It’s time for some hard truths about your campaigns…

There’s certain truths that we as advertisers just have to face up to, one of them is that sometimes you’re going to fail. It’s an unfortunate fact, but seasoned marketers and new brands just starting out have this one big thing in common: they make mistakes.

It’s not the end of the world- it’s all part of being human! But if you were aware of the most common errors that marketers make and how to fix them ahead of time that would be pretty helpful, right? Well, you’re in luck.

In this blog post we’re going to take a closer look at ways you may be sabotaging your digital ad campaigns, whether you are a seasoned marketing veteran or a first timer trying your hand at scaling your business. We’re not just here to tell you how you’re messing up, tho, we’re not monsters! We’ll also cover how you can fix these errors and all the ways in which you can better navigate the digital media landscape in order to make your campaigns work smarter for you.

Ready to face your failures and get better as a marketer? Here’s how you’re probably sabotaging your FieldTest campaigns:

1. Not installing your FieldTest tracking pixels

The first (and most impactful) thing you could do to sabotage your campaign is to not properly install your FieldTest tracking Pixel on your website and conversion pages. The importance of this cannot be understated! FieldTest gives you a set of powerful tools to turn your data into paying customers, from retargeting technology to our Audience Predictor AI, but none of them can operate properly without a steady stream of data provided by your FieldTest Pixel.

How do you fix this blunder? When you log in to FieldTest, click the ‘Pixels’ button on the left sidebar. From here, copy your tracking pixel and paste it into the header section of your website. Select the eCommerce platform you are on (if you don’t see yours then click ‘Custom’) and it will automatically insert the correct macros for you. Next simply copy your conversion pixel and paste it into the header section of your order confirmation page. And just like that, your number one mistake is corrected and your advanced campaign features are unlocked and ready for launch.

2. Daily metric obsession 

Have you ever noticed a slight dip in your CTR or ROAS and immediately hit the panic button? Or spent sleepless nights feeling like you have to monitor every single up and down to your performance metrics? If you answered ‘Yes’ then this one is dedicated to you. Being too hyper focused on your performance metrics on a day to day basis is not only going to drive you crazy it’s going to stunt your overall campaign statistics.

Here’s the important thing to keep in mind: one single day of negative performance doesn’t make a trend.

One of the more common versions of this mistake is a client seeing a slight sales slump over the weekend. Plenty of FieldTest clients see slight sales dips Saturday and Sunday; it fits with the internet trend of being online most of the week for work and taking a break to do other things (leisure, errands, etc.) on the weekend. We’ve even discussed how to counter this here). Taken within the context of one day, we understand how it can feel alarming to see sales or traffic drop off and that a common knee jerk response to this is to immediately begin pulling different levers within your FieldTest account. Instead, we recommend you pause, take a beat and see how things look after another 48 hours. Ultimately the trick here is to begin thinking about your campaign stats in larger chunks: monthly, weekly in some cases, but certainly not day by day and hour by hour. Let your budget hit its stride!

3. Only running one ad per format

The FieldTest suite of offerings gives you the most complete digital marketing tools online. This means full creative upload capabilities and support for all major ad formats, but how you put those to use is extremely important if you want to optimize your campaign performance, or completely sink it. One of the easiest ways to do the latter is to only run a single ad in any given format. We’ve all run small campaigns before, we all understand the challenges of stretching a limited ad budget, but when it comes to digital marketing it’s all about data and comparisons between datasets.

You cannot compare your ads’ performance if you only run a single creative in any given format!

For example you may be running one 970x250 and one 300x250, these two ads have completely different uses and will have completely different results, it’s a simple fact of their inherent differences as ad formats. There’s a reason we make creative guides like this one - it’s because every ad has a utility, a strength and maybe even a weakness, and they cannot be compared to one another on the same performance scale! How do you fix this? If you only have enough budget to run 2 ads, run 2 in the same format. If you have budget to run 10? Either run sets of 2 or sets of 5 and fail out the bottom performers. Never run a campaign without the ability to compare an ad’s performance to another ad that closely matches it, or at least matches its format. That’s how you build up a campaign that performs its absolute best in the long run.

4. Too many creatives, not enough spend

On the other side of that ‘stretching a limited budget’ coin, you have the next mistake you may be making to ruin your campaigns, running too many ads on too limited a budget. We see this all the time, a client comes in with a huge library of creatives they’ve repurposed from their time marketing on other platforms ie Facebook Twitter and so on, they load them all up into FieldTest and then top it off with a toe-dipping budget of just a few hundred dollars. Then, in a turn of events that sure to frustrate everyone involved, their campaigns seem not to go anywhere and no ad seems to really stand out from the crowd. Digital marketing has failed, time to go back to Facebook! This mistake is easy enough to make, you have the creative resources why not load them all in and see what rises to the top? Well, the answer to that is simple.

We balance your campaign spend equally across all of your creatives, meaning every dollar you put in gets split between every ad in competition to perform. In practice this means that two similar ads will have the same chance of being placed, giving you a clearer picture of user intent when one performs better than the other. It also means that things can get a bit confused if you try to split the spend 100 ways instead of 2, and especially if that spend is a modest amount, which is often the case for test campaigns.

There are two ways you can correct this mistake. In the short term, and on a smaller budget (ie under $1,000/month) limit the number of creatives you run to just a handful of the absolute best you have. In the long term, increase your budget over time and don’t stop your campaigns just because something goes a little awry. We recommend at least 60-90 days for campaigns to really get up and running, so be patient and don’t be afraid to up your budget in order to make a creative impact!

Your campaigns are looking better already!

We know this has been some tough love, but now that you’ve heard the hard truths we’re confident your campaigns will be performing even better than ever.

The path to acceptance doesn’t end here! We have another round of ways you are probably sabotaging your campaigns coming up soon, so keep your eyes peeled and remember, every failure is a learning opportunity. Every lesson you learn in your advertising career will only make you a better marketer in the long term. So take these lessons and go out there and make something great with FieldTest!

Get in touch to learn more about what you can accomplish with FieldTest’s powerful marketing tools