Breaking Down Your Budget: How to Decide What to Spend to Make Your Campaign Perform
Many brands come to FieldTest as their first step to scaling their marketing beyond social media. We’re proud to help these brands connect with consumers using the power of the internet. Still, digital advertising is a new world for many marketers and it can seem esoteric and difficult to understand.
We often hear the same questions when people start out with us, so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to make sure they get answered in a way that’s clear and informative. We want to put brands in a position to build the absolute best ad campaigns they can.
In the past we’ve talked you through the first steps to get your digital ad campaign started, we’ve discussed the use of a full funnel strategy and how important it is to customize your creative to make the most out of each of these strategies. Today we will be covering the next in the series of questions we often get asked by our clients: “Just how much do we have to spend in order to see results and how will I know when my spend is working?”
Generally speaking, the more you’re able to spend the better your results will be. We have a number of clients who spend six figures a month with us consistently and their results are extraordinary, often as high as 2-6x return on underlying media spend. We know that this level of investment is out of reach of some of the brands we work with but we built the FieldTest platform to make ad buying accessible for those companies starting with smaller budgets. We have built a great deal of intelligence into our solution to ensure your success. For brands starting out, the budget level you need to set is heavily reliant on a specific set of factors that change from brand to brand, even campaign to campaign. If this sounds like it might get complicated don’t worry, we’re here to walk you through all the elements and give you all the information you need to achieve your campaign goals.
Start Small
In order to determine your ideal spend, first take a look into your past campaign data. Your learning there will help you understand how your spends are performing. This might sound like putting the cart before the horse but it’s important to determine your spends by taking the most informed route possible. If you have run campaigns in the past or have created ads on social or other platforms you’ll be prepared with some traffic and some data to match. If you haven't done either that’s ok, you’ll just have to start small and use your data learnings to inform your next steps. “Start small” might have different meaning for different brands, and we technically have no minimums for non-CBD brands, but we like to think of $1000/mo as the minimum recommended buy for smaller clients to get the results they want to see out of an initial test buy. If you want to maximize your results, we recommend a spend of $2-5k/mo consistently. With this level of budget you’ll be more than equipped to build a meaningful footprint to drive sales down the funnel and gather enough performance data to make informed decisions about where your budget should go over time. Usually this takes about 6 weeks, so be patient and understand that every dollar spent in testing is a step towards a more informed, higher performing campaign down the line.
Understand Your Bid
You have an extremely important and effective tool to effect your ad performance, your bid for one thousand views, or CPM (cost per mille, italian for 1000). When ads get delivered to your audiences they are delivered on marketplaces where they must compete with other advertisers for that particular placement. This process is called bidding and is effected by the bid price chosen on your campaign setup page. Imagine you set your bid to $4 CPM. If one of your targeted intenders goes to a website where someone else is bidding for the same intender at $3.50, you’ll beat them and earn the ad impression at the lowest possible price. If they’re bidding $4.50 you’ll lose the bid Don’t fret, you will likely find another placement at another site without those higher bidders, but you may have lost out on a premium placement you don’t want to miss. If your audience primarily draws brands who bid high you may need to adjust your bid up and increase your budget to scale your results. If they only draw brands who bid low you are free to lower your spend to accommodate this and your budget can stay modest until you’re ready to increase it to boost your results. This flexibility is a huge part of why we recommend a test buy before making long term budget plans for your campaigns. You never know what you’ll find once you start to experiment
Use The Right Creative
It’s important to note that these numbers are primarily based on our hero ad unit, the content recommendation and brand amplifier 300x250 ad that you build in our ad builder. These were specially designed to be high-performing with low CPMs and high CTRs when utilized properly. 300x250s are universal across mobile and desktop and are generally considered to be one of the most common and most effective ad sizes available. Other ads are useful in filling out a full-funnel campaign, but you should be prepared to bid a bit higher than you would otherwise. For example, larger display units like 300x600s and 728x250s are going to be more expensive, you may need to set your CPM as high as 2x what you would for a 300x250 unit. This pays off in the level of brand awareness you get from using these units but it’s important to remember that without adjusting your budget you’ll likely not be seeing the best possible performance from these ads. Likewise, when you run ads in retargeting you’ll also want to boost your CPM so you’re not competing with other brands to get your final push to convert in front of your most qualified intenders. This funnel stage is where most of your return on investment will be driven, so don’t be afraid to invest a bit in keeping its performance up.
No Fees With FieldTest
Another important thing to consider when choosing FieldTest is our lack of any additional fees above and beyond your ad spend. Many other agencies will promise low CPMs only to include various hidden ad buying and strategy fees in the final bill, which translate to a reduced ROAS and CPA. FieldTest bakes all of our technology and delivery fees right into your campaign spend, giving you the freedom to make budget plans without fear of hidden fees or expenses. With FieldTest you have nearly instantaneous campaign reporting with full viewability metrics including cross-device mapping (mobile, desktop, tablet), householding, and protection against bot traffic, not to mention the money saved on creative with our built-in ad builder, all with the ease of use of a social media platform and the peace of mind that comes with the promise of no hidden fees.
Get a Plan and Get Creative
We know that many brands face one of their first major growth challenges when the time comes to allocate ad budget, but we hope this guide has helped clear the air a bit and give you some insight on how to make your campaigns perform. We still recommend that you start with at least $1000/month and scale up from there, but with a little experimentation and some clear data you can make your campaigns perform at any reasonable budget.