What are Performance Metrics?

Marketing performance metrics are quantifiable data points that track the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities and campaigns. They provide insights into how marketing efforts are contributing to business goals. Below are just a few of the buckets of metrics that marketers find useful to measure:

• Brand Awareness Metrics: Measure the reach and impact of brand messaging. Examples include brand mentions, social media engagement, website traffic, and reach.   
• Lead Generation Metrics: Track the effectiveness of lead generation efforts. Examples include the number of leads generated, conversion rates, cost per lead, and lead quality.
• Sales Metrics: Measure the impact of marketing on sales revenue. Examples include conversion rates, revenue generated, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

What’s the Difference Between Metrics and Key Performance Indicators?

Marketers tend to throw both of these terms around interchangeably, but they’re distinct terms.

Performance metrics are any quantifiable measure used to track the performance of marketing activities, campaigns, or processes. They provide data and insights into various aspects of marketing efforts.

KPIs (key performance indicators) are a subset of performance metrics that are specifically chosen to reflect the most critical aspects of achieving strategic business goals. In other words, they’re hand-picked metrics that are most critical in determining success.

For example, it’s good to know the CTR of your paid media ads, but the success of your business cannot be quantified with such a metric. ROAS (return on ad spend) or CPI (cost per install) are metrics that are more important to the overall success of the business. CTR would be considered a performance metric and ROAS or CPI would be considered a KPI.

Measuring and Tracking Performance Metrics

Measuring and tracking performance metrics is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and making data-driven decisions. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the process:

1. Set Clear Goals

Set Crystal-Clear Goals: What are you trying to achieve with your marketing? Is it boosting brand awareness, generating a flood of leads, driving sales through the roof, or creating raving fans?

Setting Goals: Volume vs. Revenue

Segmenting metrics by goal provides a clear understanding of performance and facilitates targeted strategies. What do you want to achieve for your brand: volume of purchases or value of purchases? Once you can identify your goal, the metrics and KPIs you track will fall into place.

Oftentimes brands want to do a “both and” approach when it comes to these goals, but it’s important to pick one primary goal or north star so you can align your strategy with a central aim.

• Volume: This goal typically focuses on driving purchases, new customers, returning customers, or installs. More junior brands tend to prioritize volume so they can develop a significant customer/user pool and prove the viability of their product and service.
• Value: This goal typically focuses on metrics such as new customer revenue, returning customer revenue, and lifetime value. More experienced brands gravitate towards this goal because they have already developed their footing and want to move to the next level of growth. AOV and repeat purchase rate are key factors to consider with this goal, but not as relevant for volume.

2. Identify KPIs and Set SMART Targets

These are the key metrics that will act as your compass, guiding you towards your goals. Think of them as your North Star metrics that will help you determine if you’re hitting your goals or not. If your goal is to increase sales, your KPIs might include conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Example Volume KPIs:

• Purchases: Number of successful transactions.
• New Customers: Number of first-time users acquired.
• Returning Customers: Number of repeat users.
• Installs (App/Software): Number of successful installations or downloads.
• Lead Volume: Number of leads generated.

Example Value KPIs:

• New Customer Revenue: Total revenue generated from new users.
• Returning Customer Revenue: Total revenue generated from repeat users.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Total revenue projected to be generated from a user over the course of their relationship with the business.
• Installs: Total installs driven for an app.
• Cost per Install (CPI): Total spend to acquire an app install.
• Leads: Total number of leads generated in a period.
• Cost per Lead (CPL): Total spend to acquire a lead.

Once you’ve decided on your KPIs, the next step is to develop SMART Targets. Avoid stating something vague like “I want more sales.” Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound targets for each KPI. For example, “Increase purchase volume by 15% YoY in Q4.” The idea is to set a SMART target that you can evaluate at the end of the quarter or evaluation period and directly answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question: did we achieve our goal? This is easier said than done, but with enough practice, it will become second nature.

3. Identify Your Performance Metrics

As we mentioned above, KPIs are crucial to understand if you’re successful in your marketing efforts or not. Performance metrics are meant to supplement data at your disposal and help you make decisions in the day-to-day when managing your campaigns. When it comes to performance metrics, it’s better to collect more data vs. less so you have it at your disposal when conducting analyses. You can always cull down your view of data to analyze, but you can’t add more data if the proper tools and tracking aren’t set up.

Below are examples of common ones that many brands track:

• Website
  • Website Traffic: Tracks the number of visitors to your website. Provides insights into the reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts in driving traffic. Analyze traffic sources to understand which channels are most effective.
  • Average Order Value (AOV): Calculates the average revenue generated per transaction. Important for understanding customer behavior and identifying opportunities to increase revenue per sale.
  • Conversion Rate (CVR): Measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your website and marketing campaigns in driving conversions.  
  • Bounce Rate: Measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that your website content is not relevant or engaging enough.  
• App
  • Install-to-Registration Rate: This metric, specific to app marketing, tracks the percentage of users who complete the registration process after installing the app. It helps assess the effectiveness of the onboarding process and identify areas for improvement.
  • App Visits per Week: Measures how frequently users open and use the app within a week. This metric provides insights into user engagement and the stickiness of the app.
• Paid Media
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures the percentage of people who click on a link or advertisement after seeing it. A key indicator of how effective your ads or links are at attracting attention and driving traffic.
  • Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) / Cost Per Click (CPC): Relate to advertising costs. CPM measures the cost of displaying your ad to 1,000 people, while CPC measures the cost you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Helps evaluate the efficiency of your campaigns.
• Organic Media
  • Social Media Engagement: Tracks how users interact with a brand’s social media content. Includes metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and mentions. Important for building brand awareness, driving traffic, and fostering relationships with customers.
  • Social Media Followers: Measures the number of people who follow a brand’s social media accounts. While not always the most important metric, it can indicate brand reach and potential audience size.

