8 ad campaign optimization strategies to boost performance

The reality is that many advertising and marketing professionals struggle with high ad costs, ineffective targeting and frequent algorithm changes, making it difficult to run successful campaigns consistently. But with that much money on the line, demonstrating that ads are making a positive impact is vital. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to keep pouring money into new digital ad campaign strategies. If you can’t prove the value of ads, you risk losing budget allocation or clients. 

So, how do you maximize your digital ad campaigns to squeeze as much impact as possible out of every dollar spent?

What is ad campaign optimization?

Ad campaign optimization is the ongoing process of tweaking and refining your digital advertising campaigns to achieve the best results. 

What "best" means depends on your business goals. It could be to improve conversions, return on ad spend (ROAS) or brand awareness. 

Simply put, it’s about making your advertising budget work harder for you. By digging into performance data, running tests and making adjustments based on what you learn, you get more value from ad spend, and you build confidence with the budget overlords.

Drive action with ads that compel potential customers to take the next step.

Why you need to do advertising optimization

Digital advertising and marketing are essential to business success. Think about it: e-commerce is thriving, with global sales hitting about $6.9 trillion in 2024. While online shopping won’t always grow at a rapid pace, even at a slower growth rate, online advertising is too important to ignore.

Plus, you can’t fully capture the influence of digital advertising by measuring online sales. A lot of consumers still prefer in-store shopping. Many of those people research and compare products online before they head to retail stores. This is true for B2B buyers, too. They spend 70% of their buying journey online before making contact, and one in four clicks on a digital ad before converting.

If you don’t have a strong online presence, your brand will probably lose sales. That’s why advertising optimization is necessary today. It makes sure you reach the right people with the right message at the right time. 

How to optimize your ad campaigns for maximum ROI 

Optimizing your digital advertising isn’t a mystery. Here are eight powerful ways to improve results.

1. Align KPIs with business goals

Campaign optimization is never about chasing clicks. It’s important to make sure your campaign goals, like ROAS, pipeline generation or brand lift, match your larger business goals.

Clicks alone can be a misleading metric. A high click-through rate might seem great, but it doesn’t mean ads are converting. If you get a ton of clicks but your bounce rate is sky-high, you’re likely attracting low-quality leads or bots that are wasting your budget. 

Another caveat is that platforms will optimize your campaigns based on your settings. If your campaign is set to optimize for clicks, your ads will be served to people who click a lot (not necessarily people who might be interested in your product). If it’s optimized for video views, your ads will be sent to people who watch a lot of videos. If it’s sales, ads will be served to people who buy a lot online. 

You can improve your ad optimization by defining your business goals and aligning your key performance indicators (KPIs) with them. So, if your business goal is to increase brand awareness, track website traffic, social media engagement and brand mentions. If your business goal is to drive sales, monitor conversion rates, average order value and customer lifetime value. 

Both your goals and KPIs should be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. That way, it’s far easier to create and track real progress.

Let’s say your marketing team has a goal to reduce customer acquisition costs in the next two quarters. A SMART example would look like this: decrease the average CPA for our Google Ads campaigns by 5% within the next six months. Make sure you set the goal before anything goes live. If you set your goal after you’ve launched a campaign, you’ll end up adapting to the results instead of optimizing your ads to achieve business goals. 

Fortunately, Funnel helps you centralize your campaign data, so you can easily measure the right KPIs across all your channels, identify areas of improvement and align them with wider goals. 

2. Rely on first-party data

With tracking restrictions on the rise and cookie deprecation, it’s more important than ever to use first-party data, like CRM data, website visitor data and customer lists, to improve your targeting and customization options.

GDPR and CCPA regulations are driving the shift to first-party data by emphasizing user consent and data transparency. Consumers are also becoming more privacy-conscious. This is your cue to use first-party data to your advantage. 

Since it’s directly controlled and collected from your customers, you can create personalized marketing messages, promos and content tailored to their specific behaviors and preferences. 

Take Dustin, for example. As a global IT company with multiple websites and marketing channels, they needed to personalize their marketing to resonate with customers across different regions.

To do so, they consolidated all their customer data streams using Funnel. This allowed them to slice and dice customer information into different product and country segments to create targeted marketing campaigns. 

With over 500 data sources, Funnel helps you centralize all your first-party data, including from your CRMs, website analytics and marketing automation platforms. 

First-party data gives you a direct line to your customers. Use it to personalize your marketing campaigns and build stronger connections.

3. Refine audience targeting

Audience targeting involves segmenting your market based on demographic variables, including things like gender, education, location or age. It’s one of the more straightforward ways to tailor your campaign to specific audiences. 

