Every year there are more and more platforms competing for your ad spend. While there are good ways and bad ways to use a marketing budget, there’s more than just tossing some money at a bunch of advertisers and hoping something sticks. Here’s how to optimize your ad spending.

Create a Customer Profile

While it would be helpful to know everything about a customer when they come into your store or website, that’s just not possible. However, because you’re not marketing to every single person in the world, knowing even just a little bit more about your intended customer goes a long way. The best place to start is with a customer profile.

This is a general description of your ideal user or customer. While it can be broad, the more narrow and specific it is, the better you’ll be able to target your ad spending which in turn should increase conversions. A good customer profile contains these things:

1. Demographics of age, gender, income and location.
2. Likes/dislikes, pain points and problems that you can solve.
3. Favorite media channels. TV, social media, news websites, etc. This is an important step because these are often some of the same places you’ll be buying ad space.

Go Where Your Audience Goes

The best-written ad in the world won’t do much if the right people don’t see it. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever with online advertising to reach very specific audiences. Solid research into your users will reveal some key findings for your customer profile that can increase how effective your ads will be.

Buying an ad package may be an easy way to reach a lot of platforms, but if your customers aren’t where you ads are, that’s a lot of wasted money. For example, if you find that the majority of customers love to use Facebook, spend the extra time promoting a post and narrowing the reach to the specific demographics you researched earlier. It may require a little more time on the front end, but it’s far more effective than shotgunning an ad out to a generic audience and hoping for the best.

Pace Wisely

Now that you’ve researched your customer and started to put ads where they are, you might find that your ad spend depletes much more quickly than before. That’s a good thing, because it means more people are finding your ads and engaging. However, if you had an ad that was supposed to run for an entire week in tandem with a special offer on your website, it can throw off your budget if that ad spend is used up in a day instead of the week that it used to take.

That’s where pacing comes in. Pacing is an important way to keep your ads on schedule so they reach the users that are most likely to convert to a sale. The way it works is simple but important: if your budget is $50 dollars for a Facebook post, and you want the post to run for five days, then the ad will only run each day up until the daily budget of $10 dollars is spent.

Analyze This, That and Everything

Even when an ad has run through it’s budget, the process isn’t quite done. Regardless of how the campaign performed, there is a ton of data to be processed and analyzed. The data is full of insights about how an ad performed, and a lot of those insights aren’t predictable. You may learn that there’s a certain time frame that customers were more likely to click or that one platform had a better response than you expected while another was a dud.

These are hugely important pieces of information to every subsequent campaign. By using and analyzing the data effectively, each ad campaign should improve in the performance metrics and the other KPIs you’ve identified.