When I first spoke to her, she had spent €15K out of a €20K budget on the campaign, with no results to show for it.
I rebuilt the campaign from scratch. The new campaign, built and launched for €5K (including setup), brought in 39 qualified enquiries.
Not much, perhaps, but it was 39 more than the previous €15K had delivered.
How can you avoid this situation?
Check your marketing numbers regularly
In the previous Field Note, I covered the key KPIs to watch to stay in control of marketing.
What I didn’t cover was how often to check.
Not every marketing action or campaign is going to be wildly successful. Some tests will fail. If you check often enough, something that isn’t working won’t eat most of your budget before you find out!
Yet at the same time, if you check too often (e.g. daily), you’ll spend too much time worrying about day-to-day fluctuations which are mostly random noise. Sometimes, success takes some time to show up.
So yes, you need patience, but not too much of it either.
Recommended check-in cadence
How often to check depends mostly on your role:
Weekly
If paid advertising campaigns (search or social) are run by an external agency, you should expect them to check weekly. If you run the campaign in-house, someone in your team should do this.
This is a basic check:
- Are we seeing conversions at the expected rate?
- Is cost per conversion within the expected range?
If the numbers disappoint, there is often an explanation, although bad weeks do happen. For example:
- Is there a public holiday in your target country? (Do nothing)
- Did something break in your tracking setup? (This is very common. Fix it).
- Did someone change a landing page URL? (Update the campaign)
Recommended check-in cadence
How often to check depends mostly on your role:
Weekly
If paid advertising campaigns (search or social) are run by an external agency, you should expect them to check weekly. If you run the campaign in-house, someone in your team should do this.
This is a basic check:
- Are we seeing conversions at the expected rate?
- Is cost per conversion within the expected range?
If the numbers disappoint, there is often an explanation, although bad weeks do happen. For example:
- Is there a public holiday in your target country? (Do nothing)
- Did something break in your tracking setup? (This is very common. Fix it).
- Did someone change a landing page URL? (Update the campaign)
Quarterly / semi-annually
If you’re a team leader or at a more senior level, you should still check in about what works and what doesn’t, but not too often and at a higher level.
Establish a cadence of meetings about the questions:
- How are the different channels / campaigns / initiatives working?
- Are we on target for our recruitment goals? Do we need to shift priorities?
- What should we stop doing? What should we be doing more of?
- Are any obstacles getting in our way that need senior intervention?
As the saying goes:Â “People respect what you inspect”.
Asking these questions regularly is a powerful way to communicate to people that their work matters.
Resource: Campaign check sheet
If you’re running paid search campaigns, my Google Ads Optimisation Checklist tells you exactly what to check on a weekly and monthly basis.
It’s part of my Google Ads course – which takes you step-by-step through setting up effective campaigns and maintaining them. Useful whether you are actually working inside the account or having monthly meetings with an ad agency.
That’s all for this Field Note
This article first appeared as a Field Note
In the Field Notes, I share one practical idea you can try on your site or in your campaigns. Every two weeks. Get it in your inbox by signing up here.
Â