4. Set up Analytics Tools

Now that you have established your goal, your KPIs, and additional performance metrics you want to analyze, you need the right tools to bring your vision to life. Thankfully, there are so many at our disposal. The challenge is figuring out the right combination of them to best serve your business needs. If you’re lucky to work with a marketing agency or even us at NoGood, you’ll be able to benefit from the relationships formed with these analytics partners.

Analytics Platforms

The right analytics platform will enable you and your team to track key metrics, identify what’s working and what’s not, understand customer behavior, optimize campaigns, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience. There are countless options, but these are some of the more common solutions that can help you get started right away.

1. Google Analytics

• Main features
  • Track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
  • Analyze audience demographics, interests, and traffic sources.
  • Monitor content performance and measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
• Benefit: Free and widely used, offering a comprehensive set of features for website analysis.
• Drawback: Can be complex and overwhelming for beginners, with a steep learning curve for advanced features.

2. Adobe Analytics

• Main features
  • Enterprise-grade platform for large businesses with complex data needs.
  • Combines data from various sources for a holistic view of customer journeys.
  • Offers advanced segmentation, predictive analytics, and customizable reports.
• Benefit: Robust and powerful, offering advanced analytics and customization for enterprise-level businesses.
• Drawback: Expensive and requires technical expertise to fully utilize its capabilities.

3. HubSpot Marketing Hub

• Main features
  • All-in-one platform with analytics, email marketing, social media management, and CRM.
  • Track leads, analyze behavior, and automate marketing workflows.
  • Measure campaign performance and understand attribution.
• Benefit: All-in-one platform that integrates various marketing tools with analytics for a streamlined workflow.
• Drawback: Can be costly, especially for smaller businesses with limited budgets.

4. Custom Looker Dashboard

• Main features
  • Create a wide range of visualizations, from basic charts and graphs to interactive maps and complex heatmaps, to represent your data in the most insightful way.
  • Go beyond pre-built dashboards and explore your data with Looker’s powerful querying and drill-down capabilities, uncovering hidden patterns and insights.
  • Connect to various marketing data sources, including Google Analytics, CRM systems, social media platforms, and marketing automation tools, for a unified view of your marketing performance.
• Benefit: Customize every aspect of your dashboards, from data sources and visualizations to filters and drill-downs, to create a truly bespoke analytics solution.
• Drawback:  Building and maintaining custom Looker dashboards requires technical expertise and knowledge of data modeling, which may necessitate dedicated resources or training.

Each of the different tools has different visualization capabilities, but it’s important to set up charts and graphs that help you easily understand performance in real time and at a glance. You don’t want to be bogged down with data that’s not easily understood or actionable. It’s a good idea to create reports that are tailored to different stakeholders.

For example, the CMO will likely want an executive dashboard that focuses on the bird’s eye view of performance, but your Paid Social Manager will need more detailed data to make informed decisions. Consult with various stakeholders and your agency to ensure everything necessary is included in your analytics dashboard so you’re set up for success.

5. Implement Tracking

Once you’ve decided on the analytics platform that’s the best for your business, it’s time to set up your tracking systems:

• Website Tracking: Install tracking codes (like the Google Analytics snippet) on your website to capture every click, scroll, and conversion.
• Campaign Tracking: Use UTM parameters to tag your links and see exactly which campaigns and channels are driving the best results.
• Social Media Tracking: Monitor your brand mentions, engagement levels, and follower growth with the built-in analytics tools on each platform.

If you notice you aren’t seeing data come in from certain campaigns because of a tracking error, consider turning off your campaigns for the time being while you solve the technical issue. You likely don’t want to spend on ads if you’re unable to analyze the performance metrics associated with them.

Using Metrics to Improve Performance

Now you’re measuring and tracking performance metrics. Data is officially flowing in, and now it’s time to make sense of it all with deep insights and actionable next steps.

Dive deep into the data and try to zoom out enough to understand overall trends and patterns. It’s often helpful to start with analyzing performance metrics period over period (PoP) and seeing which ones are driving the most significant variance.

These steps are very helpful if you’re not sure where to start:

• Identify: Pinpoint areas of underperformance based on metric analysis for each goal.
• Investigate: Determine the root causes of underperformance for acquisition and revenue.
• Hypothesize: Develop hypotheses for potential solutions for each goal.
• Test: Implement and test solutions using A/B testing or other methods, for both acquisition and revenue.
• Implement: Roll out successful solutions across the agency.

