Read This Before you Launch your Online Advertising Campaign

Our last post covered the most major things to consider when you’re preparing to launch an online advertising campaign. Once you’ve read that, you should have the creatives for your online advertising campaign set up, your target audiences set, and all necessary parties ready to traffic your ads. But wait! There are a few things you’ll want to double, even triple check before you officially launch your online advertising campaign.

1.  Proofread EVERYTHING

Ideally, you want to do this at every stage of planning and developing your digital campaign but it’s always good to give everything one last once-over. Make sure everything is in the appropriate case, placed correctly, and that all your punctuation is correct before you launch your online advertising campaign. Catching an error in a live ad can be both embarrassing and difficult to correct once things are trafficked so save yourself the hassle and proofread first!

2. Ensure your targeting and tracking is correctly set-up

As targeted ads are nearly twice as effective as non-targeted ads, it’s imperative to ensure that your targeting is set up appropriately and effectively before you launch your online advertising campaign. Tracking is another thing that you’ll want to ensure is set up properly for your ads before they go out into the wild. The information and data that your ads can gather can have very valuable insights into your audience, their perception of your brand, and information about your actual creatives and the placements of them that you wouldn’t want to miss out on. By double checking your tracking, you’ll also ensure that your metrics are correct from the beginning and prevent any intel discrepancies.

3. Can you see it now?

No matter the browser or device that your creative is being shown on, it should always display correctly. The best way to ensure a stable creative across all devices is to have your digital creatives built by a professional developer using HTML5. Testing is especially important if your creative includes interactive or dynamic assets as the efficiency of those aspects will determine the success of your campaign.

4. Cinch the Click

There are a few things to keep an eye out for when thinking about your clickthroughs. First, and hopefully most obvious, utilize the appropriate URL. Whatever you’re showing or advertising is exactly where people should (and want to be!) taken once they’ve clicked. Secondly, you’ll want to make sure that where your customers are going once they’ve clicked is branded and appealing enough to get them to stay there or to shop around, sign up, etc. Once people have clicked on your ad, which can be the hard part, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to convert. Oh, and don’t forget to make your landing page optimized for mobile!

5. Check-in often

Once you’ve sent your carefully crafted creatives out into the wild, the fun still doesn’t stop! You want to keep an eye out for any technical blips (it happens to us all at some point) or anything else regarding the campaign that would warrant immediate attention after you launch your online advertising campaign. You’ll also want to set checkpoints for yourself, your team, and any other shareholders or partners that are involved in the digital campaign realm to decipher the intel you’re getting from your ads and decide what is working, what is maybe not, and what can be tweaked in creatives to come. Monitoring your campaign in this manner not only allows for up-to-date reporting, a complete understanding of the performance of your campaign, but it also allows you to spot any fishy metrics that may flag something that will need addressing.

Preparing to launch your online advertising campaign can be daunting, especially after the long process of planning and creating it! Ensuring that you’ve covered all your bases, utilized this handy checklist, and perused our last post Where to Start with your Online Advertising Campaign will make the process much smoother.