This is true for startups, too. If your marketing team (or agency) is running ad campaigns, demand evidence of its contribution to the bottom line.
Also, ensure your marketers’ self-worth is not tied to the outcome of the campaigns they’re running; or else they will hide bad outcomes.
I regularly shut off campaigns if there’s no evident benefit of keeping them on, regardless of what the industry says. For instance, a lot of people talk about retargeting, but I have not seen any success with retargeting after trying with 5-10 clients.
I also discovered that Twitter charges you for accidental clicks on your ads even if they know they’re accidental. Also, these accidental clicks made up >90% of clicks on one campaign I ran.
It’s reassuring to see the big players come to the same realization.
> demand evidence of its contribution to the bottom line
If agencies have no access to business metrics, isn't this burden upon the advertiser to evaluate the campaigns in terms of business metrics?
Media agencies have their own kpis of success - a campaign can have a good performance media wise, but have little to no impact on the business.
You can say: "well... blame the creative agency for their poor campaign concept!" ... you can say that... except they work with what they have: a specific brand and a product/service.
No agency controls distribution, pricing, placement, quality, customer service, and many other variables that dictate the success of a campaign.
It's easy to blame agencies because they are outside organizations. You are a pitch of way of cleaning your bad decisions as a brand or marketing manager.
The client is always right, even when the client is wrong.
A couple folks I've worked with over the years go out of their way to highlight some of the bad stuff, and use it as learning material for future work. But it's usually coupled with "hey, we're partway through this, but the numbers are looking pretty bad right now, we should probably stop this now and rethink things". That said, I've generally only been at the smaller-self-serve side of things - the ability to stop/start campaigns with 5 and 6 figure budgets is probably a different ballgame.
I'm right there with you on retargeting. It's been my experience that this is smoke and mirrors and something that a client can sell to their bosses because it sounds like it would work.
If a campaign isn't working, I talk to our client about it and if I think I can fix it, I'm open about that too. It's easy to spend tens of thousands of dollars on useless ad spend optimized for the wrong things, and it's unfortunately the responsibility of the advertiser at this point to show their client what metrics actually matter, how to track them, and to give the client the ability to check in whenever they feel a need to.
This shouldn't be the case, but I think a lot of companies hire people that are technically illiterate to run marketing and they just chase eyeballs.
How do you figure out that a specific campaign doesn't work? For example, in the bit of online advertising I've done, I've seen nice conversion numbers from retargeting campaigns.
But how do I know these users wouldn't have bought anyway?
Also, ensure your marketers’ self-worth is not tied to the outcome of the campaigns they’re running; or else they will hide bad outcomes.
I regularly shut off campaigns if there’s no evident benefit of keeping them on, regardless of what the industry says. For instance, a lot of people talk about retargeting, but I have not seen any success with retargeting after trying with 5-10 clients.
I also discovered that Twitter charges you for accidental clicks on your ads even if they know they’re accidental. Also, these accidental clicks made up >90% of clicks on one campaign I ran.
It’s reassuring to see the big players come to the same realization.