Advertise Like a Ninja Online
Why a ninja?
Ninjas have purpose. They are focused and ready to act in alignment with said purpose.
Ninjas conserve energy. There is no wasted movement. The same goes for money. A ninja would never be happy pouring money down the hungry monster’s throat that is Google, Facebook and every other online advertising platform disguised as a service.
Ninjas strike with precision. They abhor the hack and slash approach and just “seeing what will happen.” They study their opponent and when they strike, it is with ultimate precision.
This article assumes you understand the basics of Pay per Click advertising. I recommend Unbounce’s The Noob Guide to Understanding Pay-Per-Click Marketing if you need to brush up on the basic white belt stuff.
Ninja Kata One: Measure Conversion
Do not spend money advertising online if you can’t measure conversion to a goal that matters for your business.
For every dollar spent, you must be able to point to the conversions achieved (or not achieved.)
Clickthroughs are NOT an example of a conversion, no matter what your Facebook ad rep says. Clicks are simply you pouring money down the hungry craw of an online advertiser.
Facebook, Google, Linkedin and Twitter exist to advertise. That is how they make a living and feed their families. They will do everything in their power to get clicks from your ads because that’s how they put bread on their table and run laughing all the way to the bank.
If you want to be kind and just toss money at them, that’s entirely up to you. Do it enough and you might even get on their Holiday card list. But as a ninja, I don’t like wasting my money.
Here are some examples of bad goals: get traffic to my website, increase the effectiveness of my ads or the dreaded “get clickthroughs”.
Here are some examples of good goals: sell my book, acquire new subscribers to my newsletter or get people to participate in a contest.
So a goal is an action we want people to take that matters to our business and a conversion is someone clicking on our ad and then taking that desired action.
The easiest way to measure a conversion on our websites is to make sure we have Google Analytics running and then to set up a goal in Google Analytics. I have a two part video on YouTube that walks through the steps to do this. Part One explains the concepts and part two shows the steps involved in setting up a goal in Google Analytics.
Once you are able to track conversions, you can start holding your online advertising spends accountable.
For example, I had a client that had spent almost $1,000 on online PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. They wanted to promote an event where tickets cost about $40 each. At the time they took out the ad, they saw a spike in ticket sales, so they assumed that the Facebook ads were working.
They didn’t have the ability to track conversions, but we were able to look at the referrer of ticket buyers and only four tickets came from the ad campaign. That means they spent $250 to sell a $40 ticket. Not a happy ninja.
Before someone throws a ninja star at me, it is indeed possible the ads played a role in awareness for the event, but it’s unlikely to have moved the needle enough to compensate for the $210 lost per ticket. Ninjas like measureable results, not hyperbole.
Above is the Google Analytics report I use to track my campaigns. It can be found under Acquisition | All Campaigns.
In the example above, Facebook was very happy to charge me for 160 clicks for my Creator20 campaign. Only 129 reached my site. Don’t ask. I think a lot of people abort when Facebook takes FOREVER to load up the destination page. So I paid for 160 clicks, got 129 visits and only one conversion. Oy.
Note: this is not actually what happened. I changed my goal configuration in GA and so I lost a bunch of data. If memory serves, I got 8 conversions which was still abysmal. My tweaking didn’t improve the campaign much, so I halted the campaign.
There is nothing wrong with asking for help at this stage. Find a Google Analytics expert or ninja and get them to help you setup and configure the goals that matter to your business. Make this a priority. Everything changes once you have this.
Ninja Kata Two: Target Interests
Strike with precision. Ninjas are constantly thinking about their purpose and what will resonate with their audience/tribe/community.
The days of targeting by demographics are long past. A ninja thinks about the interests of his audience. I like to use the New York Times bestseller list as one great starting point.
I love that you can see the top 10 New York Times Bestseller books by topic.
When I was promoting my Creators 2.0 book, I focused on other authors that had successfully connected with the audience I wanted to reach.
This meant that my Facebook ads targeted people that liked Brené Brown, The Artist’s Way and Steven Pressfield’s, The War of Art to name a few.
My Google ads were built by copy and pasting the promotional blurbs from some of my favourite books into Google’s Keyword Planner and also by playing around on Google Trends. There are plenty of paid keyword tools, but I prefer the free ones I linked to above.
One of the fun things you can do in Facebook is play around with Open Graph search. This is that little search box at the top of the Facebook interface. You can type in things like “Interests liked by people who like XXX” or “Pages liked by people who like YYY and ZZZ”
Steven Pressfield is one of the authors that most resonates with me and many of my clients when it comes to taking the leap and following our vocation.
