Should we turn off brand ads

When people search for your brand term, should you run an ad? Performance looks great but are those conversions all incremental? Let’s run a deprivation test and find out.

What other bad keywords are we matching?

Your boss Googled "vegan hotdogs" and saw one of your ads appear. Just one problem... our hotdogs ain't vegan. What other irrelevant terms are you bidding on?

Let's keep our UTM tracking consistent

If you look at analytics and see “facebook”, “face book”, and “FB” in the utm_source, that company is not going to make it. Every analysis just got 10x harder because you have to account for all the misspellings in every filter. Garbage in, garbage out.

Pause all the worst performing ads

The biggest mistake I see with junior marketers is taking pride in doing a great job on mundane tasks that should have been automated. Make the computer do it and clear some headspace for more important things. Mastering APIs is how you scale to $20k+ per day.

Who should we target?

In digital marketing we often pretend like the potential audience we’re targeting is infinite. The algorithm will provide. In reality good marketing strategy starts with proper audience segmentation, so you can decide what part of the market you want to go after.

Can we get spending alerts in slack?

Anyone managing 5 or more Facebook ad accounts knows how easy it is to miss crucial performance changes. If you are not constantly monitoring your accounts, you may miss an opportunity to scale well-performing creatives or pause adsets that are overspending. Instead of manually checking in Ads Manager, set up Slack Alerts to get notified when your attention is required.

How to Plan a Retail Digital Media Campaign

Digital Retail Media is becoming increasingly important as online shopping becomes the new must win battleground for retailers and brands. Many brands still have a traditional (offline) broadcast mentality to marketing investment and lack capabilities to make the most of the Digital Retail Media opportunity.

What's driving performance?

How much did a metric move the needle? It’s easy to say which metrics went up or down week on week, but how much did they actually contribute to conversions? To figure that out you need a waterfall chart.

We've got too many test ideas

You always have more ideas than you could test. You can brainstorm and come up with 9 good ideas in an hour, but that could be 3 ^ 3 = 27 different variations, and you're lucky to have the traffic to test maybe half that. It's frustrating because you don't want to leave potential winners on the table.

Compile a report by channel

Almost nobody is as good at Excel as they pretend to be in job interviews. One thing I see is people manually finding/replacing row by row to compile simple channel reports.

How should we set our advertising budget?

This may be surprising to you but >90% of companies just set their marketing budgets as a percentage of next year’s revenue forecast.

It takes too long to optimize to that

How do you optimize your campaigns if conversions can take up to a couple of weeks to happen? If you compare this week to last week’s data, last week has had 7 more days to record conversions…

How do we measure lead quality?

Looking historically at your lead data and segmenting by attributes gives you a good idea of what types of leads are more or less likely to close. This can feed into a storing system to automatically qualify leads, or just be used to align marketing better to sales.

What's our cost per qualified lead?

Working out the cost per qualified lead oftentimes requires a long-winded manual process, involving waiting for sales to follow up in the CRM. In practice it’s better to do this programmatically based on specific attributes you both agree are indicators of lead quality. That way you can optimize in near-real-time.

Calculating all the KPIs

The number one reason I would fail someone in an interview when running my agency, was simple. They couldn’t do basic calculations in GSheets / Excel for the main KPIs.

What am I willing to pay per click?

It’s your first job in marketing and the first task is optimizing the PPC campaigns. You’ve got the report, but how do you calculate what to pay per click for each keyword?