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Today’s technology makes it easy to get a message out into the world. With virtually infinite ad inventory available, an advertiser can cheaply place an ad and start counting impressions almost immediately. But here’s the thing: not all marketing strategies are created equal, and the gap between a campaign that barely moves the needle and one that genuinely drives business can come down to a handful of fixable mistakes.
We’ve been running fully managed programmatic advertising campaigns since 2009, and we see the same problems show up again and again. If your campaign isn’t performing the way you’d hoped, chances are it’s one of these four issues.
Advertising Without a Clear Strategy
Picture this: a potential customer sees an ad for something they’re genuinely interested in, but can’t remember where they saw it or what the offer actually was. That disconnect happens when your ad lacks focus and isn’t tied to a broader, well-defined campaign.
A lot of advertisers rush to get ads out the door without ever answering the most basic question: what are we actually trying to accomplish here?
How to Fix It!
Start by nailing down your goal. Are you trying to drive awareness? Move viewers down the sales funnel? Give bottom-funnel prospects an offer they can’t refuse? Each of those goals comes with different conversion metrics you’ll want to track, whether that’s sales, impressions, site visits, completed surveys, or something else entirely.
From there, you need to know your audience. Research your market and get specific about their wants, needs, and pain points. Different customers are going to be interested in your product for different reasons, and your messaging needs to speak to each of them. Segment your audience by affinity, then build look-alike audiences to capture the people who might have slipped through the cracks.
Once you understand your goals and your audience, you can build a singular, memorable message to anchor the entire campaign. Ads that speak directly to the challenges your audience faces will get remembered, and that recall lift translates directly into more people moving through the funnel.
Failing to Retarget
Programmatic excels at building relationships over time with your ideal audience. The initial introduction is a vital touch point, but the follow-up is what makes the interactions meaningful to you and the consumer. You can’t have one without the other: prospecting goes hand-in-hand with retargeting.
Retargeting is one of the most cost-effective tools in any advertiser’s kit, and it’s one of the most commonly skipped. The Customer Service Institute estimates that the success rate of selling to an existing customer runs between 60% and 70%, while selling to a brand-new prospect sits somewhere between 5% and 20%. Genius Monkey has seen this with our own consumers. Industry data suggests that retargeted ads perform around 10x better than standard display, leading to branded searches increasing around 1046%.
Skipping retargeting doesn’t just leave money on the table. It actively increases your customer turnover and drives your acquisition costs up over time. Anyone who’s already interacted with your brand has already shown some openness to what you’re offering, and you need to take that opportunity.
How to Fix It!
Build dedicated campaigns for past consumers and anyone who’s already entered your funnel. That includes people who have
- Clicked on an ad
- Opened an email
- Visited your website
- Added items to their cart
- Commented on a social post
- Converted to a paying customer at any point
Beyond paid campaigns, there are other ways to stay in front of past customers. A well-timed thank-you email to a paying customer is a great opportunity to express appreciation and cross-promote other offerings. Regular newsletters keep your brand top of mind without requiring a hard sell every time.
One retargeting angle that doesn’t get talked about enough is going after your competitor’s funnel. Platforms like Genius Monkey’s programmatic Meta-DSP (demand-side platform) let you put a well-timed offer in front of a consumer who was on the fence about a purchase with a rival. The returning customer funnel is also dramatically shorter than a new-acquisition funnel, so the cost-per-conversion tends to be significantly lower.
Using the Wrong Keywords
The best programmatic advertising campaign won’t do you much good if customers can’t find you through search. Every campaign should be paired with a paid search component, and finding the right keywords is where a lot of advertisers go wrong.
The most common mistake we see is advertisers spending way too much money on keywords that are too broad to be cost-effective. Big companies with massive marketing budgets can afford to compete in broad keyword auctions, ranking high on general terms like “soda,” “guitars,” or “TVs.” Going up against those budgets will either drain yours fast or leave you buried too deep in the results for customers to ever find you.
How to Fix It!
The secret to a cost-effective paid search campaign is owning your own brand keywords before expanding.
Programmatic campaigns reach consumers wherever they go, and the right keywords will drive brand recognition. That really comes into play when the consumer starts searching later. You want them to remember your name, and you want your brand to show up when the consumer searches for it. We’ve seen that users with a healthy branded budget average 565% better ROI because it’s easier for consumers to find them.
Once you own your brand, you can expand to other keywords as your budget allows. Even then, it’s important to keep your focus narrow. Bidding on something like “golf clubs” is expensive and crowded. Most people searching that broad term are still in the research phase, which makes them far less likely to convert right away.
A smarter approach is targeting something like “Stix steel complete set Arizona.” That query specifies a brand, a product type, specific contents, and a location. You’ll get fewer hits overall, but ranking high on that term costs a fraction of what a broad term costs. And the person searching for something that specific? They already know what they want and they’re ready to buy.
Here’s another thing worth remembering: you don’t always need to chase the number one spot. Anywhere in the top five tends to deliver strong efficiency, and it’s usually a lot cheaper than fighting for the top position. It takes some testing to find your sweet spot, but the payoff is real.
For a deeper look at paid search strategy, check out our full breakdown on the Genius Monkey blog.
Siloing Off Your Mediums
There are plenty of do-it-yourself and self-serve advertising platforms out there that let you advertise where you want. The problem is that most of them don’t do a great job of tying your efforts together across different channels. The result is a collection of campaigns that feel like entirely separate initiatives rather than pieces of a single, cohesive strategy.
This problem has gotten harder to solve with the rise of what the industry calls “walled gardens.” Ad networks often have strict rules about what data can and can’t be used within their platforms, which makes it harder to follow your potential customers wherever they go online. Each channel ends up operating with its own set of rules, its own data, and its own logic.
Over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) advertising is a good example. These channels often get treated as their own silo because of the challenge involved in gathering or applying audience behavioral data from them.
How to Fix It!
The best way to unify your programmatic efforts is to work with a platform that treats all your channels as parts of one larger campaign rather than separate buckets. A unified platform means unified data, and that data can be applied across every channel you’re running.
So when your OTT/CTV campaigns are part of the same strategy as your display, search, and social campaigns, the behavioral data from those other channels can inform your audience and placement decisions in OTT as well. That’s when things start to get genuinely efficient.
This is one of the things we’ve built Genius Monkey’s platform around since day one. Most programmatic platforms will show you data, but data is only useful when it tells a clear story.
Genius Monkey is the only programmatic platform that breaks down the customer journey at the impressions level, letting you see exactly when, where, and how a user made contact with your ads. Even within the constraints of a media walled garden, our device-agnostic approach lets advertisers put their available data to work across every channel.
A Quick Self-Check
Before your next campaign launches, run through these questions:
- Do we have a defined goal, and does every element of the campaign point to it?
- Are we running retargeting campaigns for past customers and funnel entrants?
- Are our paid search keywords specific enough to signal real purchase intent?
- Are all our channels being managed as one unified strategy, or are they operating independently?
If you answered “no” to any of those, you’ve got a place to start.
Ready to Fix It?
Genius Monkey has been helping advertisers solve exactly these kinds of problems since 2009. Our clients regularly report higher conversion rates and lower costs almost right away, not because of magic, but because we’ve seen what works and we know how to apply it.
If you’re ready to move your marketing strategy in the right direction, reach out to the team at Genius Monkey today.