So I started with an Open Graph search for “Interests liked by people who like Steven Pressfield.” I just typed that into the search bar of Facebook and got the following back.
These are the interests that people who follow/like Steven Pressfield share. This provided some unexpected but potentially useful interests that I can now use to target my ad: Sustainable Living and Coaching. Not shown but also listed were: Marketing, Reading and Neuroscience.
I ran a bunch of Open Graph searches. I also made sure to use the “AND” operator. Such as, “Interests liked by people who like Brené Brown and Steven Pressfield.”
This generated some additional interests for me to consider targeting such as: Sustainable Living and Entrepreneurship. Not shown: Creativity, Blogging and Psychology.
When I went to create my Facebook ad, I typed these interests into the KEYWORD box.
Want to learn more about Facebook Open Graph and ad targeting? Check out the awesome article from MOZ, The Marketer’s Guide to Facebook Graph Search.
Ninja Kata Three: Optimize!
You’ve setup conversion tracking for your business goal and you’ve targeted your ad. You are almost a full-fledged ninja!
But now we need to ensure our ad is working as hard as it can for us. It’s time to optimize our ad so that we aren’t wasting money. This means that we need to assess if our ad is reaching the right people with the right call to action.
If either of these is off, then we will see very low conversions for our ads.
And we also need to hold the landing page where we are sending people accountable. Sometimes we can have the best ad only to throw our money away by sending them to our homepage or another page that isn’t working to convert visitors.
Advanced ninjas will play around with A/B/N testing, but that is for the double blackbelts. For the rest of us, I recommend changing one thing at a time in our ads and then assessing whether things have improved or worsened.
Every ninja needs to understand their conversion funnel when assessing what is working or not.
The top of the funnel is how much traffic you are driving to your landing page. The bottom of the funnel is how many people accomplished your goal.
In the image above, the top of my funnel, when it comes to my advertising, is my “creators20 detail page” not my home page. I drive people straight to my Creators 2.0 landing page.
The above image shows why I don’t drive people to my homepage. Less than 6% of my home page traffic enters my funnel. Compare this with the 78.64% of people I send to my Creators20 detail page that convert and sign up for my newsletter. Clearly this page does a better job at converting!
Three Ways to Optimize Your Campaign
Here’s my breakdown on how to optimize a campaign with notes on why I choose each one.
Tweak the Ad Creative:
I choose this option when my conversion rates are good and I feel like my ad is working. I just want to see if I can improve the number of people I am getting to click on the ad.
Note that I always start by duplicating an ad that is already running. If I have a bunch of ads running, I choose my best one and duplicate that one. I want to see if I can make it even BETTER.
Take your duplicated ad and play with the tagline and copy of your ad. Do the words “FREE BOOK” work better than “Find your purpose!”?
Play with the creative if you are able to include a graphic with your ad. I love using Canva.com to create catchy little ads!
Then give your ad a few hours to run and check in. Be sure to look at the CONVERSION of the ad, not just what the advertiser is telling you. There are many cases where the ad will start getting a better clickthrough rate, but the conversion will suffer. Disable this ad and force the advertiser to go back to promoting the one that was working better for you (not them.)
Optimize Your Landing Page:
I choose this option when I am getting good clickthrough rates on my ads, but the landing page I am sending people to is not doing a good job at converting these visits into the desired action.
For those who have asked, here is a link to my Creator20 detail page that I spoke about earlier.
I should point out that this page didn’t always convert at such a high rate. I have evolved it over time. I added testimonials, the ability to see some of the pages of the book, and finally a short video that explains what people are in for when they join my newsletter.
The rate of conversion for your landing page is also dependent on who you send to it. If I was going to start trying to reach a completely new audience, I would likely create a new version of this landing page that speaks more directly to that audience. Otherwise, I risk ruining a page that is working relaly well for an existing audience.
Adjust the Ad Targeting:
I choose this option when I’m seeing decent clickthroughs on my ads (2% or more) but I’m not seeing the conversion rates I expect from my landing page. To be more to the point, when I start a campaign and my landing page conversion ratio PLUMMETS, that’s generally a sign that I am bringing the wrong people to the page.
So I will rethink my ad targeting. This means choosing different interests or keywords to target. I often find it is helpful to think about getting more specific with my targeting vs. widening my terms.
Note: If I decide I want to keep this new audience, then I would go to #2 Optimize Your Landing Page above and build a new page specific to this audience.
That’s it! Welcome to ninja status and I look forward to any questions or tips you might have to share!
Sean Howard is a podcaster, author, photographer and consultant.
