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Advertising campaigns cost money, and many companies need help understanding their Return On Investment (ROI) or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Most often, this is from a need for proper tracking and struggling to assign monetary values to your ads’ results (unless you are eCommerce.) Without ROAS, companies are left without insights into deciding whether or not to continue ad campaigns or optimize based on the results. Calculating ROAS is a foundational part of any organization’s business analytics strategy.
To make the best business decisions, you must understand and calculate ROAS. This blog discusses what ROAS is, how to calculate it, and what a good ROAS might look like.
Return On Ad Spend measures the cost-effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. It helps businesses determine whether they are making a positive return on advertising costs or losing money due to not making enough from advertising.
A high ROAS is a positive indicator of performance, whereas a lower ROAS indicates that your campaign has an opportunity to be optimized. It’s also important to consider different marketing campaigns (such as Social Ads vs. Search Ads) and compare returns as different channels will result in different performances.
Revenue / Cost: The simple way to calculate ROAS to support your business analytics strategy is by dividing Revenue by Advertising Cost. The advertising cost includes:
For example, if a specialty foods brand spends $10,000 on a Google ad campaign and generates $30,000 in revenue, the formula is as follows:
$30,000/$10,000 : $3 or 3:1
In this example, a 3:1 return on ad spend means that for every $1 the brand spent, it generated $3 in revenue.
Every brand and industry will have its own “good” ROAS. For some companies, a 3:1 ROAS is excellent, while others would consider that to be underperforming. If your ROAS is low, then you might increase ad spend to get a better return. On the other hand, if your ROAS is high, you may consider how to keep the campaign performing well and look into ways to mimic that effort in lower ROAS campaigns.
Sources indicate that the benchmark ROAS for Google Ads campaigns is 2:1, an average return of $2 for every $1 spent. Further, focusing specifically on Google Search Network, that amount increases to $8 for every $1 spent.
Calculating ROAS will help you:
ROAS allows companies to determine the effectiveness of individual ad campaigns. By examining each campaign, businesses can determine which type of ads are performing well and scale those ads to drive the best results. Tip: Remember that a solid business analytics strategy involves constant monitoring. ROAS may decrease when you scale your budget, so be sure to consistently track your ROAS while scaling.
Spending a lot of money on ads does not always mean you will get high sales. On the other hand, spending wisely on your best ads can drive more sales. ROAS calculation results help you identify the ad sets on which you are overspending. In these cases, you should reduce your budget to protect your business from losses.
Successful marketing strategies are rooted in data, and ROAS is one of your top performance indicator metrics for digital advertising. With multiple channels such as Social, Referral, and Paid Search, ROAS will help you determine which acquisition source will help you achieve your business goals.
Optimizing your marketing campaigns and properly planning your budget becomes easier when you have a solid business analytics strategy in place, and calculating ROAS is essential to supporting that strategy. You can gain a deeper understanding of performance metrics and scaling opportunities by using our ROAS calculator.
Marketing Director Sydney Thomas helps clients create, implement, and optimize campaigns in their Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts. While ensuring that clients are getting the most out of their pay-per-click accounts, she also supports creating websites to improve SEO and supports paid social network advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
When the economy takes a turn for the worse, it seems like everything is tanking. Less money is coming into your business, and everyone is rightfully concerned. Companies go into survival mode and immediately start thinking about how to cut costs and hold on to revenue. Immediately, advertising costs are on the chopping block. It seems logical to turn off your Google Ads during a recession because it’s an easy lever to pull that will immediately cut down costs.
Maybe your revenue won’t take a big hit! Maybe it’s the right move. But more than likely, turning off your digital advertising will only negatively impact your business, despite your instinct to pull the plug.
Let’s face it—most businesses, especially smaller ones, will probably turn off digital advertising during a recession. After all, they’re having the same thoughts and anxieties we mentioned at the beginning of this article. Guess what that leaves?
Even if people aren’t ready to convert on the spot, guess whose name they’ll remember when they are?
