advertisement budget
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Analyzing and Budget adjustments
Welcome back to promoting your business online, our ongoing series where we provide helpful tips for your online advertisement campaign during the holiday season. We arrived at the last days of October and need to get ready to make our first real adjustments. At this point it is very much the same for online shop owners in the US and Canada. The big ticket items in November are Black Friday and perhaps Cyber Monday, followed by the holiday season in December.
In our article “First Analytics” we talked about the questions we will have to ask ourselves. We also established our base line and can now use these information for future decisions. Today we have to prepare for the first real adjustments and have to make some hard decisions. Our tasks are:
- Finding underperforming platforms and decide what to do
- Adjusting or eliminating underperforming target groups and markets
- Increasing the budget to start the first push
The first task will relate to the questions we asked earlier. To refresh, we asked ourselves how well is a platform performing and used traffic, purchases and abandoned shopping carts as our guiding factors.
The bottom line is the question if a platform has returned our investment. So if we have invested $300 in September for platform A, we like to get at least $300 back. Ideal would be a return between 20% to 30% over the investment. However, it is possible you have not seen any sales from the ads in September due to the low budget or nature of the items sold on the store. We like you to keep that in mind. September is designed to start the season, establish a baseline and have the algorithm working in our favour.
Because we started all our advertisement with the same budget in September we can very easily compare each platform based on performance. Our baseline will also guide us for further adjustments later in November. Two more articles we like you to keep in mind are:
- Calculating Online Advertisement Budget, where we were calculating our budget.
- Distribution Online Advertisement Budget, where we decided where to invest our ad budget.
The two articles we published in August will come in handy again. Just to refresh your memory. In those articles we talk about calculating a budget for different platforms, how to invest in platforms that matter and what the strategy for the season for each platform can be. We started with a low budget in the beginning, to kick off the season, get some baseline information and help the algorithm. We then planed to increase the budget slightly and invest heavily at the end.
With the baseline established in September we have now a better idea which platform is performing well and which is not giving us a good return. We start by removing taget groups or markets that do not perform well. For example, if we are not getting any traffic nor sales from Region A we can assume this region is not performing in our favour. Another indicator is the average time spend on the shop. If visitors from Region B are only on the store for a few seconds might indicate the interest is low. Those regions need to go onto our ignore list to make room for traffic from regions with higher sales numbers, traffic and time spend on the website. We can go even further and look at other factors, but regions is in most cases the easiest to adjust.
Our second step is to slightly increase our budget. We like to refer back to the budget calculation and distribution posts we mentioned earlier. Based on your strategy you may have already increased your budget slightly by mid October or have waited and need to increase the budget by the end of October, after making the target group adjustments of course. The slightly higher budget will be needed to help with a push at the end. The next adjustment will be right before Black Friday and will stay that way until the end of the season. But we will have a few more posts for you ready by then as reminder.
Your tasks for now are analyzing underperforming platforms and consider removing them form your campaign. Use the budget designated for that platform to strengthen the platforms that perform better. If your social media representation is strong you can easily invest more in Google ads, if you feel ads on Social Media are still necessary keep them. The budget you assigned in the beginning of the season should lead you to more sales. In our experience the larger numbers will come in November and December, if you had already sales now you will feel more confident and have more datapoint to work with. If not and you feel an extra pair of eyes might come in handy, give us a call.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Happy Thanks Giving Canada
We like to start today by wishing everyone in Canada all the best for the upcoming Thanks Giving weekend. Hopefully you can enjoy it with friends and family in our trying times. Our neighbours in the US will still have to wait a bit longer before they can enjoy their turkey dinner. Regardless, welcome back to our series promoting your business online, where we share some online marketing tips for the holiday season.
Our update today is a good demonstration for your own content updates for your Blog or Social Media. As we already mentioned in the intro, Thanks Giving in Canada is this upcoming weekend. By publishing a few days in advance we are providing an update and increase our chances to be seen before Canadians get busy with preparations for the event. Obviously our goal is to show small business owners what we can do for them and encourage them to contact us for their online marketing needs. Today would also be a good time for you to have a special deal ready for your customers in the great white north.
