5 Common Online Advertising Errors to Avoid for Your Business
Globally, there are over 24 million e-commerce sites. And as the industry grows, so too does the number of online stores being created every day. And with so much competition, it’s tough to stand out from the crowd and grow your business.
But it’s not impossible!
If you’re not getting sales, there are five common online advertising errors that your business might be making. By understanding these common errors, you can develop a better campaign and avoid making costly mistakes down the road.
Keep reading to learn how to fix these mistakes and upgrade your social media advertising.
1. Forgetting About Branding
Your brand is one of the most important aspects of your business, but it’s also something that can be easily forgotten in online advertising. When people see a banner ad, they don’t associate it with your company; they just see an advertisement.
Your job is to change that. You need to make your ads feel like they’re an extension of your brand.
This doesn’t mean you have to make every ad look exactly like your website or social media page, but it does mean that they should feel related. If people see a banner ad and then visit your site, they shouldn’t be surprised by what they find there.
2. Inconsistency
The second most common mistake when it comes to advertising businesses online is inconsistency.
Consistency is a key component of any successful marketing strategy, and the same concept applies to your internet presence as well. Consistency in messaging, design, and content will help you attract a loyal following of viewers that are more likely to convert into customers or subscribers. Review some online marketing strategies for SMBs for tips on making consistency easy.
3. Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Knowing who your customers are and how they want to be approached is crucial for achieving your online advertising goals. You should start by looking at the demographics of your current customer base. Then, expand those parameters based on any new data you have about who is buying from you and why.
Use this information as a starting point for creating digital marketing campaigns that will resonate with those buyers—and only with those buyers—to maximize success.
4. Not Measuring Your Results
The last thing you want to do is spend money on advertising and not know if it’s working or not. You should always measure the results of your ads to see which ones are successful. Here are some examples of things you can look for:
Total new leads from an ad
Which ads generated the most leads
The cost per lead (CPL)
These numbers will tell you how much each customer has contributed toward overall profitability.
5. Failing to Test and Adjust
Once you’ve created an ad campaign, it’s important to test and adjust your strategy on a regular basis. There are many different methods of testing, such as A/B split testing or multivariate testing, but they all have the same goal: finding out what’s working for you so that you can continue running successful campaigns.
The most obvious way to determine whether your ads are working is through conversion tracking (or source attribution). This allows you to see which channels bring in leads for your business and whether those leads generate more sales than other channels.
Avoid Common Online Advertising Errors
To avoid some of these common online advertising errors, it’s important to understand your audience and their needs. In addition, you should measure the results of each campaign so that you know what works well and what doesn’t work well before moving on to try something new.
Although avoiding errors is important, building a more effective campaign involves more than just that. Explore our marketing section to learn about the basics of online advertising and how you can use it to grow your business.