Here’s an example of how this would come to life. Imagine your brand is a language learning app and downloads are down in Q3 of this year vs. Q3 last year.

• Identify: Auction costs (CPMs) have gone up drastically despite overall budget remaining the same.
• Investigate: CPMs are elevated on Meta but not on Snapchat or Reddit. You remember that you adjusted your age targeting last year in Q3 to target younger users because your team said they had higher retention. 
• Hypothesize: Perhaps CPMs are up because of your audience size on your biggest platform. Now you’re in more intense competition with other brands, trying to grab the attention of young users.
• Test: You try expanding to another Social platform such as Pinterest because you know you can reach your target audience there, and there’s not too much overlap between users on that platform and the others you’re currently on. You will ideally reach new users at a lower CPM, diversifying your platforms at the same time.
• Analyze and Repeat: You analyze the results and see that your CPMs improved a bit, but there are still gains you need to make to get back to where you were last year. You investigate further and try new tests such as launching on a different platform or trying a new campaign type on Meta powered by machine learning. Share your discoveries and insights with the broader team so you can get more ideas on what to test next.

You’ve reached the end of this guide. Hopefully, by now you should know more about performance metrics and how to utilize them to drive success for your brand. As we mentioned, starting with goals is crucial because your KPIs will directly tie to what you want to achieve. Performance metrics are secondary to your KPIs but are good for you to be aware of so you can investigate performance and develop strong next steps.

Use this guide to plan your next 90 days and begin measuring performance metrics for your marketing campaigns:

• 15 Days: Decide what your goal is.
• 30 Days: Establish KPIs and performance metrics.
• 60 Days: Onboard to an analytics platform and begin tracking.
• 90 Days: Analyze performance and iterate to improve performance.

Good luck on your performance marketing journey and utilizing performance metrics to hit your goals. We’re happy to be a resource and support you as you learn more and develop your marketing strategy.

The post Performance Metrics: Understanding Them and How to Use Them appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

What’s the number one most important lever we have to drive success on paid social campaigns? Based on the title of this blog you probably guessed it – creative. To set yourself up for success, your brand needs to have a clear vision for the creative, a data-driven testing strategy, and an execution plan that’s scalable. Although creative has always been imperative for success, it’s increasingly important due to the evolution of social platform algorithms in recent years.

If you wanted to ensure you were targeting your desired users several years ago, the best strategy was to design hyper-specific audiences based on interests, behaviors, or past purchases. But in a post-iOS 14 world, platforms have responded by introducing and expanding campaign types enabled by increased automation; Advantage+ campaigns are now top performance drivers on Meta, and Pinterest recently released a similar product.

With these changes, advertisers have less visibility and control over user targeting. This phenomenon has created the common phrase, “creative is the new targeting.” At this point, the best way to reach a desired audience is to craft creative tailored to them instead of using particular targeting dimensions at the ad set level.

For now and the foreseeable future, we still have control over the creative we put into the market and how we create iterations based on performance. We recommend putting time and effort into crafting a strategy that is scalable on paid platforms and reaches your target users.

We’ve already mentioned the three things you really need for winning creative: a clear vision, data-driven testing, and a scalable execution plan. Let’s dive into the details for each of these key 3 aspects.

Clear Vision for Creative

You can have the most talented designers in the world, but if you’re unclear in the direction you give them, there’s no way you’ll be pleased with their output. It’s best to give your creative team specific guidelines so they know how much room they have to ‘play’ in.

Your team must know what you’ve done before, what worked, what didn’t, and how you want to evolve in this next phase. Using examples from other brands you admire and want to emulate is extremely helpful to bridge the gap between your descriptor words and the vision you want to achieve.

On top of the aesthetic vision, it’s important to align on the purpose of creative within your marketing strategy. Is it produced to look pretty, drive results, or both? If the answer is both, can you be more specific with ‘results?’ Do you want a certain CTR or CPA?

Drill down to what’s important to your particular business and how creative can help you achieve your overall goals. Once you feel solid in that, clearly communicate your needs to your team so they can pitch ideas that ladder up to your measurable goals.

Data-Driven Testing

Creative, by nature, tends to be subjective. You can put 10 people in a room, and they may all have different thoughts on what the ‘best’ creative is from a particular batch of assets. On the other hand, data is much more objective.

It’s normal and good for stakeholders to have hypotheses about what will resonate best with audiences and why, but at the end of the day, it’s crucial to rely on data to make decisions about what should stay live, what should be paused, and how we should iterate for future variations.

Tracking this performance in real-time with a creative matrix is a great way to make sure everyone on the team is aligned on what’s working and what isn’t.

Scalable Execution

Once you’ve established your vision for creative and committed to data-driven testing, you want to be able to execute your strategy at scale. As you test hypotheses methodically and with data to call your tests, prioritize speed over perfection.

The more tests you can run with actionable results, the more you’ll learn about your users. This is crucial to growing your business and meeting the overall goals you’ve set. It’s no secret that the special sauce to sustainable growth marketing is rapid experimentation.

