I constantly see performance marketing strategies being shared online for businesses that spend 10k plus on advertising every month. Those are great, but if you're a business owner that's just starting out or you want to dip your toe in the water of performance marketing before going all in, those strategies may not work for you.
Today, I want to share a few performance marketing strategies for companies on limited budgets.
First and foremost, before you start any performance marketing, you should make sure all of your conversion tracking is set up correctly.
Conversion tracking is what lets you see when people are actually becoming customers as a result of your ads, without it you won't know what's working, so you won't be able to optimise your campaigns over time.
If you're not well-versed in conversion tracking, I would recommend hiring a freelancer or an agency to do this step for you. It's really important that it's done correctly, so it's an excellent use of your budget, even when that budget is limited.
If you're confident in your conversion tracking abilities, just go through everything and test it to make absolutely sure everything works properly and isn't over or undercounting your conversions.
Google Ads has 3 keyword match types; Exact, Phrase and Broad.
We only want to use exact match in this instance. Until recently, exact match keywords would only show for the exact keyword you entered.
So for example, if you targeted the keyword [digital marketing Cork] you would only show up in Google if someone searched digital marketing Cork, not if they searched digital marketing agency Cork or where to go for digital marketing Cork.
To make your exact match search campaign work more like that again, please follow the steps in a previous video linked below called How To Automate Negative Keywords On Google Ads.
Once you have done that you can conduct some keyword research, including looking through Google's keyword planner as well as your own search console and onsite search reports. Find the keywords that have been leading to conversions, or you believe are the most likely to lead to conversions.
Then create campaigns that only target really specific, high-intent search terms with exact match keywords. For example, 3B1 might want to target keywords like [Google Ads agency in Cork] or [Hire a Meta Ads agency near me] etc.
Using this strategy helps to eliminate wasted ad spend and really hone in on what works. It's not always the best strategy when it comes to scaling your ads, but it's great for those starting out on a limited budget.
The 2nd strategy I want to share with you today is simple, effective, and incredibly cost-efficient.
That strategy is remarketing to visitors of your website that didn't convert. It's a great way to pick up low-hanging fruit, as you know they're interested in your product or services because they have already visited your site looking for them.
They might have just gotten distracted at the point of conversion and then moved on with their lives, remarketing to them gives you another shot at converting them into a customer.
90% of the time this targeting strategy will be the best performer in a Meta Ads account, even in accounts with very large budgets.
If you're running a business with one core product like a fast food restaurant, maybe it makes sense to show you're ads to all previous visitors. But if you have a more varied offering like a digital marketing agency, it would make more sense to remarket differently to visitors depending on the pages they visited.
For example, it wouldn't make sense for someone who visited a Google Ads services page to be shown ads for web design.
In that instance, you should target the Google Ads page visitors with ads about Google Ads services, and target the people who visited your web design page with ads for your web design services.
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Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.