Experienced digital marketers are familiar with the effects of ad fatigue and audience exhaustion, resulting in reduced returns on paid social ads over time. It impacts the planned KPIs but is an expected side effect due to the bloating share of unqualified traffic.
If you want to eliminate the problem of diminishing paid ad returns, read this article to find out how to deal with it.
The Reason Behind Poor Returns from Targeted Ads
So what can go wrong during paid social advertising? Clearly, the loss of returns stems from the steady decline in conversions. It happens because ready-to-buy users have already converted into buyers/subscribers. But your sponsored ad campaign continues to reach less qualified audiences that don’t convert.
That’s an alarming bell telling you that native targeting has exhausted itself. You need additional data based on your ICP marketing findings to break through such limitations. Additionally, you must enable appropriate martech that would help you enrich b2b audience data.
If you switch to such an approach, you’ll unlock higher match rates. On top of that, this data-driven strategy allows you to measure view-through conversions.
Where Do Conventional Targeting Tactics Fail?
There are four conservative approaches to creating ad audiences for paid channels:
- Use of the platform’s native targeting filters. For instance, you can enable Interests on Facebook or Job Titles on LinkedIn.
- Pushing custom list-based audiences to ad platforms.
- Building custom audiences from pixels (tracking TA based on their interactions with the website/application).
- Building lookalike audiences.
All of these four tactics have one or several downsides.
Native Targeting
Firstly, it doesn’t provide enough filters to customize TA to represent your ICP profile properly. On top of that, audience composition remains a black box for you.
Custom Audiences from Lists
You can face low match rates if you build a custom audience from work emails. The ad network might not match these emails with the people you target if they didn’t use the same email addresses when signing up.
Custom Audiences from Pixels
In a way similar to native targeting, this tactic won’t provide you with a clear vision of audience composition. It happens because it’s built off the on-page/in-app actions of users.
Moreover, marketers can no longer rely on cookie tracking due to pixel blockers and the iOS14 privacy policy.
Lookalike Audiences
Targeting lookalike audiences have fewer weaknesses compared to the tactics mentioned above. However, you must blindly trust that the ad network targeting algorithm will ID the right audience.
Also, a particular platform’s proprietary database might not guarantee a decent audience reach, and it won’t let you push lookalike audiences to other ad networks.
How to Target Your Campaign for Ready-to-Buy Prospects
You can still hit right into pre-qualified prospects if you merge customer data from several resources. The audience enrichment process is all about enhancing data quality to improve match rates across multiple marketing channels. Therefore, you’ll get the audience stuffed with high-value prospects that you can utilize beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google Ads.
Moreover, running paid ad campaigns with an enriched dataset allows you to gauge the impact of your ad spend beyond last-click conversions. Such a strategy gives you a completely different understanding of campaign success, as you can attribute converted leads to your entire marketing & sales efforts.
2 Crucial Points to Consider
Remember these two rules that will ensure your success in lead generation:
1) Plan where to source data and how tight your targeting should be. For instance, you can try Primer’s ad targeting platform to build a comprehensive b2b audience that fits your buyer persona most.
2) Adjust the right audience size. We recommend you stick with the following audience minimums by channel:
- 30,000 people on Facebook.
- 60,000 and 400,000 people for text ads and no less than 30,000 people for Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging on LinkedIn.
- 50,000 leads for optimal reach on Google Ads.
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