Every time you launch creative, you should be iterating on something that’s performing well and introducing a net-new concept to market. It may feel safer to only churn out assets that resemble ads that have ‘worked,’ but if you rest on your laurels, you’ll never find the next great ad for your brand. If you balance safer bets with bigger ones, you’ll be able to scale your creative testing and unlock new learnings along the way.

5 Most Common Mistakes to Avoid in Creative Testing

1. Strict A/B Testing

Several brands will only call tests after they’ve run extensive A/B testing. We value speed over perfection and believe once you’ve spent against test assets in their own environment (ad set or ad group), you should have sufficient learnings to understand if they’re resonating or not.

Most clients will look at conversions or revenue driven at efficiency metrics such as CPA, CAC, or ROAS to determine success. Rigid A/B testing will slow you down and hurt performance in the long run because it will take you longer to get actionable results.

2. Falling into the AI Optimization Trap

Many platforms, but especially Meta, have recently been pushing AI optimizations that alter your creatives. They do this with positive intentions by promising increased conversions if you check the boxes in the platform that will give them power to alter your creatives how they see fit.

This is a good idea in theory, but these optimizations often make your creative look sloppy, and it can create a poor experience for your users. We recommend keeping these turned off until Meta is able to significantly improve the product.

3. Not Creating Roadmaps

You should build out a roadmap of the tests you want to run for the next month and follow it diligently. If you can sign off on briefs from your team at the top of the month, and they have the time and freedom to execute against them in batches, they’ll be much more efficient.

This goes beyond giving approval on general creative themes/tests. If you can approve in-asset copy, products featured, and the test proposed, you’re setting your team up for more success. These roadmaps should be fluid to the point that if you have a million-dollar-idea that must be tested, it can be slotted in. But barring that incredible exception, align on briefs with your team and give them autonomy to execute.

4. Pausing Creatives Too Quickly

We’ve all been in a position when Total Biz isn’t doing well and we’re looking for places to cut spend. Inefficient creative testing for newly launched assets may be one of the first places you’d want to get back some easy efficiency gains.

We recommend keeping assets live for at least a week before pausing anything, although of course there may sometimes be exceptions. Give them a chance to succeed, and if they don’t, then feel free to pause them out.

5. Not Testing Enough

If your creative team has capacity, you should be testing new concepts and iterations of past performers every week. This is even more important ahead of tentpole periods to ensure you can make the most of high-converting times for the business such as BFCM for e-comm. You shouldn’t be afraid of trying something new – it just might work and unlock incremental conversions for the brand.

How Does This Come to Life?

Below is an example of what this might look like for a typical brand just starting out with creative testing.

This setup focuses on one audience, Prospecting, which consists of users who are not familiar with the brand. One campaign called “Top Performers” has all the assets that perform efficiently at scale; these are tried and true concepts. The majority of the budget goes to these assets because they’re so strong.

The second campaign is the creative testing campaign, which tests several concepts at a much lower budget. Top performers are copied and pasted or ‘graduated’ into the top performers ad set to compete against other tried and true concepts. As a general rule of thumb, 30% of spend should go to creative testing.

New concepts should be tested every week or every two weeks, and top performers should be variated on to generate even more revenue/leads/purchases for the business.

Supercharge Your Strategy with Creative Testing

Now you’re prepared to build a creative strategy that is tailored to your business. First you’ll set a clear vision, then you’ll commit to data-driven testing, and finally you’ll build a scalable execution plan. One last word of advice – keep in mind that it’s not necessarily bad if creative ‘fails.’ Instead, this result gives you another learning that will help you optimize future variations to drive stronger results with your target audience.

The post Ultimate Guide to Creative Testing for Paid Social Campaigns appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Social’s Place in a Digital Marketing Strategy

Social is an important channel within your digital marketing strategy. Top of funnel ads do an excellent job at introducing brands to potential customers, and lower funnel ads compel users to convert. However, social is generally considered more of an upper funnel play when compared to a channel like SEM.

Another key difference is that social is a ‘push’ channel in which you’re trying to ‘push’ your message to new users, and SEM is a ‘pull’ channel because users are already searching for your products – the demand is already there.

Popular social platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Later we’ll dive into best practices for each of these platforms so you can drive success no matter which ones you choose to launch.

How Organic Social Content and Paid Social Ads Can Work Together

Organic social content is free to post and largely based on building a community around your brand. Paid advertising presents you with an opportunity to introduce your brand to new users and expand your reach beyond your organic community. This is important because the average reach of an organic Facebook post is only 2.6% of a page’s followers – if you have 10,000 followers, only about 260 will see your post.

The most obvious way to integrate organic and paid strategy is through boosting content. ‘Boosting’ is a tactic you can use after you identify a piece of existing organic content that has generated a significant amount of interest through video views or click-through rate. After you’ve selected the content, you can ‘boost’ it, which just means putting ad spend behind the content via your paid media campaigns to reach additional users.

5 Pillars for Success on Social

Before rushing to spend money on social media, it’s important to set yourself and your business up for success. If you incorporate all of the following pillars into your social strategy, you’re well-positioned for successful social media ad campaigns.

