Which advertising channel is best for my business?
Search is the most powerful advertising channel given everything is based on intent (people actively searching). While it’s complicated to set up, the upside is that you’ll be targeting customers the moment they search for what you offer.
Search Ads are the best channel for most any business — so long as you offer products/services that people are actively seeking (we can verify search volume).
If your products/services lack high-intent search volume BUT would be of interest to customers when discovered... we’d recommend Social Media and Video/Display ads given they offer granular-targeting centered on audiences, interests, topics, and placements.
So long as you have products/services that can resonate with specific audiences, social media advertising is right for you. Social is all about audience targeting and creative and often comes cheaper than Search and other channels.
The challenge is deciding which social platform is right for you and how to reach qualified in-market audiences with the right creative+copy so you achieve the highest ROI and avoid wasting money.
If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is likely your best bet.
If you’re a B2C or E-Commerce marketer, you likely have a strong opportunity across most social platforms. The right channel depends mostly on which platform best enables us to reach your target audience effectively.
After getting to know your business, products/services, and target audiences, we can recommend a prioritized plan for the best social platforms and ad formats that are most likely to deliver ROI in line with your budget.
We also strongly recommend search and shopping (for e-commerce) as primary channels for most advertisers given everything is based on intent (people actively searching).
If you run an online store selling products, e-commerce advertising is a must.
The challenge comes in deciding which platforms and campaign formats best suit your products/categories, ad budget, and ROI targets based on COGS and your target audience.
If you’re selling high-volume B2C products with standard profit margins, you likely have strong opportunities across shopping, search, social, and video/display. It’s all about prioritizing based on expected ROI to iteratively scale.
If you’re selling B2B products, your best bets are search, shopping, and LinkedIn.
If you’ve established strong organic presence on Amazon, then Amazon ads, search, shopping, social, and video/display can all serve to augment your sales and net ROI.
If you’re selling low-volume products with high-ticket values, then we’d need to identify the best place to reach customers at the bottom-of-the-funnel so you’re most likely to get direct ROI from your advertising efforts.
While we’d still recommend running top-of-funnel campaigns that feed into our bottom-funnel campaigns, the key comes in ensuring we show ads to people the moment they’re seriously considering and ready to buy your high-ticket offer.
We’d want to do a combination of low budget top-of-funnel campaigns to feed bottom-funnel campaigns, high-intent keyword search campaigns, shopping campaigns with optimized product feed data, and/or 1 to 2 social channels that enable us to directly target decision makers with the means to buy your products.
So long as you have products/services that can resonate with specific audiences and/or be placed on relevant online content and pages, then video/display ads is right for you.
The challenge comes in identifying the right placements for your image+video ads based on relevant, high-intent video+website content, topics, social channels, and qualified audiences that are best suited to boost your reach and ROI.
If you’re already running bottom-of-funnel campaigns through other channels, then remarketing campaigns are a no-brainer.
If you’re a B2B marketer, then business focused websites, in-market audiences for your specific B2B services, pages with relevant keywords, relevant YouTube content, and LinkedIn would be your best bets.
If you’re a B2C or E-Commerce marketer, we’d want to identify the best website content, placements, keywords, YouTube content, social channels, and qualified audiences to target with the right creative. The right placements and channels depend mostly on where we can best reach your target audience effectively.
After getting to know your business, products/services, and target audiences, we can recommend a prioritized plan for the best placements, content, topics, ad formats, and audiences that are most likely to deliver ROI in line with your budget.
We also strongly recommend search and shopping (for e-commerce) as primary channels for most advertisers given everything is based on intent (people actively searching).
What are the keys to success in advertising?
While many factors play into successful Search Ads... we believe conversion tracking is the most important. Your conversion events serve as north stars that guide your campaigns.
That said, your conversion events need to be revenue-centric. If you only track calls, forms, or page views, you’re not informing the AI-algorithms on what truly matters (return on ad spend). This often leads to wasted spend, spam leads, and a net loss.
For E-Commerce, we recommend going beyond website purchases to integrate lifetime value data so you optimize for higher value customers.
For LeadGen, SaaS, mobile apps, and/or local businesses, we recommend only using online conversions where leads are qualified in some way (ideally by revenue). Separately, we recommend using offline conversions to pass back sales data so you optimize for ROI and real customers (and away from unqualified leads).