Obviously, you want every aspect of your digital campaign to communicate an important message that converts browsers into buyers. 

People rarely go from seeing an ad to making a purchase instantly. There are different stages in a customer’s journey, so your campaign objectives should match each stage. For example, awareness campaigns might work better with 'colder' audiences, while retargeting is effective for re-engaging users who have seen your ads and are more likely to buy. 

That’s why we recommend using a mix of broad targeting (letting algorithms optimize), retargeting (to capture high-intent users) and lookalike audiences (to expand your reach). Broad targeting helps you discover potential customers, and retargeting and lookalike audiences help you re-engage with interested users and find similar profiles. 

Don’t target everyone. Target the right people who are most likely to become customers.

Google Ads, for example, can help you retarget audiences by placing cookies in web browsers. When someone visits a landing page on your website, a small piece of code gets added to their browser’s cache. Once the cookie gets put in the web browser, your ads can follow people wherever they go online.

Over time — maybe a few hours, maybe a few weeks — people will become increasingly familiar with your brand, which makes your company more appealing. Each time someone sees a version of your ad, they unknowingly take a step closer to becoming a customer.

The benefits of retargeting don’t end there. They can also:

• Improve your return on ad spend (ROAS) by targeting people who have already shown interest in your products.
• Reuse the most effective ads instead of designing new ones that might not work well.
• Target specific audiences based on factors such as which product landing pages they view and how much time they spend on your site.

Tommy Albrecht, Head of Performance Marketing here at Funnel, told us:

“Display and programmatic advertising in a post-cookie world is hard. People don't like ads, but they despise irrelevant ones. So the key is finding placements where your brand feels the least intrusive. This starts from researching your target audience and understanding where they hang around. If you find good publications and see results from advertising there, maybe that could even spin some partnership/sponsorship ideas.”

4. Test creatives and messaging

Running tests is one of the best ways to see what’s working and what’s not. But social media or holiday sales trends evolve quickly. A topic that dominated Facebook News Feeds and Instagram Stories last week might not even get a response today. That applies to advertising strategies too. 

The most effective ads from a month ago could actually turn people away from your brand right now. Testing gives you insight into trends and social media user habits as they evolve.

Let your test results guide your budget allocation so you can invest in the creatives and messaging that are working. Here’s what to test: 

• Visual elements: Images, video, fonts, design
• Messaging: Headlines, body copy, CTAs
• Landing pages: Layout, copy, forms
• Targeting: Audience segments, demographics, interests
• Ad formats: Types and placements 

However, Tommy cautions against over-adjusting at the slightest sign of a performance drop. He says, “Each change throws the algorithm into a Learning Phase, which is a period of adjustment and lower performance.” Instead, adopt these best practices:

• Let the algorithm work: Allow at least 7 to 14 days for the platform to optimize digital ad campaigns before making major adjustments, especially on platforms like Meta. But if your campaign is bombing after a couple of days, pull the plug or pivot. 
• Set a minimum data threshold: If your test hasn’t gathered at least 1,000 impressions or 100 conversions (depending on your campaign type), your data might be too limited to make decisions.
• Look for statistical significance: Use A/B testing tools to check whether your results are truly different rather than just random fluctuations. Aim to test for one to two weeks to reach statistical significance. But even then, a lot of times you won’t have enough data, so you’ll need to rely on logic and frankly, your gut. 
• Watch cost efficiency: If your CPC or CPA is significantly rising while conversions remain flat, it’s time to adjust.
• Pivot if engagement is low: If an ad has below-average click-through rates (CTR) or high bounce rates, it likely isn’t resonating with your audience — try a different creative or message.

5. Optimize landing pages

So you have people interacting with your ad — that’s great! Pat yourself on the back, but don’t celebrate quite yet. What happens when they land on your webpage?

This is where the magic happens (or doesn’t). Landing pages are often the first point of contact between your potential customers and your brand. If your campaign goal includes a landing page or your website, make sure the page matches your ad messaging. If it loads fast, continues the story and vibe of the advert that linked to it, and has a clear pathway for the customer to convert, you’re onto a winner! 

But the customer journey is messy, so you need to understand what influences customer purchase behavior. As Google’s research points out, we are influenced by six core biases: category heuristics, power of now, social proof, scarcity bias, authority bias and power of free. 

Your landing page needs to leverage these biases to influence customer decisions. Here’s what you can do: 

• Category heuristics: Keep product descriptions clear and concise to simplify decisions. 
• Power of now: Use CTAs that emphasize immediate benefits (for instance, “Get started now” or “Instant download”) or offer fast delivery options.
• Social proof: Share customer reviews and testimonials to build trust.
• Scarcity bias: Highlight limited-time offers or low stock to create urgency.
• Authority bias: Showcase endorsements from experts or trusted sources.
• Power of free: Offer free shipping or a free gift for a minimum amount spent to incentivize buying. 

