Whether your offer hasn’t converted from the beginning or stopped converting as you were trying to scale, chances are you fell victim to one of these common pitfalls.
Typically, the effectiveness of native campaigns can be measured by both the number of conversions and the conversion rate. As you analyze the campaign at a higher level, you may encounter less-than-expected conversion rates, a low total number of conversions or a higher-than-objective CPA. In this guide, we explain the 5 step ad management routine to combat these issues and how they arise.
However, the root of the problem may not always be as simple to determine. In this article, we will cover the most common mistakes that lead to decreased performance of native campaigns.
No cohesive story communicated
Typically, the conversion funnel on native campaigns consists of several stages, including ads, bridge pages (such as editorials, quizzes, etc.) and ultimately sales landing page. What should be done if a significant percentage of ad clickers are lost between these funnel layers?
Sometimes, users don’t click on the landing page because there’s no engaging story that elicits an emotional response and motivates them to take the next step. All creative assets in use should be cohesive and help the target audience easily and gradually comprehend the product and all its benefits.
High-performing campaigns always communicate a cohesive story to a user, so they can see why they need the product. Targeting purpose-driven gen-Z users, you can tell the story of how the brand was founded or the product invented. Alternatively, you can speak about success cases or how the product is a much-needed solution to a common problem.
A mismatch between offer and sales funnel
Simply put, a sales funnel ends up mistakenly making false promises to the user. This typically is seen when the promised value of a product — or advertised product — placed on the ads or pre-landers is not seen within the landing page content. This problem often occurs when advertisers use a problem-solving approach on their ad creatives, creating ads where exact customer pain points are shown and new effective solutions are implied.
While you may achieve a lot of clicks and impressions with this strategy, sending the wrong type of audience to your offer won’t bring you sales. As a result, users reach the sales landing page but aren’t persuaded or intend to purchase. To avoid this situation, it is recommended to dedicate creative assets for each funnel without mixing them and display the promoted products on the ads.
A switch of offers, geos or sales tactics
Success comes to those who are willing to adapt and experiment, especially in native campaigns. If your campaign hasn’t been performing well in weeks, it is high time to move on and test something new. However, if you switch offers, targeting or creative angles too quickly, you may not have enough time to fully test their potential. The vast majority of profitable campaigns have negative ROI in the first few days of rotation.
For consistency, we recommend allocating testing budgets and setting distinct monetary thresholds for each part of the campaign. You can set a monetary threshold for each traffic source; for example, if you spent more than 2xCPA and received 0 conversions, disable this particular traffic source. Do take into account that average CPC bids also vary by geos, so, therefore, test budgets for various geo targeting will differ as well.
Infrastructure issues
Another very common mistake that destroys ROI-positive campaigns as they scale is infrastructure issues within the landing page. A slow lead response time or tech issues often prevent users from confirming their purchase intentions and lead to loss of conversions.
When a lead gradually moves from their first purchase intention towards check out, any roadblocks they encounter — e.g. a temporarily unavailable site, an inoperative mobile version — will have a direct impact on whether or not they ultimately convert. Ensure that users can easily interact with the order form or contact a customer support team.
Don’t skimp on your tech infrastructure, especially hosting packages or CDN services, and use good page builders for the web pages. Keep track of the page speed, too. Ideally, you would want to deliver and render the above-the-fold content in under one second; otherwise, you risk disengaging users.
The same goes regarding customer service infrastructure: make sure that a call center and a support team are able to scale their operations quickly before you send more traffic and leads to them. Needless to say, fast lead response is vital to keep and nurture user purchase intentions.
Retargeting not done
In most cases, reaching and engaging with users who either already know about your product or have seen your ads is much more efficient than seeking new users. According to Criteo studies, website visitors who are retargeted are more likely to convert by 43%. Users also notice and respond to retargeted ads more often: from our experience, the CTR of a retargeted ad is up to 10x higher than the CTR of regular ads.
On the MGID platform, you can retarget users who viewed or clicked on your ads; made a prior visit to the landing page; converted in previous campaigns; or performed a specific action, like adding an item to a shopping cart. It is recommended to allocate a dedicated budget for retargeting. For the majority of e-commerce campaigns, it is reasonable to dedicate over half of the total budget to retargeting.
Final thoughts
Marketers who make these five mistakes are more prone to failure in the long term. Keep a watchful eye out for these pitfalls, as well as analyze the data along different stages of your conversion funnel to derive actual insights. So, if ad creatives are not achieving good CTR rates, check targeting settings, performance of different traffic sources and split-test various combinations of headlines and visuals. If the majority of users are lost on their way from the quiz gateway to the selling landing page, chances are there is something wrong with your pre-lander and you should split-test a few different versions.
