Why aren’t my digital ads performing?

You may have restricted your ads to only going to people in your market area.  You may have targeted websites about certain subjects.  You didn’t pay a flat rate per month, you only paid when your ads were delivered, and you got a great price.  Your ads were crafted after hours of intense effort.  And yet, the campaign bombed.  What happened?

The short answer may be, robots don’t care about what you are selling.

There are four main challenges with getting good results from your digital advertising.  One is the websites themselves.  Many websites don’t have the good content that makes you look good by being advertised on the site.  Many websites are pushing up their visitor count by buying cheap traffic, and cheap typically means low quality.  For a website owner trying to sell exposures on his site, those 29,000 “Visitors” a day from popup ads and additional tab openings, etc. are just as valuable a commodity as the 1,000 visitors a day he gets from Facebook.  It’s entirely possible that 29 times out of 30, your lovingly crafted ad was never seen.  And those visitors from Facebook and other legitimate websites?  If they clicked on the “You won’t believe what happened next!” ads, they probably aren’t that interested in what you are selling.  But at least they were real humans, right?  That bad news is, that might be the good news.

The really bad news?  The humans might not be humans either.  When a computer gets infected by malware that opens a virtual browser and goes to the website, it looks real.  But no one is seeing your wonderful ad but a malware bot.  Luckily the infected computers are in the minority, but they don’t go to work in the morning or sleep at night so they may make up the majority of the “high quality” website traffic that your ad goes to.

The third problem?  Most people, even when they are humans and are really looking at your ad, aren’t prospects for your service.  They just aren’t.  They might lack the money or not be a good prospect for any number of reasons.
The fourth problem?  If that beautiful ad that doesn’t communicate who you are, have a benefit statement, and call to action it probably isn’t getting the job done.  You may only have a fraction of a second to get to their attention.  Use it wisely.
You may be depressed at this point, but you CAN get good results!    

1.  Start with good ads.  There are design steps to triple your results or better.
2.  Exclude websites with poor results, there are over 80 million websites in the USA but there are only about a million sites worth spending your advertising dollars on.   That's about half of the sites that will cheerfully accept your marketing dollars.
3.  Target the specific people that are prospects.  Not just someone on a website about cameras, but someone that can afford to buy a camera.  An ad on a website for business content is one thing, an ad delivered to someone at a specific type, size and location of business is better.
4.  Balance the delivery of your ads among the people or businesses you are targeting.  Don’t let a small number of people or malware bots suck up your display budget.

 
Digital ads work.  You just need the right ads to be seen by the right people.  Robots are awesome, but they don't buy stuff.