5 reasons why online marketing campaigns fails

5 Reasons why online
marketing campaigns fails
But not the only ones 
November 7th, 2014 - Copyright ©Philippe Bussières, M.Sc

Who should read this
 Small or medium company decision makers with little or no
Web Marketing experience.
 Web Marketing consultants seeking an objective and easy
way to explain some basics to clients with little or no
understanding of those basics.
 Anybody who’d like to share ideas for another version of this
presentation with more advanced topics.
5 Reasons why online marketing campaigns fails - Philippe Bussières, M.Sc 2

A marketing campaign can be perfectly built, have great advertising
performances, but little or no return on investment…
Who’s guilty ?

Mostly, you’ll find those
1. Expectations
2. Planning
3. Targeting
4. Business / Industry understanding
5. Tracking

Before we get started
In order to be successful, a campaign must
reach its objectives or provide good
insights about what to do to reach them.

1 – EXPECTATIONS
Are you clear on what you want to get from those campaigns?

What are your
expectations?
 Getting new clients (… Very creative)
 How many ?
 At what costs, each ?
 Increase my website’s trafic (… Interesting)
 Any kind of trafic?
 What’s your target trafic with the campaigns ?
If you don’t talk about that with your campaign manager, he can’t
guess it for you. (He can try, but he can also be wrong)

How to manage them?
 Discuss with your campaign manager
 What’s the long term value of your clients?
 100 $, 500 $, 10 000 $  Your overall strategy will be modified accordingly.
 How many clients are you expecting?
 1, 5, 25, 156  What’s realistic for the amount invested.
 How will you be able to know it’s from the campaigns?
 Ask your clients that are calling, tracking on the website, etc.
 Make sure your campaign manager understands and agrees (not
commits, but agrees) to set those as target KPI, and that the data to
verify it is or will be available.

Clear example
I want the most Facebook Page Likes, Web
clicks and Youtube views out of $1,000
Most social media interactions
out of $500
Most likes
out of $200
Most views
out of $300
Most clicks
out of $500
Most clicks
out of $500
Now you’ll have a clear view of you overall budget’s performances and will be
able to target problematic areas of your campaigns!
Hum… ok?
Makes kind of
sense…
Let’s go!

How does a campaign fail?
Unshared or
unset
expectations
No clear
analysis
scope
Unmet
expectations
No or
limited
learnings
Failure
By having unclear expectations, or multiple expectations for a single budget, you
will always have to reduce the focus of your analysis and weight the impact of
each performance indicator to assess the overall performance.

How does a campaign
succeed?
Agreed
expectations
Clear
analysis
scope
Reached /
Unreached
expectations
Useful
learnings
Success

2 – PLANNING
What kind of planning drives your campaigns, and maybe your
whole company?

Your plan is to ?
 Increase budget after a high ROI week?
 Double the budget when your order log is getting empty?
 Change all the campaigns because you don’t like how the ad
sounds?
 Throw a 20 % off on THAT morning when your boss came and
reminded you that you were getting close to the end of a quarter
and have not met the revenues yet?
 Stick to a strategy?

Before answering,
remember
 People reading and clicking on your ads are real, have feelings, and
intelligence, and preferences for businesses acting a certain way, or
not.
 How do you want to be recognized by your audience?
 Does your online advertising behavior reflect the core values and vision
of your business or products?

Remember also that
 Online campaigns can be optimized when the appropriate data is
available.
 Changing campaigns before having sufficient data volume prevents
further optimization.
 Being unable to optimize campaigns also means being unable to take advantage of the
most important benefit of online marketing.
 It reduces your online marketing efforts to «spray and pray».

So… Work on a real game
plan
 Get all the stuff you need at the early stages of your campaign
preparation.
 Costs and volumes estimates (AdWords Planner, Google Trends, etc.).
 How will you measure your objectives.
 Ads that are aligned with your core values and advantages.
 Additional ad sets to replace the current ones after a specific time if they are not meeting a
specific KPI, not before when you start to have doubts.
 The goal here is to reduce doubt, not to take action based on it.
 A determined checkpoint to review overall strategies, budgets and prices.
 A more aggressive version of the campaign, in case you’d need it.
 Recurrent evaluations and reports on the specified objectives.

Unrespected
or
unexisting
plan
Improvised
changes to
campaigns
Poor data
Unmet
expectations
No or
limited
learnings
Failure
Improvisation will break data reliability and increase chances of misinterpreting
that data.

How does a campaign
succeed?
Respected
plan
Structured
campaign
modifications
Reliable data
Reached /
Unreached
expectations
Useful
learnings
Success

3 – TARGETING
Have you shared the appropriate information with your campaign
manager?

Let’s say a business has
 3 products
 1 at $25, with 10 % profit
If you aim to gain 5 new clients with 100 $ in AdWords, you’d prefer to
give a higher share of your budget to your 250 $ product. This
information is critical to online marketing campaign profitability and
will influence the campaigns structure.

