You Ask, I Answer: Digital Ad Spend During Quarantine?

In today's episode, Christopher asks, what are you doing to adjust your digital ad spend when so many people are working from home and or businesses are uh closed? So really good question, uh, I would imagine it's one that's on everyone's mind. It depends on your business. If you are classified, for example, as a non-essential business and you're closed, obviously immediately turn off all your ad spend. Preserve your budget, right?

Make sure that you log into all the ad platforms that you have you have, you know, social, Google ads, YouTube ads, uh display ads, all that stuff. Preserve your budget. Just turn things off, right? If you're virtual, uh meaning your company can work from home and stay in business, uh stay operational, uh, or you're an essential business, uh, consider adjusting your spend uh and consider the type of advertising you're running. In a period like this where you have a lot of people working remotely, working from home, you're gonna have a lot more eyes on digital content, right?

So if you are doing CPM advertising, cost per thousand views, you're gonna see those those numbers probably go up, but the performance may not, because people are just home and cons consuming more digital content. Uh you may want to think about uh testing out and and monitoring you know uh cost per uh lead, cost per acquisition, uh cost per click, something like that that gets you to the actions that you care about as opposed to just being in front of eyeballs. Being in front of eyeballs right now is easier than it has been from a uh mechanism perspective because there's a lot more ad inventory because there's a lot more people online. But your performance may not. So keep a close eye on those numbers.

If you see your CPMs start to go up and your performance does not commensurally go up for the ad stuff, you may want to change strategies. Keep an eye on two other metrics as well. Actually, I would say three. Um, your lead generation mechanisms, especially for any leads that are from unpaid sources, organic search, uh unpaid social media, things like that. You're gonna want to sort of establish a baseline for the last, say what, 30 days compared to the previous 30 days, and then the last 30 days versus the same 30 days year over year.

And get a sense of the performance on your lead generation mechanisms. That's number one. Number two, look at uh returning users year over year, same period, 30 days prior to 30 days, 30 days year over year. And then the third is look for look at search volumes, particularly any branded searches, branded organic searches, people searching for your company or your products and services by name, same time periods. What you want to do is get a sense of the percentage change for each of those metrics, and uh by the mechanisms of your choice, average, median, sum, doesn't matter, whatever you feel comfortable with, knowing your own data.

Uh, I would personally go with average for this instance. What you want to do is establish what percentage drop you're seeing in all three of those behaviors. And the reason for this is that we want to adjust our ad spend based on perceived demand in the marketplace. If no one's searching for us, if no one's coming back to our website, and if no one's filling out our forms from unpaid sources, then we know that demand for what we're doing is down, and we should uh uh consider throttling back our ad spend or changing our targeting or something to get to the demand that is there, but not wasting money if demand does not exist. Because there are a lot of people, understandably, who have absolutely no interest in our marketing right now, and that's more than fine.

People need to get as the expression goes, get used to the new normal. It's going to take a couple of months for that to happen. So consider those those metrics. Now, why those three? Because we're trying to measure three different levels of interest in us, right?

Branded search means we've got mind share and there's need for us. People are trying to find us. Returning users is important because again, if we are in a an environment where everyone is digital and everyone's spending a lot more time on digital devices, new users are just flat out users to our website. Maybe the curious, maybe the bored even. I mean, you have to be really bored to to browse some of our corporate websites, but it's still within the realm of possibility.

But a returning user is somebody who comes back, right? It's somebody who didn't get bored with us and came back for some reason for any reason whatsoever. So we want to be able to track that. And then, of course, those that those leads generated from unpaid sources. And of course, we want to exclude paid sources because that's not something that we're actually trying to figure out what to pay right now.

So we so those three measures, I would say average together, the the well no the percentage difference year over year and past 30 versus prior 30, um averaged together will give us a sense of how far up or down is demand, and then you do your calculations. If demand is down thirty percent, you may want to ratchet your ad spend down that much as well. That way you're staying in sync with the market. And this is an assessment that if you're spending a whole lot of money on ads, you may want to do you know weekly, uh, maybe even daily if you're spending a lot of money on ads. If you know if you've got uh an ad campaign that's spending you know 10, 20, 30, 50,000 a day, it's probably worth your time to do that, especially once you get in the habit of it or you write yourself uh a routine for doing that to be able to extract that data and look and look backwards at uh those times.

That's the way I would tackle this question so that you understand what's happening in your audience and your market, and you can adjust your spend appropriately, and you don't blow your budget, especially since once this is all over, um and demand picks back up, you're gonna want to scale your ads with demand. Right? You're gonna want to, and you'll need to have budget in hand to do that. If you spend the budget now when people aren't buying, it's gonna be a lot harder to recover. So I would say use this technique.

Let me know how it goes for you. I'm legit curious to see how others are measuring demand right now because it is a very, very unusual time, and it we don't have good mathematical models for uh a black swan event like this. Good question. Let me know how it goes for you. Leave your comments in the comments box below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.