There has been an explosion of ad networks over the last few years. Some would argue we have too many ways to purchase ads. This can be a good thing if you are willing to investigate the options to find the ones that meet your needs.
Learn the technical details of your chosen platform
Once you’ve found an ad platform that meets your specific needs, then it will be imperative that you learn the technical details of their offering. The difference between making money or losing money could easily be the difference between knowing the technicalities or not. The most complicated and advanced platform is probably Google AdWords, and it could easily take months to truly master their product, so know what you’re doing before spending money on pay per click ads.
Buying ads is a business model competition
It’s always hard to know how much you should spend for a single click, or for a set of impressions, but the answer is a factor of your business model. If you are targeting the same audience as another company, but your business model is more efficient, and your LTV is higher, then you can afford to pay more for the traffic without going upside down. The best thing you can do to win customers using ads is to have a great business model. It’s almost an unfair advantage because no amount of tips or tricks can overcome this one stronghold. If you can pay twice as much to acquire a customer, then you have a very defensible strategy.
Consider the various personas of your customer
Your customers can probably be reached using various platforms. For instance, they are more than likely on Facebook and LinkedIn. You must then decide which persona they are utilizing when they want a product like yours. When someone is on Facebook, they are thinking about friends and family. They are looking at photos of other people’s experiences. When people are on LinkedIn, they are thinking about climbing the corporate ladder and how networking with others can help them reach their goals. If your product is for project management in agile environments, then I wouldn’t choose Facebook, even though technically you could reach your demographic there. Yes, they would see your ad, but their mindset would be incorrect because you are introducing yourself to them in the wrong place. Always think about the persona your customers exhibit while using your particular product before choosing an ad platform.
Circumvent the ad networks when possible
This tactic may not scale easily, but it is still well worth mentioning. You could go to BuySellAds (or other places) and buy banner ads on a particular blog that your audience reads. However, if you cut out the middleman (BuySellAds) and go directly to the owner of the blog, then you can get cheaper rates for two reasons. First, BuySellAds is cutting every transaction, so if you go direct, that is money that you can recoup without the blog owner losing anything. Second, you can negotiate. Very rarely is the lowest price and the advertised price the same thing. You can ask for a lower rate and often close a deal relatively simply.
If you are paying per click, then qualify every click
There are two ways to buy ads. First, you can purchase them on a CPM basis, which means you pay for the set number of impressions, and it doesn’t matter how many clicks they get. Second, you can pay per click, and this means that it doesn’t matter how many times your ad appears, you only pay when your ad is clicked. If you are paying per click, then you don’t want people to click your ad unless they are seriously interested, because it costs you money every time they do. Luckily, there are things you can do to qualify clicks using the ad itself. Consider putting the price of your product in the copy so that people don’t click unless they are interested in spending money. Also, don’t use emotion to pull them in unless that same emotion will cause them to buy from you. Don’t put a picture of a cute cat on your ad, just to get cat lovers to click on it if your product doesn’t have something to do with cats.
Test variations of your ad
One of the most fundamental lessons of ads is that you have no idea what your audience will respond to. You have to test multiple versions of the copy, various versions of the imagery, and then multiple combinations of the copy and imagery together. The numbers will tell you the truth about which ads you should be running, but your intuition or gut is probably not accurate.