Beyond conversions, successful Search Ads require a segmented approach that uniquely addresses each product/service you offer, unique selling points for each customer, and streamlined conversion paths for each segment.
This requires informed execution across campaign breakouts, conversion funnels, keywords, audiences, targeting, landing page UX/UI, A/B testing, ad and landing page copy, image/video assets, bidding strategies, and many other factors.
We can touch more in-depth on this during our free strategy consult.
The primary keys to success in social media advertising are audience targeting and image+video ad creative and copy.
You have to segment campaigns intelligently by audience-type, product/service use-case, and stage of the buying journey. This ensures you hit each audience segment with relevant and compelling ads that speak to exactly who they are, their use case for your product or service, and their stage of the buying journey (discovery, consideration, or ready to buy).
That said, landing pages and conversion tracking are the other critical components.
Landing pages serve as the critical second-half of your ad funnel where users convert and become customers. Conversion events serve as the north stars that guide your campaigns.
Your landing pages need to be segmented so that each page closely matches the audience, use case, value positioning, product, service, and/or stage of the buying journey targeted in each ad segment. From there, you need to have a streamlined conversion funnel for purchasing, sign ups, lead forms, calling, or downloading your mobile app.
To guide your campaigns towards ROI, your conversion events then need to be revenue-centric. If you only track calls, forms, or page views, you’re not informing AI-algorithms on what truly matters (return on ad spend). This often leads to wasted spend, spam leads, and a net loss.
For E-Commerce, we recommend going beyond website purchases to integrate lifetime value data so you optimize for higher value customers.
For LeadGen, SaaS, mobile apps, and/or local businesses, we recommend only using online conversions where leads are qualified in some way (ideally by revenue). Separately, we recommend using offline conversions to pass back sales data so you optimize for ROI and real customers (and away from unqualified leads).
The primary keys to success in e-commerce advertising are a conversion-optimized online store, quality product feeds, stellar ad copy and image+video creative, qualified audience targeting, and accurate conversion tracking.
It’s very difficult to get e-commerce ads right without the combination of all these factors.
Ignoring ads for a minute, your online store is where customers directly purchase your products. Whether that’s a Shopify or Amazon store, the quality of your product+category pages, store UX/UI, page copy, checkout flows, product feeds, and strategies for post-sale reorders, promotions, and cross/upselling all play the biggest factor on whether you drive strong conversion rates with higher average order values and LTV.
Without an optimized store, you waste a large majority of your ad budget.
Beyond this, stellar product feeds play a pivotal role in ensuring your products show up to the right people, at the right time, with the right information, and across other purchasing channels such as directly on Google shopping. Stellar product feeds need to be robust with solid product images, names, IDs, pricing, descriptions, attributes, units+variants, meta data, and other copy, while always remaining up-to-date (price changes, sold out items, etc).
Beyond the copy and images used on your store and in your product feeds, you also need to ensure you have compelling and resonant copy and image+video ad creative that’s segmented to directly match ad segments based on your target audiences, use cases for your products, stage of the buying journey (discovery, consideration, or ready to buy), and for where ads show up (channels and placements).
To close the loop, your purchase conversions need to accurately reflect revenue generated with analytics set up to track every stage of the buying journey from items viewed, to add-to-cart, checkout, and drop-off. We also recommend integrating offline conversions so you can track and attribute repeat orders as a way of optimizing ads towards higher LTV.
The keys to success in video/display advertising are all about your image+video ad creative, ad copy, qualified placements, and qualified audience targeting.
Video/display is often primarily used for retargeting campaigns and/or top-of-funnel campaigns meant to drive awareness and consideration. However, it can also offer bottom-of-funnel prospective value in making new customers aware of your products/services while driving conversion via intelligent placement of relevant ads on the right online content.
Similar to social media advertising, you have to segment campaigns intelligently by audience-type, product/service use-case, and stage of the buying journey. This ensures you hit each audience segment with relevant and compelling ads that speak to exactly who they are, their use case for your product or service, their stage of the buying journey (discovery, consideration, or ready to buy), and that relates to the content they’re viewing.
