KISSmetrics: 11 Little-Known Secrets to Lower Your Ad Spends

11 Little-Known Secrets to Lower Your Ad Spends

Posted: 22 Mar 2016 11:08 AM PDT

"That's it! I must do something about it," you whisper after seeing your ads dashboard.

For the last month or so, you changed your ad copy, images, did split testing and even hired an ad manager. Yet you only have spent more ad dollars.

In fact, sometimes you're stretching your budget far outside from your pocket.

And now, it's got you thinking…

Is it normal to spend so much in ads?

Am I the only person who's suffering from this uphill struggle?

Deep down, you know you can't carry on like this.

You know you have to find a way out.

So how do you change it? How do you lower your ad costs so it will result in more savings and ultimately higher conversions?

Let's see!

1. Add Powerful Words to Get More Clicks

Powerful words help you get more click-throughs.

They make your copy look fascinating so that visitors stop, read your ad, and click on it.

In fact, studies have shown that words are more powerful than sound.

That's why you should aim for including those powerful words that makes your copy look more convincing and appealing.

This in turn helps reduce your ad costs and get more clicks from the same budget.

This ad from Matthew Woodward is a great example. Not only did Matthew use powerful words in his copy, but he also added social proof by using the keyword phrase "Award Winning Blog".

Smart use, isn't it?

To get started, you can use these 9 powerful words to inspire viewers to take action.

You
Free
Fast
Try
Easy
Increase
Get
Win
Instantly

2. Play With All the Platforms (And Find the Cheapest One)

Recently, Neil Patel found that a LinkedIn ad costs considerably higher, but their quality is often better than any other platform.

On the other hand, Facebook ads were cheap, but their lead quality was considerably lower as compared to LinkedIn ads.

This was possible because Neil played and tested with different ad platforms.

Once you start running ads on different platforms, you'll often find this type of pattern in your ads.

So, go ahead and run on your ads, at least, on these top performing ad platforms:

Google Ads
Bing Ads
Facebook Ads
LinkedIn Ads
YouTube Ads
Twitter Ads

Invest the same amount of money for each ad platform and calculate overall ROI from each ad platform.

3. Stretch Your Budget Higher

This may sound contradictory, but it's true.

When you're advertising online, you're competing with thousands of companies and brands, some of whom may be spending millions of dollars per month on paid advertising channels.

That means you're joining a huge, worldwide auction. You're competing with hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

And this narrows down your chances of getting more engagement.

So, the only way you can avoid this scenario is by spending more or stretching your budget.

But, that doesn't mean you need to spend more when you're just starting out.

In fact, you should start with a small budget. Once your ad begins to get some clicks, calculate your results and see if you’re getting a positive return.

If it is profitable, scale up your campaign and scale the bid higher to a profitable amount, otherwise stop running the ad and start again from scratch.

This way you'll ensure that you don't spend anything extra on your ads.

4. Refresh Older Ads

As time passes, your ads are likely to get older and this in turn can affect your ad spends and budget

For instance, take Digital Marketer.

This was one of their best performing ads in 2014:

But as time passed, the ad conversion rate began to decrease.

Then they came up with the refreshed version of the ad.

And it went on to generate more leads at a much lower cost.

And the best part?

They didn't change the offer, just refreshed the older version.

Likewise, when your ad cost is going higher- refresh the ad copy and target it to a newer audience.

Refreshing the ad will cost you just 15-30 minutes, but creating a new ad with a brand new offer will obviously take hours if not days.

5. Give Away a Free Gift

When running ads to a landing page it's always recommended to create a free tangential offer that aligns with your viewers.

Why?

Because anything free can lure your targeted audience to your site.

This YouTube ad from GetResponse sends the viewer to this landing page.

This is a highly targeted offer for the visitor.

However, that doesn't mean you need to deliver an immensely valuable service for free.

When starting, you can use these freebies to giveaway to your audience:

Ebook
Free Trial
Video Series
Report/White Paper

Or even a case study of somebody whom you helped, just like Beth Hayden, who offers a tantalizing case study to new email subscribers.

6. Use Ad Tools to Spend Efficiently and Target Better

When you're spending lots of money on ads, you have to keep a regular check on your ads dashboard.

If you're running ads on different platforms, then this makes your task even more difficult.

Just one mistake and you lose thousands of dollars.

That's where ad tools come in.

They can help you:

Manage multiple ad accounts
Save your precious time
Target your ads better
Test with different variations
Control your ad spends
Make changes with just few clicks

Keeping all those things in mind, it's always favorable to use ad tools when you're spending a lot of money.

Or you can even hire an ad manager or PPC expert.

