Ten Factors That Limits Online Ads Campaign

© 2020 March Oyinki

The impact of digitalization and innovation cuts across all business segments and the advertising industry is no exception. Many businesses and individuals now include digital marketing channels as part of their corporate communication strategy. This transformation, as innovative as it may appear, may result in abysmal performance regardless of the budget, when poorly implemented; and there are many reasons that accounts for such failure.

The failure of an ad campaign transcends a mare lack of effort or poor funding, several other factors also cause online ads campaigns to produce disappointing results. Some of these factors are below and they are by no means exhaustive.

1.       Absence of a Website

2.       Absence of a Payment feature on a Site
3.       Wrong Target Audience
4.       Poor campaign Budget
5.       Choosing Generic over Paid Campaign
6.       Poor Content and Irregular Update
7.       Absence of Call-to-Action on a Site
8.       Over-pricing of Products and Services
9.       Absence of Promo or Gift Coupon
10.   Wrong Digital Marketing Mix

1.       Absence of a Website

A website, apart from being the landing page of the company or brand, also serves as the storefront, especially when it is an ecommerce site. It is a platform for sharing information about the brand. Most lead generation efforts help to attract visitors to a website where detailed information about products and services are available and surfers have the option to make payment for purchases. A website also help promote brand visibility during a search on Google and other search engines. An ad campaign that does not lead to a web-landing page produces far lower conversion, when compared to those directed to a website.

2.       Absence of a Payment feature on a Site

Studies have shown that most purchases online are impulsive reaction to either targeted adverts or a product search conducted by the individual. Sites without a payment feature stands far less chances of converting leads to sales than those with ecommerce functionality. Lead generation efforts, through either online ads campaign or affiliate networking programmes to an ecommerce website produces substantially better result than sites without a payment feature.

3.       Wrong Target Audience

Effective targeting is a major success factor when adverting online. Most digital marketing platforms provide features that allow users to set options that target specific audience based on age, location, gender, classification etc. The inability to choose appropriately, the right criteria that ensures precise targeting of the audience that produces higher conversion, is responsible for the failure of many ads campaign. Hence understanding the use of the target audience tool is crucial because, the failure or success of your online ads campaign depends largely on it.  

4.       Poor Campaign Budget

Budget plays a significant role in determining the effectiveness or success of an ad campaign, because it is all about numbers. The success of an ad campaign depends tremendously, on the number of views, engagement and conversion that occurs. The higher the number of the target audience, the more views, engagement and ROI that records. Low budget campaigns take a longer period to produce result and a high budget campaign have a better chance of recording instant success.

5.       Choosing Generic over Paid Campaign

Some generic ads campaigns produce appreciable results, especially, if the company or individual has large number of followers such as an influencer who has millions of followers. Para venture you are not in this category, then generic campaign is certainly, not an option for you, because most often, it produces disappointing results. Generic campaigns require a lot of energy and time, and usually, the result is not quite encouraging.  

6.       Poor Content and Irregular Update

Good content drives traffic and increases engagement. Creating and posting good content keeps the visitor on the site for longer period of time, which enables the site to record a higher retention rate and increases the possibility of conversion. Posting interesting content helps attract more views due to higher click-through rate of the campaign. Poorly produced content do not only discourages click-through, visitors quickly close the page and move on to other more interesting sites. Irregular page update have similar result when you have stale content, which apparently, shows a lack of commitment by the content owner.

7.       Absence of Call-to-Action on a Site

Call-to-Action is a short statement prompting visitors to a website to take action by clicking a button or a link, which leads them to a page where they will find detail information about the products or services with the option to make a purchase. The presence of such a feature helps to improve the site navigation and the ease of use. A call-to-action statement also help to boost the impulse-buying tendencies of surfers, whereas the absence of it reduces navigability and user-friendliness, which ultimately leads to site abandonment.

8.       Over-pricing of Products and Services

The Internet is the worst marketplace to fix prices arbitrary for your products and services, because buyers often conduct a search before reaching a decision to make a purchase. Such search efforts produces a long list of competitors providing related services or selling similar products with a wide range of price options. Sites with higher price offers stand lesser chance of making any sales.

9.       Absence of Promo or Gift Coupon

The availability of gift coupons and product promos on a website helps to attract visitors and increase the rate of conversion. Many websites use these coupons and promos as bait to attract surfers to sign-up on their mailing list, often for emailing marketing campaigns. The use of discount sales coupons are mainly to promote sales during holiday seasons and special periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Reports show that Amazon recorded in 2019 more than 80 percent of its annual sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone. The absence of promo and fit coupons is detrimental to an ads campaign.

10.   Wrong Digital Marketing Mix

Digital marketing offers a wide variety of channels, which produces better result when combined appropriately, and ensuring that only those channels that serve specific interest audience, which are known to be more effective for promoting certain types of products and services. Having an understanding of the right channel to use when promoting a product or service, is a fundamental criteria for the success or failure of an advertising campaign. A wrong marketing mix could spell disaster.

Conclusion

In as much as all of these factors, both collectively and individually, causes an ad campaign to fail, the elimination of as many of these impediments as possible, will go a long way to increase the chances of success. It is important to ensure that you put together a digital marketing strategy with the necessary guidelines before deciding to venture into online advertising, to avert regrets and waste of valuable resources.