Every brand owner knows the struggle. On one hand, you have the absolutely essential need to advertise your products online in order to drive new customers and keep your old ones coming back to purchase your products. On the other, you have ever rising costs across marketing platforms making it more and more difficult and critical to know just where to assign that precious marketing dollar. Some reports have shown Facebook CPMs increasing 30% compared to this time last year, and that trend is only continuing upward.

At FieldTest we know that a good ad campaign isn’t just one that drives a ton of traffic and sells a lot of products, it’s also one that has a manageable and predictable cost for your brand so you can plan for the long term and know your marketing budget is securely spent. This week, we’re going to talk about the top 3 ways you can ensure that your ad campaigns are set up in a way that is cost effective so you never have to worry about whether or not you are making the right choices with your marketing budget.

1: Be smart about your funnel

If you have followed the FieldTest blog for some time you’ll already know how central the marketing funnel is to our product. By dividing your marketing into Awareness, Consideration, and Action stage ads you’ll ensure that your customers are being presented the right messaging at the right time and that they’re always being pushed down-funnel towards conversion. The centrality of this strategy makes honing in your creatives at the three stages critical to your success, and to keeping your costs down. If you awareness ads are not properly set up to drive traffic you’ll end up spending a lot more than you probably should in order to get people onto your site, and the same goes for consideration and action ads. Check out our blog entry here for some tips on how to make sure your funnel is set up to deliver the best results and lowest costs.

2: Optimize your ad campaigns

The FieldTest platform is all about empowering brands to take full control of their digital marketing. That’s why we give our clients the ability to track performance across all of their campaigns and adjust their budgets and creatives on the fly, 24/7, all from one easy to use dashboard. This ability to make edits and optimizations to your ad campaigns is an important step to keeping your costs down to their lowest possible level. By trimming out creatives that aren’t performing well and iterating on messaging and imagery that is you will help keep your ad campaigns running at full speed so you never have to worry about your ad dollars being squandered.

3: Adjust your CPM 

We’ve already mentioned how Facebook’s CPMs have trended upward over the last few years, but they are far from the only platform to do this. Advertising costs have been increasing all across social media as they continue to gain market share and feel they are entitled to taking more and more of your marketing spend due simply to their cornering of the awareness market. Worst of all these platforms rarely give you insight into just why their CPMs continue to rise, it is kept fully opaque. 

At FieldTest we do things a little differently. By giving you the ability to set your own target CPM we make sure that you never have to worry about inexplicably rising costs, and with full data transparency you'll always know exactly where every dollar is being spent. We find that around $4 is the sweet spot for our ads, in fact we even make it the default for all new campaigns. Compare this to Facebook’s average CPM of $12 and you’ll see why so many FieldTest clients are moving their awareness marketing budgets away from social and onto the open web.

Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can help you build campaigns that are high performing and cost effective