Ad campaign optimization: eight tips for success

North American companies spent over $297.5 billion on ad campaigns in 2021. Researchers expect that number to keep growing over the next few years. By 2024, advertisers could spend nearly $380 billion.

With that much money on the line, advertising and marketing professionals must prove their value to clients and employers. Businesses will only spend more on advertising when they see it grow revenues. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to keep pouring money into new digital ad campaign strategies.

No matter where you are in your advertising career, you could use a little help optimizing your approach to digital advertising.

With the right campaign optimization strategy, you can get better results that prove your value. Then, you can present the results in a digital marketing report that solidifies your reputation.

Whether you work for a global corporation or a boutique marketing agency, the following points will make optimizing marketing campaigns easier than ever.

Why to optimize your advertising campaigns

Digital advertising and marketing have become essential to business success. Once all of the economic data comes in from companies and governments, researchers expect to see that e-commerce accounted for about $5.7 trillion of global sales. While online shopping probably won’t grow as rapidly as it did in 2021, even slower growth makes digital advertising impossible 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, though.

If you don’t have a strong online presence, your brand will probably lose some in-store sales.

8 ad campaign optimization strategies

Optimizing marketing campaigns can lead to more sales, revenues, and overall success. OK… but what steps do you take to optimize your digital advertising?

It isn’t a mystery. There are concrete, tested ways to improve results.

1. Align KPIs with business goals

Optimization isn’t just about chasing clicks. It’s important to make sure your campaign goals (like return on ad spend (ROAS), pipeline generation or brand lift) match your larger business goals. If you’re optimizing for clicks, but you’re not actually getting any quality leads or contributing to the larger business KPIs, those clicks are money down the drain.

Luckily, Funnel can help you centralize your marketing data, making it easier to measure the right KPIs across all your channels and make sure they’re aligned with wider goals.

2. Rely on first-party data

With tracking restrictions on the up and cookie deprecation, it’s more important than ever to use CRM data, website visitor data, and customer lists to improve your targeting and customization options. If you’re using Funnel, you can aggregate all your first party data in one place for better segmentation and targeting.

3. Refine audience targeting

We recommend using a mix of broad targeting (letting algorithms optimize), retargeting (to capture high-intent users) and lookalike audiences (to expand your reach). 

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. Even the best messaging doesn’t always convert people, though.

OK, but how do you raise your brand awareness to make people feel more comfortable buying from you? That’s where retargeting ad campaigns come in.

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 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 as they evolve.

Keep testing and adjusting to keep up with social media users. But you need them to improve your return on ad spend, increase click-through rates, and grow brand awareness.

Tommy offered a word of caution when it comes to iterating and testing:

“A key is to let the algorithm work. Some people keep making constant changes, at the slightest sign of a performance drop. While you do need to keep an eye on it, each change throws the algorithm into a Learning Phase, which is a period of adjustment and lower performance. That said, experiment and change a lot, but try to change as few times as possible”

5. Optimize landing pages

If your campaign goal includes a landing page or a link to your website, it’s vital to make sure the page matches or follows on from 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 on to a winner! Strong CTAs are your friends here, as well as a smooth-flowing website and a beautiful, branded design. 

6. Consolidate your 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.

Today, you need to consolidate your ad campaigns as much as possible. If you can consolidate your ads down to one or two sets, you’ll give algorithms higher data volumes. More data means algorithms can lean faster and direct your ads to people likely to show interest in your products.

Account consolidation matters with Google ads too.

Sure, it's tempting to separate your advertising accounts so you can track the performance of individual creatives. Unfortunately, that approach means you don't get a broad view of how your campaigns perform. And that means you don't have the data needed for campaign optimization.

Consolidate your accounts so you have enough conversion volume to draw data-driven conclusions. You'll spend less time trying to determine which ad campaigns strategies work for you and more time optimizing the strategies that already get good results.

7. Focus on what works

Once you’ve set up your campaigns, don’t forget them! Make sure to monitor and adjust budgets to shift spend towards the high-performing campaigns, channels and audience segments, and cut the ones that are under performing.

But remember: you can't measure success and determine what works until you establish a goal.

This raises an important distinction between vanity metrics and actionable metrics. Vanity metrics might look good in a report, but they don't give you insight into how you can increase conversions. Ask what value each metric offers. If you don't have a good answer, you probably shouldn't spend much — or perhaps any — time collecting data about them.

For example, a high click-through-rate (CTR) might look impressive. If it doesn't convert, though, it isn't a good ad. Focus on the assets that get real results.

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.

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

Optimizing ad campaigns 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 performance, while real-time monitoring ensures budgets are allocated effectively. By focusing on data-driven insights and strategic adjustments, advertisers can drive real business impact, proving the value of every dollar spent.