementations and in-depth data. If you don’t have this in place, the likelihood of generating or sustaining strong performance is limited. Early warning signs include strong click-through rates that lead to pages with low conversion rates or high bounce rates.
Ignoring Page Speed Experience and Core Web Vitals
Linked to landing page optimisation but a technical layer deeper is the performance of your website itself. If you’ve gone to the trouble of constructing a best practice landing page, but the load time is poor, your efforts will be largely wasted as users abandon their sessions. This is a particularly painful Paid Media experience as you effectively pay for a click that never engages with your content.
Tools like Page Speed Insights give excellent overviews of individual pages and highlight on a very straightforward Red, Amber and Green basis what is having the most impact on load times. Building this into your optimisation cycle is essential to have the full picture of the user journey and avoid any nasty surprises further down the line when a seemingly perfect set of ads and landing pages aren’t generating the results expected.
Conclusion
Now, you could say that a few of these are quite straightforward, common-sense observations rather than deep insights. You’d be right. However, we’ve seen these mistakes countless times on accounts of all shapes and sizes, often observing upwards of 33% of the available budget being wasted each month.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Performance Marketing is about getting maximum effectiveness and efficiency from your budget, regardless of the size of that investment, and following key principles is a foundational element. A balanced, long-term strategy gives you the best opportunity to drive sustainable success for your business, and that can only succeed on a strong base.
You know where we are if you want to talk!