We recommend taking advantage of the cheaper ad costs. With fewer advertisers in the mix, the cost-per-click (CPC) will be far lower than usual. It’s a great opportunity to actually reduce your cost-per-acquisition and further your overall brand awareness.
In 2008 and 2009 during the last recession this country experienced, Google Ads still made money. While their profits didn’t grow exponentially, they left the recession in a good place. Why? Because people will always use Google and therefore Google Ads, and people will always need to advertise online. Google also dominated during the pandemic as users flooded the internet during the stay-at-home orders. You can see a similar pattern in Facebook Advertising.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s longest serving chief operating officer, stated in July 2022, “Despite the current challenges, I’m very confident for the long term,” Sandberg said. “We’re facing a cyclical downturn, but over the long run the digital ad market will continue to grow. Advertisers will go where they get the highest return on investment and ability to drive their business.”
Digital ads, whether on Google, Facebook, Bing, or elsewhere, is a consistently growing business and isn’t going anywhere any time soon. As far as anyone can tell, people will always use Google to find the products and services they need.
The average length of a recession is 17.5 months. While it may be a miserable 17 months, it will come to an end. Following a recession, the economy and markets return to normal at minimum, and often turn into a period of huge growth and opportunity. If you keep running your Google Ads during a recession, you’re bound to collect qualified leads to follow up on when the economy improves. You want to be there when that happens— with an already established, well-oiled digital advertising campaign that keeps you at the forefront of your audience’s mind when they’re ready to buy.
It seems so simple to turn off the channels that aren’t directly connected to your revenue. Why keep spending money on the channel that doesn’t immediately convert? But if you turn off your acquisition channels, your conversion channels will suffer later. In most circumstances, your path to conversion isn’t as simple as 1-click to purchase. Your marketing funnel more than likely involves multiple touchpoints, and your acquisition channels shouldn’t be undervalued just because you can’t see the immediate purchase.
Advanced digital marketing experts are always watching what is referred to as assisted conversions. These are ways marketing channels contribute to a sale on other channels. A simple example is when someone clicks on an ad, browses and leaves, then later goes directly to the website and converts. “Direct” (traffic that goes straight to the website’s URL) may get the credit in your analytics platform, but it may not have happened without those ads. Turning off your ads may hurt your other channels because of assisted conversions.
While we don’t recommend immediately pausing your ad campaigns as the quick fix to save money, it is a good time to evaluate your spending and campaign types. Keep your pay-per-click (PPC) running, but be more efficient and mindful about what you’re spending.
You also need to be thinking long-term. In a recession, it may be tempting to start running ads for the first time in hopes that it becomes a quick revenue fix. This rushed approach often leads to dashed hopes and inflated expectations. Many campaigns take months to get into an optimized groove, so most of the time those won’t turn a profit quickly.
If you aren’t sure whether to stop, start, or adjust your Google Ads during a recession, we have good news! To help businesses during this time, we are offering a complimentary digital ads audit to help you make the most of your marketing money right now. Spaces are limited, so grab your spot today.
Marketing Director Sydney Thomas helps clients create, implement, and optimize campaigns in their Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts. While ensuring that clients are getting the most out of their pay-per-click accounts, she also supports creating websites to improve SEO and supports paid social network advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
Big data is hard to collect, organize, and view at scale, but you know you need it to compete in today’s growing digital landscape.The way you’re analyzing data now is likely a time-eating process that hardly ever results in quality business insights. It’s difficult to move beyond massive Excel spreadsheets, but it’s also daunting to invest in sophisticated tools that aggregate data but don’t integrate with one another. Telling a story through data pulled this way that can actually inform your business decisions is nearly impossible.
In order to remain digitally relevant, you must implement a solid business intelligence strategy that simplifies the ability to make business decisions from loads of data. In this blog, we discuss three ways business intelligence (BI) can form your business strategy for immediate success.
A business intelligence strategy is the process of developing and executing a BI system that will help identify opportunities and weaknesses that give your business a roadmap for achieving business level goals.