Google Analytics is a great tool to gather insights into user behavior on your landing pages. Look at bounce rate, time on page and conversion rate, and then make adjustments accordingly. 

Shopify also shows detailed data on sales, orders and customer behavior on your online store. Funnel connects to both, so you can track the entire customer journey, from the initial ad click to the final purchase, from one place. 

6. Consolidate your campaigns and accounts

Not too long ago, digital marketers knew they needed several audience-focused ad sets for social media campaigns. You would use different sets of creatives to reach different consumers. But social media algorithms have changed everything.

Now, it’s recommended that you consolidate your digital ad campaigns where possible. Consolidating ads down to one or two sets gives algorithms higher data volumes. This means algorithms can learn faster and perform better. Instead of spreading your budget across many small campaigns, consolidation allows the algorithm to optimize more effectively. 

Consolidate your accounts to give algorithms more data for faster learning and better ad performance.

But of course, this consolidation needs to be done consciously and strategically. For example, if you sell two completely different products, you might want to split them into separate campaigns so each product gets enough spend. 

If spend isn't a concern, you might use a single campaign and segment audiences with ad sets. Just remember to avoid over-segmentation because algorithms need enough data to perform their best. 

If you’re more focused on maximizing ROAS on the account level, you can use a broad ad set and include both products in the same ad set and just let it optimize. All these decisions should reflect your objectives, audience and business goals. Ultimately, it comes down to prioritizing what's most important for your business. 

Consolidating your accounts also makes a difference because it’s easier to track campaign performance across multiple channels. 

You get a broader view of how your marketing campaigns perform and enough conversion volume to draw data-driven conclusions. You'll spend less time trying to determine which digital ad campaign strategies work and more time optimizing the strategies that already get good results.

Cross-channel insights also allow you to see how your marketing campaigns on different platforms influence each other. For example, you might see a high-performing social media campaign on Instagram leads to a big increase in direct search traffic on Google Ads for specific product keywords. Or, you might not see many clicks on Youtube, but notice a lift in brand searches and website visits. 

This confirms that your social efforts are directly impacting your search performance, so you might want to allocate more budget to both platforms to capitalize on this synergy.

7. Focus on what works

Once your campaigns are live, the real work begins. Make sure to monitor and adjust budgets to shift ad spend toward the high-performing campaigns, channels and audience segments, and cut the ones that are under-performing.

But don’t get caught up on vanity metrics, those that look good in a report but don't give you insight into how you can increase conversions. Aim for actionable metrics that are directly tied to your goals and provide insights that can be used for campaign optimization, such as conversion rates, CPA and ROAS.

8. Use a multichannel approach for your digital marketing campaigns 

Google Ads doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can make it work as part of a broader ad optimization strategy by reusing images and text throughout.

Why would you use the same images and text instead of creating as many ads as possible? Wouldn’t different visuals reach different audiences?

Maybe… but that’s not the goal of your multichannel marketing approach.

Consider the See-Think-Do Care model.

According to this framework, it takes several brand exposures before consumers feel comfortable buying from you. They:

• See a product for the first time.
• Think about whether they want to buy the product.
• Do make the purchase.
• Care about the services they receive after finalizing the purchase.
  
  

People tend to buy from companies they know. It just feels less risky.

The first time someone sees your ad or visits your website, they probably won’t finalize a purchase. Don’t think of this as a failure to convert. Think of it as the first step in converting a new lead.

A multichannel approach to digital advertising can target potential buyers at different points of the sales funnel. Putting ads on social media covers the See phase and introduces people to your brand. 

Google Ads — and similar digital advertising options — usually work better in the Think and Do phases because you’re directly targeting people who have already been exposed to your brand. This is where retargeting campaigns work wonders. They effectively re-engage users who have shown initial interest and guide them further down the sales funnel. 

The Care phase also matters, but that’s something the customer services team needs to think about.

The art of ad campaign optimization

There’s no doubt that data powers digital marketing, but it's how you use it that counts.

Campaign optimization isn’t just about small tweaks — it’s about aligning strategy with business goals, leveraging first-party data, refining audience targeting and continuously testing what works. 

A strong landing page, consolidated ad accounts, and a multichannel approach help maximize campaign performance, while real-time monitoring ensures budgets are allocated effectively. 

Funnel simplifies the campaign optimization process. Data consolidation and simplified performance monitoring make it easy to turn numbers into actionable strategies. So, why not start for free today?