Digital Marketing Campaigns: Advertising Without Guessing

Judge whether a campaign is working in two weeks, not two quarters.

Description

A campaign is a defined amount of money, spent over a defined period, to achieve a defined outcome, that you can afterwards judge. If any of those four is missing, you don't have a campaign — you have ongoing spend. And ongoing spend is almost never evaluated. It becomes a line in the accounts that renews itself, and three years later nobody can say what it produced.

This toolkit is about not letting that happen. It starts with the arithmetic that decides whether you should advertise at all — average job value, enquiry-to-customer rate, and what an enquiry is actually worth to you. Most small businesses have never calculated this, which is why so many campaigns run for years without anyone being able to say whether they should.

Then it covers choosing a platform, setting a budget by working backwards from customers, targeting (including the negative keyword list that typically cuts a fifth to a third of wasted spend), writing ads that qualify rather than just attract, where the click should land, and how to judge the result against a rule you wrote down beforehand.

There's also a frank section on working with an agency — the six questions to ask before signing, and the warning signs. Including why a fee charged as a percentage of spend creates an incentive to spend rather than to spend well.

What's inside

• The four things to fix before spending anything
• When advertising is the right answer, and when it's an expensive mistake
• The arithmetic: what a customer is actually worth to you
• Choosing where to advertise, matched to customer intent
• Setting a budget by working backwards from customers
• Targeting, negative keywords and retargeting
• Writing ads that qualify — with a do/don't comparison
• Landing pages, and why you should never send paid traffic to your homepage
• The first 72 hours, and then leaving it alone
• Judging a campaign, and when to stop or scale
• Working with an agency, or deciding not to
• A worked before-and-after example
• Self-audit, ranked quick wins, 90-day plan, quiz, worksheets, glossary

Who it's for

Owners about to start advertising, owners already spending and unsure whether it's working, and owners considering an agency who want to ask better questions first.

Who it's not for

If your website doesn't convert, advertising amplifies the problem at a cost per visitor. Fix the destination first — start with Websites That Work.