[Flowchart] Choose ad channels with confidence.

marketing strategy

Dec 8

Unsure where to start with your ad campaign? Follow our guide and understand the building blocks of running ads on Google and social media channels.

Google and social media advertising flowchart

~ Flowchart ~

Choose ad channels with confidence

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Spending ad budget is a series of tests - choose your channels, test, measure conversion rates, and move the money around accordingly.

But when you’re just starting out, you can’t simply “spend everywhere” and see what happens. It would be challenging to optimize ads across different channels, you would waste budget in the process, and you’d probably be overwhelmed.

Once you’ve worked with ads and understand how they’re set up, it’s easier to decide where it makes sense to start spending.

Here are the key terms and factors you should understand when finding your starting point for ad investments.

Choose your audience

This is who you are targeting through your ads. When setting up some types of ads, you are able to “define an audience”, selecting predefined characteristics to target.

For Facebook and the Google display network, for example, you have the choice of defining your audience in terms of:

Location
Gender
Age
Behavior on your website (retargeting ads)
Sometimes specifics like income level and job title

Retarget your audience

You may have heard of remarketing, the collection user information and following up via any channel. Remarketing includes ads, nurturing emails, and followup communication from sales. Retargeting, on the other hand, refers to ads specifically.

Google and Facebook, for example, allow you to retarget users who visit your website based on their demographics and behaviors. Most people choose to follow up with people based on the pages they already viewed.

For instance, users who view your blog on decorating cookies could be retargeted with a cookie decorating cookbook ad. The idea is to ads that will resonate with that user.

You could also get more specific: organic traffic who visited your cookie decorating blog is retargeted with the cookbook.

Set your budget

There are also many options when setting ad budget. You can bid on individual keywords, set a maximum cost per click, or even set a target cost per acquisition (CPA).

Ultimately, allowing the ad platform to optimize by CPA should yield the highest ROI. Keep in mind, the landing page will need to have a clear call to action.

If you’re running a campaign to build brand awareness, you may value impressions alone. Or maybe you want to drive traffic to an information blog post as a starting point. Then, they might be retargeted with an ad that leads to a landing page with a clear call to action.

See how the funnel works? Your ads can help push the right people to the right content, guiding them along a funnel to convert.