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Looking for better digital marketing results? Invest your time

Looking for better digital marketing results? Invest your time
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As more and more eyeballs are glued to smartphones, dollars will flow into digital marketing in greater numbers. By 2021, according to Forrester Research, companies will spend more than $120 billion annually in digital marketing, with email marketing, online video advertising, social media advertising, display advertising and paid search making up 46 percent of all advertising within five years.

Yet with the increasing amount of money being poured into digital marketing, Wordstream found that very few companies put in the time to manage effective campaigns. Wordstream reviews thousands of accounts with its AdWords Performance Grader and Facebook Opportunity Calendar; it found that:

  • More than half of AdWords advertisers haven’t looked at their accounts in the past 30 days.
  • 25 percent haven’t checked in even once in more than 90 days.

The great thing about the digital world is the amount of data it generates. One thing that the numbers show is that there’s a strong link between account activity and performance.

Wordstream released a white paper, “The 20-Minute Work Week,” to guide you in making the most of your social accounts and paid search.

Here’s a breakdown of what you should do each week:

  • Check bids and budget (minutes 1-4): Raise bids on keywords that are converting at a profitable rate and lower bids on keywords that aren’t. Remember to not bid more than you can afford. Don’t spend all of your money for the top position. It’s better to be able to run ads longer in the second or third position.
  • Keyword research (minutes 5-9): Keyword expansion increases your reach, so look into new keyword opportunties and experiment with keyword match types, such as phrase and exact match.
  • Ad-text optimization (minutes 10-13): Test your text ads continuously. Make sure that they include the keyword you’re bidding on and a strong call to action. Test variations of your tone, word choice and headline, and rotate the ads. This will give you the data to see which are working and which aren’t.
  • Improve Campaign Relevancy (minutes 15-18): Create new, more targeted landing pages with a clear through-line from the keyword you’re bidding on to the ad and the destination URL. Also, split your largest ad groups into smaller, more targeted ones.
  • PPC reporting (minutes 19-20): Review the month-to-month results to see what might need changing next week.