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How to Prepare Your Website and Business for a Digital Advertising Campaign

By Snap Agency October 12, 2020

Internet advertising isn’t all graphic design and keyword research, as important as those things may be. Sometimes online advertising methods look like neatening up your site’s layout, tracking numbers and figures, and similar prep work. Check out our steps below so that your site is up to snuff before launching your big ad campaign!

Step One: Optimize That Landing Page

Your landing page is what appears to customers in response to a search engine optimized result. In plain English, it’s your customer’s starting point, the first glimpse they get of your website, and sometimes your brand. Landing pages aren’t necessarily the same thing as home pages, but there’s often overlap.

Point being? First impressions matter, especially when preparing your site for digital advertising. If you want to amp up those conversions, you need to make that first impression count.

Keep it Simple

We’ve discussed this in previous posts, but when in doubt, simplify your landing page. Navigating your site should be a straightforward experience, especially for first-time users. Are links easy to locate? Have you clearly stated your brand’s mission, your CTA(s), or what your business does that no one else can? Consider removing pop-up ads (unless they are indeed useful), dead links, gratuitous buttons and graphics, and so on.

Ensure it’s Mobile-Friendly

A staggering 86% of the top landing pages are optimized for mobile—emphasis on the word top. Customers don’t have the patience for non-responsive sites, oversized images, tiny text, or any other problems that come with a non-mobile-friendly site. Your customers will be more receptive to your digital advertising campaign if they can easily access it on their phones as well as their PC.

Step Two: Track the Impact of Ads

The last thing any of us would want to discover is that our hard-earned advertising budgets were being funneled away on a failed campaign. That’s why it’s essential to track the ads’ success at all stages of your marketing plan.

Get Organized

Look, we get it. Tracking ads can be arduous, especially when you have to do it weekly or even daily. But a wise man once said, “your habits will determine your future.” Your future being, in this case, the success of your business.

We recommend setting reminders in your content calendar to review the stats of your ad campaign regularly. Determine what’s working well and what needs improvement. Whenever possible, point to specific numbers and percentages to back up your claims. Better to find out that one aspect of your campaign isn’t going according to plan early on instead of halfway through the year. Or, worse yet, after the campaign is already over and done with.

Track Your Success on a Variety of Channels

Okay, we admit it, telling you to “check up on your campaign” regularly is pretty vague. What do we mean by that, exactly? Where exactly should you be checking?

The short answer? If it can be monitored, and if it’s a means by which customers hear about or get in contact with your business, track it! We’re talking about conversion tracking on Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, as well as CRM and KPI tracking. Heck, we’re even talking about tracking incoming phone calls. 

Now, wait a minute—phone calls? That’s right; those customers hear about you from somewhere before they call you, don’t they? So ask them where they heard about you! Was it from a Facebook ad? Or perhaps a Google one? Feedback like this will help you figure out where most of your ad budget should be going. And if you forget to ask, don’t worry. Phone tracking systems like Dynamic Number Insertion assign different numbers based on the source of the call. In other words, you can see what site a customer is calling from without actually asking the question.

Step Three: Ensure You Can Handle the Surge in Leads

We don’t typically think of sites being unable to handle heavy traffic these days. After all, this isn’t 1997! An influx of guests isn’t going to mess with page load times, is it? Well . . . yes, unfortunately, this can still happen, even in the year 2020.

We discussed keeping things simple in Step One, and the same applies here. Optimize file and image sizes, cache heavily, and anything else that will minimize lagging. And speaking of “tracking the impact,” it pays to monitor what times of day, and in response to which ads, traffic surges. That way, you can prepare yourself for those spikes when they’re most likely to occur.

Remember, as frustrating as slow load times and increased traffic can be, they’re actually a blessing in disguise. Your business is booming, and your ads are, indeed, effective! If those aren’t reasons to be proud, we don’t know what are.

Partner With Snap, Your Internet Advertising Guide

Need to create a knockout ad campaign? No problem! We’ll set you on the right path for crafting landing pages, regularly monitoring analytics, and preparing for hiccups such as surges in traffic. For a full rundown of our digital advertising services, shoot us a message. We can’t wait to hear from you.