A combination of a special deal, content on your Blog, shop and social media plus online ads aiming for this event would be a good combination. If you have the budget available you can consider having an ad running in addition to your regular ads or adjust the images and description on the one you are already running. The second event where you perhaps can test your strategy could be Halloween, where you can as well create a special deal, ads and content updates. Using those holidays in October will allow you to generate a datapoint at the end of October to analyze if your activities had a positive influence.
The datapoint we set in September will come in handy by the end of October. We mentioned in our update last week what questions you might want to ask. If you like to check it out here is a helpful link to our post from last week.
By the end of October you have a new set of data, perhaps with a holiday special or two already done. The next step will be to use the information to adjust the target groups set for your ads and also the budget for them. Depending on the strategy you have set for your business this year, you should feel comfortable with the data you gain to make the adjustment needed.
October allows you to have a good test run with a smaller investment and hopefully good feedback for your adjustments. In November we have Thanks Giving in the US, Black Friday and also Cyber Monday and this is kicking off the main sales season. With the data gained in September, the first specials done in October with a smaller budget should make you feel prepared for the main season.
If you like us take a look at your ad strategy for 2021, feel free to contact us.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Calculating Online Advertisement Budget
Last week in our Blogpost series about promoting your business online in 2021 we talked about Audience and Platforms and how to categorize them based on followers, likes and other factors. In this post we will show you how to use the information from the previous week to calculate a decent Online Advertisement Budget.
Before we get started let us not forget to consider running ads on Google. You may also have relationships with other platforms where you like to run separate ads. To make it simpler we will focus in our example on Google and Social Media.
Based on the ranking of the social media platforms we explained last week, you will have a good idea where your budget will reach your audience best. It is now time to put that knowledge to use. First advise we like you to follow is to calculate with at least $10 per day per platform as your minimum advertisement budget. If you can afford more as your minimum even better.
In our example we will have Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok, which brings us to a total of 5 platforms. We therefore need to calculate with $50 per day. Our ads for the Holiday Season should start in September to help with the algorithm. It will also allow us to make our first adjustments before the season really begins. We will aim to end the campaign on the 20th December, to have last minute sales we can still ship in time. So between the 1st September and the 20th December we have 111 days. Our first calculation is therefore easy 111 days x $50 = $5,550 for our overall budget.
Next we will look at the different platforms and rank them based on the method we described in our last post. The reason we have Google as the top platform on our list is because search engines have given us a better return of investment for the type of ads we are running during the season. We therefore assign to Google a fixed 40% and will assign the rest to the remaining platforms. In our example the list will look like this:
- Google 40%
- Instagram 30%
- Facebook 15%
- Pintrest 10%
- TikTok 5%
Right away we can see TikTok will end up with a very small overall budget and if we divide that by 111 days we realize the platform is way below our $10 per day rule. As long as we can not increase our overall budget we will have to eliminate TikTok from the list and adding the budget to the remaining platforms. Repeat the elimination process until you are able to run an ad for a platform for at least $10 a day. We did that with our example list too and after eliminating the least performing platforms our final list will look like this:
- Google 40% ($2,220.00 / 111 = $19.14 per day)
- Instagram 35% ($1,942.50 / 111 = $16.75 per day)
- Facebook 25% ($1,387.50 / 111 = $11.96 per day)
Please keep in mind this is just a simple example to calculate an overall advertisement budget quickly and is primarily aimed at small business owners with a very limited budget. However, the calculation today should allow you to get an overview and increase your success rate for your ad campaign during the holiday season.
After we have calculated our overall available budget for each platform we are now one step closer and can use the information from today in our next post. Next Wednesday we will concentrate on distributing the budget effectively over the holiday season.
If you like us take a look at your ad strategy for 2021, feel free to contact us.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
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