Google AdS, social campaigns, PR and influencer marketing, and much more: channels and opportunities in the world of digital advertising are multiplying by the day, but when faced with the more or less necessary desire to invest in them, the question that remains increasingly complex to answer is, “how much should I invest and how can I get the most out of my campaigns?“
Data and KPIs come to our rescue to monitor and understand the performance of our campaigns, but they do not provide an answer and, more importantly, are not a tool to optimize their performance
ROAS and ROI: understanding and calculating the return on your advertising investment
Although KPIs and data do not provide us with the solution to optimizing our campaigns, they are undoubtedly critical to understanding their performance and, in that sense, harbingers of useful information for evaluating corrective actions to improve their performance.
But let’s see what it is all about.
With the term ROAS (Return on Advertising Spent) goes to define, specifically, the return on advertising investment. Calculating ROAS is very simple: you divide the user-generated revenue from campaigns by the cost of the ads, multiplying it by one hundred.
ROAS = advertising revenue/advertising cost
Ideal for constant monitoring of campaigns and evaluation of possible changes in budget allocation, ROAS is a KPI that nevertheless lacks a more strategic and business view.
In this regard, it is undoubtedly more comprehensive that on the campaigns evaluated by the ROI (Return on Investment). With this metric we go, in fact, to consider not only the mere advertising expenses but also the cost of the related activities of creation and management.
To calculate ROI:
ROI = (total revenue – total cost) / total cost
Once we understand how to evaluate the return on investment of our campaigns, all that remains for us to do instead is to address the key issue concerning optimizing their performance.
Better results for your campaigns? Find out how with the help of marketing automation
Creativity, copy, budget, placements, target audience: there are many factors you can play on to make a campaign successful.
Very often we can optimize it as best we can on the platform, but we don’t put the same care and attention into choosing the landing page or perhaps defining the navigation paths that lead the user to purchase.
Are we always sure that the expectations of the user who clicks the ad are met? Or rather, are we really sure with our campaigns that we are intercepting the right target audience?
In both cases, strategies for marketing automation and the use of Customer Data Platforms, such as Blendee, provide us with valuable help in both the on-site personalization of the customer experience of the user from the campaigns, as well as in the antecedent phase of creating different audiences.
Customer data platform: all the value of advanced profiling
Over time, the tools and features offered by even advertsing platforms such as Google ADS, in terms of profiling, have evolved with the goal of providing marketers with the ability to refine their strategies. Think, for example, of how much more information and data we can now take advantage of with remarketing tag integration rather than integration with Google Analytics.
But what if we ourselves were to provide Google with clusters of highly profiled users to work on our campaigns?
In addition to demographic data, interests and information on browsing and purchasing behavior, for our segmentation it may be interesting to also integrate information collected by our customer care service, rather than data from our CRM or even more simply use the Customer Lifetime Value of our customers as a profiling criterion.
It is clear that this type of information is in no way available either within Google Ads or, much less, within Google Analytics.
However, a customer data platform like Blendee can help by allowing us to implement effective audience profiling and segmentation strategies.
Once created, these segments can be easily exported, via a connector, within the dashboard of the well-known paid campaign platform.
The advantage? The ability to better profile our audience, customizing the browsing experience on and off the site.
Marketing automation and digital advertising: how to personalize the on-site experience
A digital advertising campaign works if it converts. If profiling and segmentation activities are key for defining the clusters of users that will determine the target (think of the different remarketing campaigns, rather than the possibility of generating clusters of users to be used as targets starting from those created in our CDP), the customization of the online customer experience is no less important!
Personalization of content, product recommendation dynamics and behavioral messaging are just some of the features for personalization on-site: it is always important to provide the user who lands on our site/eCommerce with a browsing experience, and thus purchase, that is consistent with the path taken by the campaign.
Let’s imagine, for example, we want to thank all the users who have visited the site page dedicated to stores, but who have not filled in the form to book an appointment. It might be interesting to create a banner, perhaps sent by email, inviting them to download a coupon code to take advantage of a free consultation at the point of sale.
Or imagine being able to customize the browsing experience of users within our shop, showing, for example, on the landing page of a search campaign a banner customized according to the search key (e.g, “cross biking gloves”, rather than “bicycle helmet”).
All this allows marketing managers and digital strategists to change perspective and evaluate the importance of focusing personalization activities even post-click. Only thanks to this approach it becomes possible to create omnichannel customer experiences and optimize the budget invested in campaigns.
Digital advertising and marketing automation: the advantage of a comprehensive approach
Given that investments in Ads campaigns always play a primary role in any marketing strategy both during acquisition, as well as during remarketing, it is perhaps appropriate to remember the significant advantages that can be achieved from the adoption of an all-encompassing approach extended to the post-click phase.
- Evolved and dynamic audience profiling and segmentation;
- Audience synchronization directly to Google ADS
- Ability to create high-performance targets;
- creation of ads dedicated to each individual segment;
- Off-site on-site customer experience personalization strategies;
- Optimization of ROI and campaign performance.
As one can easily guess, the advantage of optimizing the performance of campaigns through the contribution of marketing automation and artificial intelligence is indisputable: being able to create clusters of highly profiled users to be used as targets, as well as customizing the browsing and online shopping experience have positive effects on the performance of the campaigns themselves.