Goal Setting and Measurement

It’s hard to achieve results when you don’t know what your goal is in the first place. Understanding your business objective is critical in both the short and the long term for successful campaigns.

Most marketers these days are data-obsessed, and the data you receive from your ad results can inform your next campaign, tighten up your audience, and increase your ROAS (return on ad spend). Analytics is your friend and will help you make the most out of your social efforts to optimize current campaigns and inform future ad content and strategy.

When you set goals, you first need to align on what is the most important for your brand in the next 12 months. Some brands want hockey-stick growth and aren’t concerned with efficiency. Other brands want to keep scale low but be hyper-efficient. Most brands want to scale drastically while maintaining excellent efficiency.

You should have an honest conversation with your team about what is non-negotiable. Those non-negotiable metrics will usually involve total revenue, number of purchases, leads, or another metric that you can tie directly to your business’s bottom line. Once you have that solidified, you can discuss the ideal efficiency you want to hit with your paid spend.

Platform Selection

Social media platforms are not one-size-fits-all. The best platforms for your brand depend on your audience, budget, goal, and the creative assets you have available.

Social ads are pay-to-play, and you’ll want to factor in auction costs as well. For example, platforms that are older and more established, like Facebook, have a lot of competition. This competition drives up auction costs and makes advertising more expensive. If your audience is on a smaller platform with less competition, you should consider running media there to offset elevated CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) elsewhere.

Although you have several social platforms at your disposal, it doesn’t mean you should use all of them in your strategy. You want to find where your audience is spending their time and meet them there. Why would a children’s clothing brand advertise on Discord? Those mommy bloggers are gathering on Pinterest – but it takes crucial social media listening to confirm this.

When starting or revamping your current social media ads strategy, start by considering your top-performing organic channels. This is usually a good indication that you’re in the right place. Find out where your content performs best by looking at metrics like click-through rate and video views. Your marketing budget is likely finite, so it makes sense to invest in channels where you’re already seeing traction.

Audience Targeting

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend, knowing exactly who you’re targeting is crucial to social ad success. What’s the use in paying for ads and putting the effort into content creation if it’s not going to be seen by the right people and lead to high-intent consumers?

Targeting can go from extremely broad to exceptionally granular, and lookalike and retargeting makes it even more specific. Going beyond general targeting, you should evaluate your first-party data to understand more about your users and create personas.

You can start to develop personas as you ask deeper questions: What product lines do your customers purchase from? How often do they repurchase? Do they checkout with multiple items in the cart? Once you have your personas, you can more effectively target them and experiment from there. The more you test and experiment, the more you’ll learn about your audience.

Creative

Creative is the single most important lever at your disposal for social. Although targeting is important, it’s clear that platform algorithms are advancing to the point of prioritizing high-quality content in auctions, and it will be more likely to be served to users.

Your ad may be the first touchpoint a user has with your brand, and first impressions matter. The quality of your creative can determine whether they keep scrolling or pause to learn more about your product or brand. Creative is not only a way to communicate your message clearly, but also drive emotional connection and resonance through visuals, tone, and storytelling.

Consistently strong creative builds long-term brand equity and brand loyalists, which are priceless for any business.

Testing

Rapid experimentation is our secret sauce to sustainable growth marketing. Testing can take place across all areas of social ads including audience, graphics, placement, etc. You want a winning campaign strategy, and sometimes one minor change can bring your ROAS through the roof. It’s easy to rely on a winning asset, but even evergreen content will fatigue.

Analyze campaign performance first to get an understanding of what elements drive campaign performance. Is there certain imagery, in-asset copy, or products featured that tend to correlate with higher conversions? Rely on performance data instead of your gut or existing biases to analyze performance and decide what you want to test next. It’s important to iterate upon existing concepts to make them even stronger and also test net-new ideas to keep your creative fresh for your audience.

How to Build a Paid Social Strategy by Platform

• Campaign Overview
• Facebook Ads Manager
• TikTok Ads
• X Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Pinterest Ads
• Snapchat Ads

Overview of a Paid Social Media Campaign

When planning any paid social strategy, there are three campaign types in which almost every platform organizes its ads campaigns. These are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

If you need a brush-up, awareness is your Top of Funnel (TOF) campaign type that generates interest in your product or service. Marketers can increase brand awareness by telling people what makes their business valuable to them.

Consideration, or Middle of Funnel (MOF), is best for getting people to think about your brand and encouraging them to seek more information. The Bottom of Funnel (BOF) or Conversion campaign type is designed to encourage people who are interested in your product or service to take action via an app download or purchase.

Depending on the maturity of your brand, these goals will vary. Early stage brands will be focused on more TOF to bring about brand awareness while more legacy brands will be focused on more BOF conversion campaigns due to already being known entities.

Within these three campaign types, you’ll find various ad objectives that you can use to build your ad groups for targeting and individual ad assets. Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads – you should tie these objectives back to your company’s overarching goals and specific OKRs in relation to your ad spend.

These are just a few of the objectives campaigns can include:

• Increase website traffic
• Build brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Boost engagement to page or posts
• Increase app installs
• Increase conversions

Facebook Ads Manager (Instagram Lives Here Too)

Meta has several properties – including Facebook and Instagram – under its umbrella company. Meta has more than 3 billion users worldwide, making it a powerhouse in the world of advertising. 

