You probably could have guessed that the correct answer is the latter. Initial campaign management and regular optimization are key to seeing the best ROI of your digital advertising investment.

Within each of your ad platforms, it is important to make sure the following things are happening during the first few weeks of running a campaign:

• All campaigns and ad sets are delivering to appropriate target audiences.
• Adjust campaign budgets to ensure you are reaching a large enough audience.
• Make sure remarketing lists are continuing to grow if you are running a remarketing campaign. 

When optimizing a campaign, it is important to remember that there are a variety of ways to optimize depending on your advertising budget, target audience, etc. Within each advertising platform, there are performance metrics you should pay attention to when optimizing. For example, there are many more ways to optimize campaigns within the Google AdWords interface simply because of its complexity.

Below are a few key metrics to pay attention to when optimizing campaigns using Google AdWords and social media advertising.

Within Google AdWords, pay attention to these key metrics:

• Keyword performance (specifically for AdWords Search campaigns)
  • Adding new keywords and implementing a negative keyword list are both essential to keyword optimization.

• Bid adjustments
  • Within Google AdWords, there are many ways to set bid adjustments – location bid adjustments, device bid adjustments and schedule bid adjustments. The specific bid adjustments to implement vary from campaign to campaign. For some campaigns, bid adjustments in all possible areas make sense, while for others, bid adjustments in just one or two possible areas will allow for best campaign performance.

• Ad position
  • The Google AdWords interface assigns a number for ad position. The ideal ad position is between 1 and 3. If the number is higher than 3, your ad is likely not getting as much visibility as it could, and you’re probably getting fewer clicks, a lower click through rate (CTR) and aren’t reaching your conversion goals.

Within social media advertising platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), these are a few key metrics you should pay attention to when optimizing:

• Budget allocation
  • Based on each campaign and ad set performance, it is important to adjust budgets to ensure you are reaching your target audience. If you are advertising on multiple platforms, it is also helpful to use a reporting tool to monitor your budgets so you can ensure your campaigns stay on budget.

• Targeting options
  • Within each social media advertising platform, there are a multitude of ways to reach your target audience. Through optimization, you can figure out which targeting options perform best based on your specific audience. Don’t be afraid to test out different options or even layer targeting options in the same campaign!

• Update ad copy and images
  • Regularly optimizing ad copy and images ensures that your target audience doesn’t constantly see the same message. Review the performance metrics to determine copy that performs best for each of your target audiences.

• Boosted posts
  • If boosted posts are part of your digital advertising strategy on Facebook or Twitter, boosting posts that are recent and relevant to your target audience allows you to reach a wider audience than just the people who “like” your page on Facebook or “follow” you on Twitter.

Want to learn more about digital advertising? Register for our digital advertising post conference session at Converge 2015 next month with myself and Converge Vice Presidents, Hayley Warack and Robyn Anderson. We will review digital advertising best practices and various channels and strategies.

We can’t wait to see you there!