When campaign performance starts slipping, most marketers’ first instinct is to reach for the budget dial. The thinking seems rational: spend more dollars, get more exposure, and therefore better performance. Increasing dollars to struggling campaigns typically makes existing problems worse rather than better, however.
Smart budget maximisation involves more than just scaling up. You need to establish whether campaigns that already exist have the building blocks to justify increased spend before scaling up ad spend. Below are three scenarios where budget increases will be a waste of funds and hurt your return on investment.
1. Low Ad Quality
Throwing more budget at unengaging ads is like shouting in a crowded room—louder is not always better. If your creative assets lack good messaging, good value props, or compelling images, more budget simply gets bad content seen by more people.
Low-performing ads typically have warning signs in their metrics. Below-average click-through rates for the industry, high numbers of bounces, and low engagement are an indication that your message is failing to resonate with audiences. Spending more budget on these campaigns is essentially paying more to see the same sub-par performance.
Instead of scaling spend, optimise creative assets first. Experiment with different headlines, images, and call-to-actions. Check out your best-performing ads and determine what is working with your audience, then apply it to low-performing ones. Only after your creative assets are optimised do you then look to scale spend.
2. Poor Targeting
Budget increases don’t matter if the wrong groups of people are reaching your campaigns. Your best creative message will never work if it’s being seen by people who don’t care about your product or service. Broad targeting may seem like a means to discovery, but usually results in wasted impressions and poor conversion rates.
Audience mismatch is revealed by demographic data and user actions. If your analytics are revealing a lot of interest from age ranges or geographical areas that you didn’t expect, your targeting criteria might need to be rewritten. If your campaigns are accumulating clicks but minimal conversions, then you might be appealing to browsers, not buyers.
Before you scale up your budget, review your audience targeting parameters. Review your customer personas and ensure that your campaigns are targeting individuals who best align with your ideal buyer profile. Utilise platform-specific targeting features to hone, test different audience groups, and measure which groups give you the best conversion rates. Proper targeting will usually be of greater value compared to broader reach, especially when you have limited budgets. And if all this sounds a little stressful, choose King Kong or another marketing leader to ease the burden on your team.
3. Inadequate Landing Pages
Your landing page is the final step in your conversion flow for your ads. If traffic is being driven to a page that is not aligned with your ad promise, the page is slow to load, or creates friction in the user flow, then more ad spend only gets more traffic to a leaky funnel.
Landing page problems will typically manifest themselves in your conversion metrics. Low conversions and heavy traffic are usually an indication of mismatch of your landing experience and ads. Slow page loading, bad navigation, or the absence of clear calls-to-action can all counter even well-executed campaigns.
Optimise landing pages before scaling ad spend. Ensure page content is consistent with your ad messaging, simplify the conversion process, and test layouts for improved user experience. A properly optimised landing page can greatly improve campaign performance with no extra dollars spent.
Make Every Dollar Count
Smart advertising requires more thinking about strategy than about how to allocate a budget. Rather than automatically spending more when campaigns underperform, first address the root problems. Repair creative quality, audience targeting, and landing page optimisation before scaling your investment.
Remember that successful campaigns accrue momentum from optimisation rather than just spending more. Optimise your underlying drivers, monitor the impact of your optimisations, and scale budget only after your campaigns are demonstrating healthy performance metrics. This is how you can ensure your ad spend is driving maximum return while building sustainable growth for your business.