Meta’s ads platform, Facebook Ads Manager, might be the OG of social advertising and comes in behind Google as the #2 digital ad seller in the US. Though iOS14 put a bit of a buzz kill on Facebook’s data tracking, marketers are still on trend to spend over $58 billion on Facebook advertising this year.

Social operations for both Instagram and Facebook are housed within Facebook Ads Manager. Though Facebook has traditionally held Meta’s market share in digital advertising, Instagram drove $70.9B in 2023 and has steadily increased year-over-year.

The Instagram audience is slightly younger than the Facebook audience. Instagram is used by 65% of Gen Z users, whereas Facebook is a bit lower at 56%.

So why use Facebook Ads? Facebook Ads are extremely versatile and offer up to 11 different variations you can use to solve a variety of business goals from driving traffic to your website to reaching people in your local area.

After selecting your campaign type and what to optimize for, there are a multitude of ad formats to compliment your campaign. Creative assets can be shared between a business’s Facebook and Instagram pages, making it a quick process for marketers to build campaigns.

Facebook offers photo ads, video ads, stories ads, carousel ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, messenger ads, and playable ads, while Instagram’s ad types include Stories, Reels, Instagram Shopping, and Branded Content Ads when working with creators.

**NoGood Tip: We like to start with a TOF campaign with video creative. This way, even if the user doesn’t engage with the asset, they’re still considered a video viewer and can later be retargeted.

TikTok Ads

Entering the U.S. market in just 2016, TikTok has amassed over 1.8 billion users worldwide, with the vast majority between the ages of 18-24. Though TikTok is known for its entertaining and playful content, its advertising capabilities cannot be underestimated for both DTC brands and B2B brands.

TikTok generated an estimated $16.1B in revenue in 2023, a 67% year-over-year increase. In comparison to its social media platform competitors, TikTok advertising still remains largely undersaturated by B2B brands, which positions it as a less competitive market with bigger returns.

TikTok launched its Business Center in 2020 and continues to roll out new ad optimizations and campaign types for businesses of all sizes and budgets. Any business account can run full-funnel campaigns via TikTok’s Ads Manager, but accounts that are considered “TikTok Partners” (brands that meet a minimum spend threshold) are paired with TikTok representatives that can assist with specific TikTok ad types. With the help of their rep, managed brands can run additional campaigns including branded hashtag campaigns, brand takeovers, and branded effects.

TikTok’s Ads Manager offers three levels of campaign types with several objectives to choose from.

**NoGood Tip: We’ve noticed that it takes a bit for TikTok Pixel to learn and become efficient at retargeting; therefore, start with a TOF awareness campaign prior to working towards conversions.

Within the ad group creation, marketers can choose to target at a broad or granular level, including choosing audiences that are interested in specific hashtags or that have completed certain actions (watched till the end, liked, commented, shared, followed, or viewed profile).

An ad format unique to TikTok is Spark Ads. Spark Ads are assets that are posted organically first and then boosted within a campaign. Once the asset is posted organically, marketers can add an additional CTA linking to a landing page and push it out to their targeted and organic audience simultaneously. 

This is in opposition to a Dark Ad, which does not live on an account’s organic feed and only appears in front of the targeted audience. Dark Ads are a good option for accounts that do not have an organic TikTok presence or are optimizing for lead generation, app installations, or other conversions.

TikTok’s Spark Ads tend to drive stronger conversion rates vs. Dark Ads, which encourages accounts to build and maintain their organic presence while running social ads.

X (Formerly Known as Twitter) Ads

When building an X campaign, the three funnel objectives are the same as Meta’s Ads Platform, though underneath, you’ll find eight different objectives unique to X.

X ads are often seen as native in a user’s feed since their flagship ad format blends seamlessly into the feed (only marked as “promoted” to differentiate). Though this may be the most discreet ad format, X offers several other ad types that are more standard such as video and carousel.

Promoted tweets are best for awareness, driving website traffic, or promoting time-sensitive content such as giveaways. Video ads are best for storytelling, demonstrating a product in use, or displaying movement. Carousel ads work very well for e-commerce, app downloads, or multi-feature promotions because of the way they can tell a sequential story and encourage engagement.

Read our comprehensive X Ads Guide for more tactical strategies.

LinkedIn Ads

70% of users are confident LinkedIn delivers a positive ROI, ranking above Instagram and Facebook. Most effective in the B2B sector, LinkedIn is the best platform to get in front of specific industries, companies, or even people. 

As the largest platform for business-minded interactions, LinkedIn values professional connections for individuals, while LinkedIn ads can drive traffic to your landing page, identify quality leads or potential employees, grow your page’s network, and show your expertise through thought-leadership.

As with the other social platforms we’ve examined, all three campaign objectives have a different core KPI, which will determine how your funds are distributed. Unlike Meta’s Ads Manager, LinkedIn works off of a “second-price” auction model, meaning you only pay one cent higher than the next bidder. Advertisers can set their max bid and adjust the allocation as they see fit.