A BI strategy will help you make informed strategic decisions, save time and money, and gain a competitive edge. Implementing a BI strategy is not an easy task: it requires significant preparation and, potentially, expenses. In the end, though, the rewards (and ROI) will outway the costs. And soon, businesses that don’t BI will experience higher costs long term than those that do. Once the automations and aggregators are set up behind the scenes, you can cut the time it takes to manually pull, align, and analyze data manually by up to 90%.
A solidified BI strategy uncovers where your business is maximizing ROI while also identifying the business actions not giving you a return on your investment. It’s difficult to analyze ROI across business campaigns, most often due to unstructured data coming from multiple data sources that do not talk to each other. The information in these disparate systems may be easy to report on in a siloed view; however, a siloed view limits the ability to compare the real impact (or lack thereof) of a specific campaign. By implementing a BI strategy, CEOs and business owners can review data combined from multiple sources and see insights at the business level to fully understand what’s performing and what’s not.
BI can simplify the data collection process, which can reduce your long term costs for gathering data on an ongoing basis. Budgeting and forecasting can also be accomplished through a solid BI strategy. CEOs and business owners can estimate how much they need to spend on certain campaigns in order to achieve their business revenue goals with campaign-specific performance data. Additionally, they can quickly identify where campaigns are blowing through budget without producing results and take immediate action to either stop or reroute budget elsewhere.
Outgoing campaigns are not the only area where you can use BI to optimize your costs. At &Marketing, we use it internally to understand how we are spending our time for each of our clients and identify where we can improve our own execution processes to optimize time and reduce costs.
By implementing a business intelligence strategy, you can get visibility into your entire competitive landscape across multiple business lines and channels. Competitor intelligence is often difficult to work into existing analytics, as competitor data does not always match up apples to apples with your own data. If you’re struggling with limited competitor information, BI tools are available that can analyze competitor campaigns by identifying where they are doing better and what areas you can improve and overtake them.
Creating and executing a business intelligence strategy is not an easy task. It requires extensive planning and is not as easy as simply choosing a platform. Here’s what to know:
The most important part of creating a business intelligence strategy is to define KPIs for your business. Without KPIs, you will develop a strategy that does not effectively answer the questions you need to answer.
After defining your KPIs, understand the people, processes and technologies you need in order to achieve success. This step is important in getting everyone on the same page before getting too far down the road.
This is the most time-consuming step of creating a business intelligence strategy. You must gather all of the data and determine common connectors so it all communicates. Once you have aligned data sources, be sure to visualize the data in a way that CEOs and business leaders are able to easily understand.
This is the most exciting part of creating a business intelligence strategy and a critical step in taking data all the way from insights to action. Our team recommends reviewing data for multiple time frames in order to best understand your business. For example, compare months, quarters, and years to uncover trends. September might show higher numbers than October, but you might be up for the quarter or the previous year’s September.
Using the business insights from above, create a roadmap for success that details your campaigns. Use the roadmap to guide your tactics and serve as a baseline. After starting the campaigns, be sure to monitor results as soon as you have them.
Business intelligence strategies are always evolving, just as new digital tools arrive to market every day and online trends ebb and flow. Be sure to constantly review the market for ways to innovate.
Implementing a BI strategy requires upfront work and expense that your business will need to prepare for ahead of time. Yet, a solidified BI strategy uncovers where your business is maximizing ROI while also identifying the business actions not giving you a return on your investment.
Having trouble with building your BI strategy? Download Our BI eBook to help you pave a roadmap for your own business.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
Marketing budgets vary drastically by industry and there’s no one single formula to perfect budgeting. Even within the same industry, each business has its own nuisances—like company structure, goals, and customer journey (also known as the sales and marketing funnel). This doesn’t even include the one-off events and ideas that come up halfway through the year or the fourth quarter blitz many businesses perform surrounding the holidays.
