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Running an online advertising campaign without optimization is a bit like looking for your car keys in the middle of the desert, blindfolded. Your chances of success are somewhere around ZERO percent.

Maintaining your positive ROI, let alone improving it, requires continuous tinkering to your advertising campaign, to learn what works, what doesn’t; what’s a waste of money and what makes you money. Take five minutes to learn about the steps required for optimal campaign optimization – some of the actions need to be taken on a regular basis, while others are one-time tweaks but whose importance is usually underestimated.

Set Your Target

Your target audience is the foundation of the campaign optimization process. First, you need to define which sort of audience you want to target, and then compare it to your campaign, ad group, and keywords to see if there’s a match.

Track the Right Things

You can’t optimize your campaigns without having the data you need. So you need to track all the relevant parameters from your campaigns to learn what works and what doesn’t. Examples of important things you should monitor are the sources and geos your conversions are coming from, how much you are paying per impression, the device, operating system and carrier your converting audience is using and which keywords did they type.

Have Your Report Ready!

The ad network or ad exchange you work with should provide you with customized reporting, which should give you a clear picture of your campaign’s performance. In those reports, you can view statistics from all your campaign groups and filter your parameters the way you want. A good reporting system goes a long way in helping advertisers optimize their campaigns and maximize their efficiency.

Keywords are Key

Whether you’re a year-long business, and especially if you’re a seasonal one, you should never stop optimizing your targeting keywords. After all, a missed keyword is a lost business opportunity. Targeting by keywords gives advertisers narrower yet more converting audiences to display ads to, and looking for high traffic-volume keywords in your niche should become an action you perform regularly.

Budget Control

To maximize profitability, you must allocate every dollar effectively. The more control you have on what you spend, the more you will be able to focus your resources on what makes you money. If you can set a cap on your daily spend or define bids for sources you deem profitable, it can be the first step on your way to scaling.

 What’s the Frequency?

If you display an ad to your audience too many times, you’re bound to either bore or annoy them or both. If your audience see your ad too few times, they might ignore it. This changes depending on your niche, but the consensus regarding the optimal number of times you want a person to see your ad is four. The first time they usually ignore it, the second time around they notice it. By the third time, they start to get interested, and the much-desired click happens on the fourth serving. Set your ad frequency cap accordingly to achieve optimal results.

Every Hour Deserves a Different Bid

Not all hours of the day were created equally. In other words, some hours of the day your conversions may be better than others. That’s what Day Parting was invented for, and you should use it to display your ads to the most relevant audience at the right time.

Wrap-Up

Campaign optimization is one of the essential steps in running an advertising campaign – You can’t succeed without it. Moreover, it’s not a one-and-done deal, but a continuous process. If done correctly, though, optimization could significantly increase your conversion rates and lead you on the sure way to positive ROI and successful scaling.