Let’s say a business sells
 Books writen in english
 Will you target…
 books, +books, ‘’books’’ and/or [books]
 New books, +New +Books, ‘’New Books’’, [New Books]
 Will you avoid…
 Used books, free books, ebooks
 Books in German, Books in Spanish

Know the targeting
capabilities
 Keyword based (Mainly AdWords)
The keyword you will choose will fit to 1, up to thousands of different search
terms, depending of the targeting type
 Keyword match
 Broad : New Books  Any search term containing books or a similar word [New boks,
New boots, Neo book, book a new trip]
 Broad Match Modifier (BMM) : +New +Books  Any search term containing New and
Books, no regard to the order [New books of Star wars, Books for new parents, Buy new
books, New books for free]
 Expression match : ‘’New books’’  Any search term containing New books in that
specific order [Buy new books, Search new books, how to find new books for kids 3 to
5]
 Exact match : [New books]  Those exact words, or close variant, depending of the
campaign settings [New books]
 Keyword exclusion
 You can remove keywords to prevent paying for useless search terms
o Example, you are likely to add ‘’free’’ or ‘’used’’ as a negative keyword, so +New +Books would
include all search terms with New and Books, except those containing free or used.

Know the targeting
capabilities
 Profile based (AdWords, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
 Interests
 If you’re in a narrow market, use narrow interests to filter your audience, you
can think of anything and have verification made.
 Age
 Gender
 Job types
 School Degrees
 Seniority
 Following a specific page

Insists on more precise
targets
 Having a wide audience is good for brand awareness, but not to
get new clients at the lowest cost possible, unless your product fits
anybody.
 You can handle both goals with 2 separate budgets if you want.
 A/B test your interests
 Keep track on each audience results over time. Those liking
poutine vs those liking car engineering

Weak
targeting
strategy
High shares
of budget
lost in
useless
audiences
Blurred data
Unmet
expectations
No or
limited
learnings
Failure
Instead of using your $500 into your target audience and have $500 of useful
data, you’ll have a smaller share of data value for your $500 investment.

How does a campaign
succeed?
Strong
targeting
strategy
Low shares of
budget lost
to useless
audiences
Concentrated
data
Reached /
Unreached
expectations
Useful
learnings
Success

4 – BUSINESS
UNDERSTANDING
The campaign manager knows his tools, but you know your
business, and your market!

Share information
What you know
 How business is traditionally
made in your industry
 Competitor information
 Specific terms related to your
products
 Personas
 Products strenghts and
weeknesses
 Sensitive topics in the
industry
What your campaign manager
knows (or can estimate)
 Volume for a specific persona
in a specific area.
 Keyword searches and trends.
 Keyword costs
 Popular topics
 Major competitors
 Keyword relevance

Stay both opened to new stuff
 You know are business has been made in the past X years.
 It doesn’t mean it’s the only way through the Web.
 Your campaign manager have an idea of what might work online
 Doesn’t mean that you’re input won’t help.
 You are your best representant, help your campaign manager to
reflect it.

Unshared
knowledge
Reduced
campaign
relevance
Lost
opportunities
Unmet
expectations
No or limited
learnings
Failure
Here, the reason why there is no or limited learnings coming from that kind of
campaigns is that the data gathered may hide a problematic the campaign
manager won’t be able to detect.

How does a campaign
succeed?
Shared
knowledge
Higher
campaign
relevance
Won
opportunities
Reached /
Unreached
expectations
Useful
learnings
Success

5 - TRACKING
Will you feed your campaign manager with the information he
needs to increase optimization capabilities

A classic in B2B
 A phone number visible on every page of a Website, the only
phone number the company uses.
 Do you have your call logs?
 Can you analyze your log with your visitor over time?
 Are you better to use a specific number for your Website (I think so)
How do you want any campaign manager to increase incoming calls
without knowing anything about how many and when they happen.

Prepare your tracking
methodology
 Primary objectives
 Quote forms completed
 Calls received
 Request a call for completed
 Orders completed
 Secondary objectives (can help when there is not enough data about the
primary objectives)
 Newsletter subscription
 Brochure downloaded
 Contact form completed
 Email link clicked
 Viewed product details
 Created an account, etc.

Score your objectives
Example
 Primary objectives are worth 100 points
 Secondary objectives are worth 10 points
(you expect that 10 newsletter
subscription will bring you, sooner or
later, the same opportunity that a quote
form does)

Weak
tracking
strategy
No or
Limited
measurable
results
No or
limited
performance
assessment
Unmet
expectations
No or
limited
learnings
Failure

How does a campaign
succeed?
Strong
tracking
strategy
Highly
measurable
results
Detailed
performance
assessment
Reached /
Unreached
expectations
Useful
learnings
Success

The hidden one…
Make sure that you keep your records of every campaign performances
to enhance analysis capabilities of your data over time.
Often, the greatest opportunities are NOT coming directly from within
the campaign, but from the global context of the campaigns within the
business.

ALLRIGHT… «I ALREADY
KNEW ALL THAT STUFF»
I’m glad you do. Nothing in that presentation is new, yet those are
often neglected areas when a campaign manager is hired.

QUESTIONS?
I’LL BE GLAD TO ANSWER
@PhilBussieres
ca.linkedin.com/in/philbussieres/
Philippe.bussieres@gmail.com

5 reasons why online marketing campaigns fails

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5 reasons why online marketing campaigns fails