Asking Important Questions About Your Paid Strategy

Your paid strategy can often become a can of worms when knowing where to spend your money and how to alter your strategy. But we’re here to help.

We spoke to Josh, who works in the paid department at Blaze Media, to ask him some of the questions people struggle with when building their paid strategy.

From looking at customer journeys in paid advertising to the role of attribution, we asked about:

Why data is so important in paid advertising
The metrics you need to focus on in your paid reporting
How to bridge the gap between leads and sales on paid

So, let’s get started!

Why is data so important in paid advertising?

Data can make or break your paid strategy.

With the right data in place, you can refine your strategy. You’ll know what to turn on, turn off, or turn up in terms of budget and strategy.

Josh agreed.

“Paid is so analytical. For the consumer, they just see the creative element of the advert.

“Whereas for marketers, we see the behind-the-scenes, which are the metrics that come from those adverts.

“We look at these reports, and we can use those metrics to make informed decisions on where we take our ads next.

“The thing with paid, and marketing generally, is that a lot of times, people think they know best. The good thing with paid is that we can say, ok here’s what you think and then here’s what the data says.

“For us, this lets me keep an open mind when it comes to testing too. Sometimes, your best idea performs less well than you think, and then an idea that comes to you really quickly ends up being your best-performing advert.

“But having all of this data at your disposal means that you can then make informed decisions based on data.”

And this is a great way to look at things. What’s important to remember is the argument between your gut and your data.

Pro Tip

We asked business leads: if 1 is data and 10 is gut, where do you land in how you decide strategic decisions?

Read the full breakdown of gut vs data

Which metrics do you focus on most?

“Previously, we used to share all of our stats and metrics with our clients in reports.

“But we quickly realised that the client only really cares about a small number of stats. That’s generally how much they’ve spent compared to what they get back.

“For paid media managers, we look at a lot more than these two stats. We have the overall metrics for how campaigns are performing in terms of driving revenue. And then we also look at stats around the actual ad performance, so things like conversion rate, cost per conversion etc.

We might also look at metrics like cost per click. But this is much more variable and not one you can really compare account to account. One account might have a cost per click of £1 while another has a cost per click of £50.

“Our main focus with our clients is always revenue so we can show how profitable we’re making their campaigns.”

How do you report on customer journey stages?

Customer journey stages are really important to consider too. But the thing is they’re not predictable user to user. So, applying to customer journey stages has different meanings.

“We break down campaigns to different parts of the funnel. Bottom of the funnel campaigns tend to see smaller audiences and spend less but they have a greater return compared to top of the funnel. You might even see more traffic and click-based statistics for your top of the funnel campaigns.

“What’s important to remember is that bottom of the funnel numbers rely on the top of the funnel. If you kill off the top of the funnel, within a few weeks, the bottom of the funnel will be impacted. You always need to populate the bottom of the funnel with the top.”

How can paid marketers focus on revenue as a metric?

Revenue can often be ignored, especially for those working in lead generation as it’s more difficult to connect sales back to marketing touchpoints.

“eCommerce is easy when it comes to revenue. It’s all laid out in front of you. Lead generation companies do have it harder.

“Marketers working in lead generation use lead volume as their north star metric. They don’t often look at lead quality or what happens to those leads after they’ve been created.

“In my opinion, the people who will succeed are the ones who transition from optimising campaigns for leads to optimising for revenue and offline value.

You can bridge that gap really easily in two ways: attribution and UTM parameters.

“Attribution does all the hard work for you by connecting sales back to marketing. And UTMs allow you to get the data you need for more granular reporting in tools like Google Analytics.”

Optimising your paid strategy

Looking to develop your paid strategy? Contact the team at Blaze Media to learn more about what they do and how they support their clients.

You can watch the full video with Josh over on our YouTube channel and remember, you can sign up for our newsletter too. We share regular updates on everything from marketing reporting, paid insights and more.