YouTube Ads

Over 40% of retail shoppers have bought products they watched YouTube videos about; the platform presents a massive opportunity to engage with and connect with audiences.

Users on YouTube can be targeted by channel, interest, search intent, placement, topic, location, age, and more, giving advertisers the ability to reach their target audience at an affordable rate.

YouTube Ads are actually built on the Google Ads dashboard. If you’re familiar with building Display or Search campaigns, you’ll already be familiar with the YouTube Ads interface.

Instead of selecting a traditional campaign type, marketers select a campaign goal followed by an ad format.

Similar to TikTok, YouTube offers unique ad formats specific to its platform, including overlay ads, bumper ads, responsive video ads, and skippable or non-skippable in-stream ads. All of these ad types offer unique opportunities to showcase your product in use, target users as granular as a specific YouTube channel or keyword, and create and maintain connections through introductory ads and retargeting (especially if non-skippable).

Pinterest Ads

Pinterest is a visually-driven, board-centric platform used for creative exploration and expression. Though few last-touch conversions come from this platform, it’s a powerful tool to leverage during the consideration phase.

Due to its authentic and creative nature, traditional ads used on other platforms may not work as well on Pinterest. Social ads on this platform must feel authentic and organic in order to drive performance since they appear among a user’s search results.

Pinterest offers three campaign types with limited options in objectives.

Its audience targeting is similar to those of other platforms, but we find it most similar to building a paid search campaign. Because Pinterest allows keyword targeting, we recommend leveraging Pinterest-provided resources including Pinterest Trends and Pinterest Predicts to help align your audience with the traffic Pinterest is reporting.

For more on Pinterest Ads, read our Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing.

Snapchat Ads

Introduced in 2014, Snapchat’s advertising was built for large companies with deep pockets. Today, Snapchat has made it simpler and more affordable for brands of all sizes and budgets. Though it may not be top of mind in the realm of social media, Snapchat has been steadily growing year after year and has grown 7% from 2023 to 2024.

Depending on your campaign goals, Snapchat offers various ad formats under Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion objectives. With as little as $5 per day, ad formats range from single images or videos to story ads, AR lenses, filters, and commercials up to 3 minutes long.

We recommend beginning with top-of-funnel awareness campaigns on Snapchat to nurture your audience before retargeting those that have interacted with you in a consideration or conversion campaign. Retargeting on Snapchat is done through an Ad Engagement Audience, which is a strategy that’s confined to actions taken only on Snapchat ads. This effectively helps move users down the funnel.

It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

Though there are a multitude of social media platforms offering advertising services, not every platform will be right for your brand and audience. We recommend meeting your audience where they are, which you can figure out based on organic performance, social listening, and data-driven targeting.

But even when running ads on social media, the goal is to continue to resonate with your target audience and build your brand community. Social proof and the use of UGC have become increasingly powerful as users prefer to hear about a product from a trusted source instead of an overly curated social campaign.

Be sure to remain native to the platform you’re advertising on and monitor engagement, interaction, and brand sentiment that builds community and successful social ad campaigns.

Work with an expert on your social media ad campaigns.

The post Social Media Ads 101: Choosing the Right Platform for Your Business appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Before we get into the details, it’s important that we discuss two commonly confused terms: programmatic advertising and programmatic channels. In simple terms, programmatic advertising refers to automating the ad buying process to sell and purchase ad space in real-time via an auction. Think of this as a direct contrast to traditional TV and direct mail buys, which do not have an auction that is constantly shifting every moment. 

A programmatic channel consists of display/video and includes out of home (OOH), CTV, banners, etc. in contrast to other channels such as social and SEM. Think of programmatic advertising as an umbrella that all digital marketing platforms sit under and the programmatic channel is just one of them, in addition to social and SEM.

In this article, we’ll cover 4 programmatic advertising ad examples that we can learn from and adapt for 2025.

4 Programmatic Advertising Examples

1. Spotify: Wrapped Dynamic Billboards

This example is from several years ago but is as relevant as ever. Spotify transformed its popular annual campaign ‘Wrapped’ into an interactive programmatic advertising ad campaign. This was the first real-time OOH activation they did, and it was executed in cities worldwide.

Users who were physically in the presence of the digital OOH billboards could opt-in to have their ‘Wrapped’ displayed in real-time on digital billboards directly in front of them. This OOH experience evolved an already extremely popular campaign and brought it outside of the digital ecosystem into the ‘real’ world. In the process, a new dialogue was created between users from all over as they connected in real-time. The only thing more compelling than big, dramatic billboards are big, dramatic billboards that feel deeply personal.

This execution was impactful as it increased brand affinity for existing users but also introduced more people to the brand who were not familiar with it. Typically most campaigns are targeted towards new users, but to be able to intrigue new and existing customers is a powerful play by Spotify.

Advertisers must take a nuanced approach when attempting to replicate Spotify’s success in their digital marketing strategy. Many users are concerned that countless companies have access to their personal data. What makes this campaign interesting is that it turns the idea of data privacy’s association with fear on its head; instead it makes sharing data cool and exciting for the user. In Spotify’s case, music taste is something that most people take pride in and feels connected to their sense of identity.