There are many ad tools like:

7. Pay Attention to Ad Quality Score

There's a reason why ad networks introduced quality scores.

It helps you, as an advertiser, know the quality of your ad. And of course your quality score affects:

Ad cost
Ad ranking

Here's a great visual graphic by Wordstream detailing how much you can save by scoring a high quality score:

Image Source

But you often avoid ad quality score by assuming that you can never improve your ad quality score.

However, all it takes to improve is focusing on these key areas:

Refining Ad Text
Optimizing Landing Pages
Keyword Research and Organization (In Search Ads)
Relevance and Resonance (In Social Networks)

A rule of thumb is to keep refining your ads and strive for the best.

8. Run Multiple Variations to Test

It's super important to split test your ads. Without doing so, you’ll never know the villain in your ads.

Once you start running split tests, you'll always come up with a winning version.

And the best part about them?

It can be applied to anything: landing pages, emails, popups, blog posts, sales pages, and ads.

In digital advertising, you can test every element that you think will improve your ad performance.

For example:

Headline
Call-To-Action
Sub-Headline or Copy
Image
Audience Targeting
Ad Position
Element Position

…and there are countless possibilities.

All you need to do is just copy the ad. Then, change the element you want to split test and then run the ad.

That's it!

Adespresso, for instance, ran a split test on this ad by changing the image:

vs:

Image Source

And the results?

Well, it reduced their ad costs by 61.24% from $2.673 to $1.036, just by changing the image.

However, while split testing with your ad do not change more than one element. If you do, you can't attribute success to any one element within your ad. For example, don’t change your background image and the headline in your variant. If you do, you won’t know if it won/lost because of the headline or image.

9. Images Affect Conversion Rate

As you've seen earlier in the example above, images can affect your conversion and ad costs.

If used properly, images can help your ad stand out and instantly catch the visitor's attention.

On the other hand, they can be the biggest conversion killer in your ad copy.

That means to stand out, get more conversion and lower your ad costs, you need an eye-catching image that stands out from the ecosystem.

For example, this ad by GMAT Club is great example of standing out:

They strategically used a "Free Webinar" button to catch viewer attention.

Here are some tips to make your image stand out:

Change the color scheme to make sure your image doesn't blend into the ecosystem.
Use an image with happy/smiling people to catch more eyes.
Strategically use power words in images.
Play with contrast to make your text visible.

You can hire a graphic designer to design your ad images, or you can use a DIY tool such as Canva.

10. Become a Pro at Targeting

I'm sure you don't want to target non-interested persons.

That would only increase your website traffic not sales. And you’re in this to make sales. Traffic that doesn’t convert isn’t going to pay the bills.

That's why you need to spend some time in targeting your ad to the right people.

Fortunately, ad platforms these days are robust enough to create more targeted ads so you can find a suitable audience.

For instance, Google allows you to add negative keywords.

Those keywords that you don't want to rank for.

For example, for an SEO agency it might be:

Consulting
Cheap
Hire
About Us
Book
Cheap

As all of these are very general broad terms, which definitely will increase your ad costs not sales.

On the other hand, social ad networks like Facebook makes it super easy to target the right people using demographics, location, and even interests and behaviors.

With these features in hand you can easily advertise to the right people with the right message.

This not only will result in a higher conversion rate but also at reduced costs.

11. Run Cheap Retargeting/Remarketing Ads to Catch Lost Visitors

It's evident from research that: approximately 96% of visitors leave your site without converting or buying anything from you.

That means you'll have little to no chance to convert them at all.

Yes, you can use those annoying exit-intent popups.

But still, you can't stop all of them.

Then there comes retargeting ads as your savior.

These ads will target those visitors with your ads. So wherever they go, they'll see your ad.

They're pretty decent in catching those lost visitors. In fact, they can boost response rates up to 400% from your ads.

They work so well because they are targeted to only those people who already know you or have some kind of relationship with you.

That results in more conversions at a cheaper cost.

Here's an ad from Jeff Walker that's constantly following me after visiting the Product Launch Formula website.

Conclusion

I know how it feels when you're spending way too much and getting nothing in return.

With just these little changes to your ads, you can create more profitable ads.

Ads that keep sending you targeted traffic, consistently give you 10X returns, and that multiply your revenue every time someone clicks on your ads.

For this, start small.

Remember…

…. just BABY STEPS.

Start with one ad, optimize it, and test it against different variations. Then create more ads and start scaling up for more profits.

About the Author: Aman Thakur shows aspiring bloggers and marketers simple and effective ways to grow their email list and get more return from them. Download his free eBook – 101 list building ways to grow massive email list quickly.