The simple trick to transform paid ad ROI

Generating a good return on investment (ROI) from paid ads is one of the top challenges faced by marketers today. And even if your paid ads are delivering a good ROI, you’ve still got the onerous task of proving it to the board.

But for many marketers, generating – or proving – a good ROI for your paid ad campaigns may be simpler than it seems. If you aren’t currently tracking and reporting on offline conversions – through your phone calls, for example – it may be as simple as bringing in call tracking and marketing attribution software like Mediahawk.

Using Mediahawk to help improve campaign ROI

The first step on the road to improved paid ad ROI is simply being able to account for all your leads. Do you really know how many leads your ad campaigns generate? Have you really accounted for all sources, both online and offline?

These days, it’s fairly straightforward to track who’s filled in a website form, or contacted you via live chat. But what if someone came to your or your client’s website via a Google ad, noted the phone number and called directly from the search results, or even later on?

If you or your clients are selling high-value goods, or are dealing with a long buying journey (care homes and car dealers, here’s looking at you), your customers are most likely to be making phone calls to you as part of their buying journey.

With Mediahawk, you can see your online and offline leads right alongside each other in your marketing reports.

And you can use the Paid Campaigns report to dig even deeper. There, you’ll see an overview of total calls that have come in via your paid ads over time, as well as a breakdown of various other insights, including:

• Total calls and total visitors
• The performance of your Google, Microsoft, and Facebook ads, side by side
• The top keywords used
• Your ad campaign cost per call

Looking at the Paid Calls report, you’ll get a view of each and every call that comes through. You’ll see which campaign generated each call – great for care home and automotive marketers who are running ads with third parties, such as Autotrader or carehome.co.uk, and want to see if their advertising investment is paying off.

3 actionable ways to start transforming paid ad ROI

When it comes to getting more ‘bang for your buck’ from paid ads, there are some easy things you can do using Mediahawk to make a big difference.

1. Audit your paid ad channels

With much greater visibility of your campaign performance through Mediahawk, you can begin to implement changes to improve campaign ROI.

The first is simply to update your performance reports to include any missed leads. If you weren’t previously reporting on phone leads, now’s the time to add them in and see how much your campaign ROI jumps up.

With a side-by-side comparison of paid ad performance, you can start to make better-informed decisions about which campaigns to switch off, improve or leave alone. Seeing your Google Ads right alongside Bing ads is great for this and can really help you know which campaigns deliver the best results.

In fact, you can do the same with print publications, social media sites and anywhere else you run paid ads.

2. Identify what resonates and what doesn’t

With advanced multichannel campaign tagging, you can start to build a much clearer picture of the paid ad content, copy and messaging that resonates best with your audiences.

For auto marketers, this could mean getting insights into which offers, new vehicle models, or showroom events appeal most to customers. And for care home marketers, it could be your secret weapon in understanding which concerns and fears resonate most with relatives of potential new residents.

With this insight in mind, you can tighten up your targeting, craft more compelling ad copy and become a master of messaging – all with the end result of greatly improved campaign ROI.

3. Look at the bigger picture and refine, refine, refine

Having a 360-degree view of your paid ad campaigns and how they fit into your overall marketing mix can really help you understand your return on investment. It also helps you know how to better nurture leads to increase conversions.

What’s more, you’ll be more certain that you have the right paid ad strategy in place once you can clearly see the ROI it’s delivering.

With the insights you can gather from #1 and #2, you can start to make adjustments for future campaigns. You can make informed decisions about targeting and messaging, and be more confident that the campaigns you set up are going to deliver the ROI you need.