Brands need to scour their first-party data to find attributes that users would take pride in sharing and execute against that when asking them to show off to their peers, similar to the Spotify example. If your business is a card company, then you could ask a customer to share the holiday card template they picked that year. If your business is a social media app, then you could ask a user to share their 5 most liked images of the year. Whatever your company is focused on, there’s likely something your user base would be excited to share with others that you could build a campaign around.

2. Nike: Weather-Based Digital Ads

Nike partnered with the Weather Channel mobile app to present users with clothing suggestions based on their current weather conditions. For example, if it was rainy, then a rain jacket would be advertised. If it was sunny, then a sweat-resistant, breathable t-shirt would be presented. From there, users could click through to Nike’s site where they could buy the suggested items or continue browsing. 

This was a play focused on the bottom of the funnel, but also increased awareness for users who did not purchase but were curious about the thoughtful options offered.

What this campaign did great was help a user make the connection between a real-world situation (the weather) and Nike’s product offerings. When shopping for clothing, we typically think about future scenarios that our future self will be in and pick clothing accordingly for that distant moment. This execution instead connected the weather to current needs and products that would fulfill those needs. Instead of the distant connection between future self and future weather, the moment felt more immediate and rooted in reality.

Advertisers can learn from this by partnering with the Weather Channel if they have a seasonal product. For example, a mattress company may want to advertise cooling sheets or cooling mattresses on particularly hot days. A streaming service may want to increase spend on rainy days when people will be staying inside, looking for some way to entertain themselves. Staying in tune with the current weather trends and how they may impact your business is a smart way to engage users in moments they’re more likely to convert.

3. McDonald’s: Traffic Buster OOH

McDonald’s launched a clever OOH campaign that showed different ads depending on the flow of traffic. For example, when traffic was backed up, they displayed a message that started with ‘Stuck in a jam?’ This was a smart way to communicate with users based on the context of their current situation. The campaign used real-time data from Google Traffic API to ensure the right message was shown at the right time to users on the road.

Drivers are used to being inundated with billboard ads on heavily trafficked highways. After a while, the ads tend to blend in with each other, and it’s increasingly difficult for brands to stand out and make an impact. McDonald’s combined cheeky humor and real-time data to make a connection with drivers and cut through the noise. 

One smart way that advertisers can learn from this is to integrate with the Google Traffic API if it makes sense for their business. This is particularly useful to brands that have brick-and-mortar locations and are aiming to increase foot traffic or sales to a particular location. Combining real-time data from the API and a funny, attention-grabbing headline will likely be an effective way to engage users and achieve goals.

4. Audi: Dynamic Car Customization Retargeting

Audi’s programmatic campaign was focused on the launch of the extremely customizable Q2 car. They utilized a car configurator tool onsite to support customers in crafting their dream car, choosing from seemingly limitless options. Audi combined data from the configurator related to each user’s preferences and data related to their place in the funnel. For users who built their dream car in the configurator tool and had been to site before, they were served ads that featured cars looking like the ones they built. More than 6,000 variations of the ad were created, which provided a customized experience to all users.

As a result of using this dynamic programmatic campaign and targeting approach, Audi drove a conversion rate 4x higher vs. their previous, more traditional approach. 

What’s interesting about this example is that the ad variations felt hyper-personalized to each user, and they were, but they weren’t infinite. There were 6,000 variations, which was more than enough for each user to feel seen and like Audi recognized them as an individual. Not only did they experience the euphoria of creating their ideal car and dreaming about buying it, but then they were reminded by that special experience at a later point, through an ad. It kept Audi top of mind, which is key for any advertiser. 

Marketers can action on this example by providing configurator tools on their site to learn more about their customers preferences and to give their users additional ways to explore their brand and products. Combining that data with existing site users is a powerful way to retarget people who have been to site but have not yet been compelled to convert.

Conclusion and Takeaways

Inject Creativity in Contextual Moments

These campaigns all made users stop what they were doing and think about what information was being presented to them in an ad format. Many people openly say they don’t like ads or even hate them, but what they hate is the monotony of an experience over and over when they’re trying to do something else entirely. These ads felt more like one-off experiences rooted in their current reality. This made them more engaging and impactful than a traditional campaign.

Data is Key

All of these ads would not have been possible without a significant amount of data collection. This was used to cater each user’s experience to each current situation and make the ad experience that much more meaningful and memorable. For example, Spotify used its own 1st party data, Nike partnered with the Weather Channel, and McDonald’s partnered with Google Traffic API. No matter how creative your idea is, it must be backed up with data to create an unforgettable experience for the end user.

OOH is Powerful

Many advertisers are scared to test OOH because it can be difficult to measure results or craft creative that’s good enough for such a highly trafficked area. These are logical concerns, but considering how OOH can use creative and data to create one-of-a-kind brand experiences, it should be seriously considered by all advertisers. 

No matter what brand you’re advertising, there are many ways to incorporate programmatic advertising if you’re creative and want to try something that will make a big impact.

The post Programmatic Advertising 101: 4 Examples to Learn From appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.