An added step in video/display advertising comes in constantly optimizing your creative, placements, and audiences based on which combinations are driving the highest ROI.
Like all advertising, landing pages and conversion tracking are also critical.
Landing pages serve as the critical second-half of your ad funnel where users convert and become customers. Conversion events serve as the north stars that guide your campaigns.
To guide your campaigns towards ROI, your conversion events need to be revenue-centric. If you only track calls, forms, or page views, you’re not informing AI-algorithms on what truly matters (return on ad spend). This often leads to wasted spend, spam leads, and a net loss.
For E-Commerce, we recommend going beyond website purchases to integrate lifetime value data so you optimize for higher value customers.
For LeadGen, SaaS, mobile apps, and/or local businesses, we recommend only using online conversions where leads are qualified in some way (ideally by revenue). Separately, we recommend using offline conversions to pass back sales data so you optimize for ROI and real customers (and away from unqualified leads).
Questions frequently asked by new clients:
There’s no “right answer” to this question. However, through discovery calls and market research, we can identify the ideal budgets for you to choose from.
The biggest factor for deciding on ad budget is whether or not you’ve run ads in the past.
If you have, then we can align the correct budget based on historical CPA/ROAS performance in line with your ROI targets.
If you’ve never run ads, we can identify average costs of acquisition by studying your competitors, and work backwards to identify what you’ll need to spend in order to hit your monthly ROI targets.
The key is to build enough data that enables our team and AI-algorithms to optimize. Another factor is the 45 to 90+ day learning period needed to to start hitting ROI targets.
With that in mind, we recommend striking a balance between staying conservative (so you don’t waste money), while ensuring you spend enough to return at least 30+ revenue-centric conversion events per month.
To start, we are not a traditional agency.
Our team is made up of current+former employees from all the major adTech companies. This means we have insider knowledge on what works, and that your account will never be managed by recent college grads or overseas contractors.
We focus exclusively on net monthly advertising ROI with transparent tracking/reporting so we are always on the same page (shockingly, most agencies don’t).
All we care about is results... and so should you.
This varies heavily between different clients, industries, and ad channels.
For example, if you spend a comfortable budget and offer smaller purchase value products/services, we can generally deliver ROI within 45 to 90 days.
However, if you have long lead-times, high-ticket products/services, smaller ad budgets, or underperforming sales teams, it can often take upwards of 90 days.
That said, we create ROI projection models for all new clients based on these factors. As a general rule of thumb, we typically say it takes 90 days with at least 30+ revenue-centric conversions in order for us to start hitting your desired ROI.
We cannot guarantee your results. What we can guarantee is that we will optimize and double down on what does work while cutting out what doesn’t.
Achieving ROI targets requires constant optimization+experiments with real data to test and validate any strategy. Any marketer that guarantees results is selling you false promises.
That said, so long as we have enough budget, data, and time to execute on informed ad strategies with iterative optimization based on real data, we can hit ROI targets for most any client with a confidence interval of 90%.
Hear From Our Clients
Verified Review
Rick F.
5.0
"Rob and Raph are the real deal! 🎉 After years of unprofitable ad spend, they revamped my website and ads delivering a net profit in their first month. Thanks for bringing my business back to life and for all the booking revenue over the years. Praise be to the Mookie bucks! Woohoo!”
Founder
Verified Review
Dayne F.
5.0
"All I have to say is ‘wow’.
At 20M monthly organic, we never knew how to leverage paid. Mookie helped us design a new search booking UX with the most detailed ad strategy for capturing cheap intent-driven traffic via search, topic/audience layering, in-market audiences, and segmentation."
CEO
4.9
(28 reviews)
Want More From Your Advertising?
Whether you are just getting started with ads or need help revamping your current accounts, we have you covered
Explore Our Client Case Studies
TRANSPORTATON BOOKING PLATFORM
$24k
monthly
ad spend
+$2.3M
booking
commissions
199% ad spend ROI
48 months
FORTUNE 100
COMPANY
฿340k
monthly
ad spend
+700%
job app
growth
+50k game plays
12 months
WOMEN’S LIFESTYLE SUBSCRIPTION BOX
$610k
monthly
ad spend
+$29M
client ad
revenue
+268% ad spend ROI
18 months