6 Tips for Increasing Your Paid Social ROAS
ROAS (Returns On Ads Spend), is essential for knowing how effective a paid ad is either on social media or on other marketing platforms like Google Adwords, Bing ads, WordPress ads and so on. As the number of social media networking platforms keeps increasing, it becomes very difficult for brands to completely ignore the opportunities for an increase in sales or brand awareness that advertising on these social platforms offers.
However, the concern, over time, is how they can increase the returns on marketing investments on such social platforms. This is particularly due to the fact that there is a limit of control that a brand has on these platforms when comparing it to the control it has with its website. Algorithms that control these social sites change often and these could have some effects on the way ads run on those platforms too.
If you’re spending a lot of money running ads on a social platform, you should be receiving great value for it. In this article, we’d be sharing very helpful tips on how to get more value for the ads you’re paying for. Irrespective of the kind of returns a brand is hoping to get, these tips should help with increasing it. On the other hand, if you need some additional help to increase the ROAS for your business, it would be useful to get in touch with a digital marketing agency to assist you further. For now, let us take a look at these 8 tips for increasing your paid social ROAS.
1. Have a goal
This is the first and most important step before running any social ad. Remember that you have little to no control over how these ads are shown to your target audience. Recent changes in algorithms of these social sites, like Facebook and Instagram, has been more focused on ensuring people get more real content than advertised content. This is their own way of enduring they also stay true to the aim of the social site.
Having a goal can really help you know if what you need is a paid social ad on relevant social sites or just creating and publishing consistently relevant contents for more organic traffic (which is often advised even when running paid ads). If the goal is to get more traffic on the website, then you will be more focused on getting analytics tools that will help track metrics relevant to this goal.
2. Understand who is the brand’s target audience
It is worthless to run a social ad on a platform where your target audience do not gather. That’s like putting a round peg in a square hole, you’re definitely not going to get an impressive result and you’d end up being frustrated. So, have a clear understanding of who the brand is targeting. Don’t do guesswork. Rather, work with real data that can help you dissect your target audience to the tiniest detail about them. This will help you create various buyer personas relevant to the brand, and it would be used when setting up ads on social sites (like indicating the age, gender, interests, location and so on).
3. Decide on the right platform
Like we mentioned earlier, it is pointless to run very brilliant ads on social sites that your target audience aren’t using. Running ads should not be a wild guess or gamble. You must be specific about where you are going to find people who will be interested in your brand. If your brand caters to younger people, social sites like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr would be best.
For a professional audience, LinkedIn you be your best choice and so on. Take time to study the various social sites and the kind of audience they attract so you can decide early which your target audience are on. This way you can get more results for the goals you’ve set and the money you’ll be investing in these ads.
4. Pay close attention to available targeting options
If you’ve ever tried playing a dart board game, you’d be more familiar with what it means to target something. Targeting requires that you are precise about what you want and about how to get what you want. If you are able to get the first three tips mentioned above right, targeting would be a lot easier to do.
Once you’ve mapped out the targeting options available to you on the social site (because such targeting options varies), you can then enter all necessary information to target the buyer personas you’ve developed. Some platforms might give you very detailed targeting options (even to the tiniest detail about your target audience), while others might not. So learn to work well with what you have.
5. Target specific locations
This is one smart way to increase your paid social ROAS. With the increase in the use of voice search, many more internet users are interested in services or products close to home or where they work. Even those migrating to a new country or city often search heavily for services or products they find in the location they’re moving into.
So, for smart advertisers, you can cash in on this by running location-specific ads. If you’re running a local business in a city, run ads that will target people in that city. If you’re running a local business within a state, run ads that will target people in the various cities within that state. The more specific the location is, the more results you’d get.
6. Schedule ads to run based on the active periods of followers
Before jumping to run paid ads, it’s advisable to first grow a very organic fanbase who are interested in what you share and engage with your content. With this, you can have a very basic idea about the peak and low periods of those who have an interest in your content.
You can also look at the behavioral pattern of your website visitors too, to get additional information on the days of the week and time they frequent the website. These two pieces of information can be of tremendous help when deciding the day and time you want to the ad to run on the selected social site.