When you are promoting a new product, there is a certain order of things that you should follow.

When you consider the promotion schedule, ideally besides organic promotion (no cost) you should consider paid promotion (advertising). Once that you have decided that advertising is an option for you (you have the budget, the will, the knowledge or the expert to help you), one of the most important parts of a advertising campaign is that you have to follow up with the results.

You have to be able to see what worked and what didn’t in your campaign. If you only throw your message out there and then don’t analyze the results, you are missing more than half of the purpose.

The key of your advertising efforts lie on being able to interpret the aftermath. Whether the whole thing worked or blew, and mostly which specific parts delivered a result are going to be the essentials for you to be able to learn from the experience and to create future campaigns that will make your product (and your business) float or sink in the sea of market oblivion. Testing ads and making improvements are crucial for your ad management.

Today’s post will help you identify the fundamental metrics you must master in order to upgrade your advertising results. But before we go into that, let’s analyze the process of you getting a new lead (potential customer or prospect) through an ad.

Your prospects need to first see your ad, then feel compelled to click on it, go to the landing page, read through it and do what you want them to do on the website (buy, leave their email address, ask for a quote, book an appointment, etc.). You will be analyzing metrics along those steps.

Now that we understand this process, let’s start identifying what we want to measure.

The first figure you should pay attention to is the traffic your ad has generated. Or more accurately, try to answer: how much traffic have you geared towards your ad? When we say traffic, think of it as people moving along a busy street. Contrary to the general opinion, you don’t generate or create traffic. Instead, traffic already exists and you divert it to your ad or to your business.

How much traffic do you need before making decisions?

If we move along with the busy street comparison, you have to think of your ad as if it was you standing in front of that flow of people, trying to get their attention. You go to the middle of the stream and stand in front of them, waving a sign that points to your shop. Your sign has to be compelling enough to get their attention and to make them change the course of their pace to go someplace else (your business).

Therefore, the first thing you need to measure is how many people actually paid attention to your sign and followed you to where you were pointing them to.

This is the number of people that actually paid attention to the ad and ended up where you intended them to. This means they saw the ad, read (watched) it, and clicked on the link you provided. Do you have a number? Great! Is it greater or smaller than a thousand? It’s not until you reach at least a thousand, that you can start coming to conclusions. If a thousand people see your ad but didn’t click on it, there is something wrong with the ad or the audience that you selected to show it to.

What is an acceptable click-through-rate?

Next, you need to have a look at the CTR or click-through-rate. Let me give you an example so it is super clear: if a thousand people clicked on it but less than 2-3% acted on it (did what you wanted them to do on the landing page), then the problem is on the landing page or the offer it contains.

Did I make that 2-3% up? Not really. If you are asking for a sale on your landing page, even though you might find there are differences in industries, a 2-3% conversion rate is fair. However, if your are sending people to a freebie (meaning you are offering gated content or a free something in exchange of their email address, your objective should be at least 30% conversion).

To understand whether your ad is a success or not, the questions you should be answering are:

• Did I get enough traffic to make a decision? If you did, move on to the next question
• Is the ad adequate for both the audience and the offer?
• What is my CTR (did people who saw my ad click on it? Did they buy/sign up/book/… If they didn’t, move on to the next one
• Is the audience adequate to my offer? if it is, move on
• Is my offer attractive enough?

The answer to these questions should help you devise what the next steps for your advertising campaign are. Bear in mind that ideally, your conversion rate should be 40-50% for an optin (people signing up for your free content) or 2-3% for anything else. If it’s not, there is something you should tweak along the process that I described above.

Start by tweaking each step, starting by the most basic ones (the starting ones) and once those are optimized, keep moving along optimizing deeper into the process.

As always, if you need help with anything that you have read in this blog you only have to let me know and I’ll try to help you as much as I can.

Let me know where in your ads you are struggling.

And if you would like to know more metrics you should be paying attention to, you might want to check this other post here.

Do you want more cool information like this being sent directly to your inbox together with cheatsheets, templates and other marketing materials? Then have a look below!