Allocating your budget in the wrong places will lead to spending too much in certain areas and potentially running out of funds. Setting your budget too low will lead to poor results and a likely poor return on investment (ROI). The bottom line is, there’s no perfect system or cookie cutter template for a marketing budget that can apply to everyone.
In order to set the right budget and use it effectively, you need to:
Keep reading to dig a little deeper into the three steps above.
(Curious how much you should be budgeting? Check out our marketing budget calculator.)
A marketing budget is an estimate of costs related to marketing your products or services. A typical marketing budget takes into account all overhead marketing costs (ex: software, salaries for marketing employees, cost of office space). However, much of the budget is concerned with actual marketing communications and campaign efforts like public relations, website development and hosting, advertising, etc.
A marketing budget plan will help you put your marketing funds in the right place. When you know how much you can spend, you know how much you can put into each marketing strategy and channel. It allows you to determine which approaches work with your budget or if an outsourced digital marketing company’s packages fit within your budget. But before you create your marketing budget, there are a few foundational steps to take:
When you set your business’s goals, make sure they’re SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). You don’t want to set a goal like “increase sales.” It won’t give you a precise target to work towards and achieve. Instead, set a goal like “Increase sales by 20% by the end of the year.” This goal is easily measurable and gives your team something precise to achieve.
SMART goals will give you a concrete reference point when budgeting for marketing because all activities can be measured by milestones that work toward a specific revenue goal.
Perform a competitor analysis to see how your top competition performs online. While you’re at it, perform some market research and aggregate all the places your ideal customer hangs out online and plan how much it might cost to get your message and offer in front of them. You can even use some top-notch tools to get this information quickly and easily.
If you want to know how to prepare a marketing budget, start by establishing your external costs. You need to know the price tag attached to everything your company needs to succeed so you know how much you can allocate for marketing. Not only does it determine what services you can invest in, but it also helps you set a baseline for your ROI. Examples include:
Develop an idea of which strategies you want to use for your business when creating a marketing budget. When you know which strategies you want to invest in, you can determine how they will fit into your marketing budget plan. For example, do you want a robust content marketing plan that includes blogs and ebooks? What about email automation? Social media? Influencers? Be mindful not to try and do too many things at once, and always have a way to measure the strategy against the goals you set above.
Budgets are not unchangeable plans—they’re allotments you can tweak when you need to. Business changes throughout the year based on trends, seasonality, the economy, and other unpredictable factors. Budgets, like strategies, must be adjusted at any time.
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends small businesses (businesses with revenue less than 5 million) allocate between 7% and 8% of total revenue to marketing — assuming your business has margins in the range of 10-12 percent. The number goes up from there for smaller businesses.
The amount of revenue businesses typically allocate to marketing has increased steadily over the past 10 years, with average marketing percentage of revenue landing around 13% in 2021, compared to just 8% back in 2011.
Try out our marketing budget calculator and see how much you should be preparing for your marketing budget!
Want to talk to someone on our team about how to put that marketing budget to use? Just fill out the form below and we’ll reach out to connect.
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
We’re all full of uncertainty as we map out the next year, but you don’t have to worry about drowning in doubt. With a solid plan and strategy in place, you can do more than just tread water. You can swim past the competition.
With today’s rapidly changing business landscape, 2023 planning can feel paralyzing at worst and daunting at best. From rising inflation and operating costs, to employee retention and supply chain gaps—chances are you’re sitting down to plan for 2023 and finding yourself at a loss.
The good news is, planning for growth in 2023 doesn’t have to be overwhelming, stress provoking or confusing. With advice from the leading experts in business and marketing, you can equip yourself with the knowledge, tools and action steps to prepare yourself for an uncertain 2023 and position your business not just to tread water, but to swim faster and stronger than your bigger competitors.
What’s their secret? We’ll let them tell you. Our network of business and marketing leaders shared their top challenges and best tips on navigating uncertainty. Our experts will discuss the trends and provide a roadmap to grow in 2023.
Our Founder & CEO, Rajat Kapur and trusted industry CMOs Alan Gonsenhauser, Danielle Cantin and Jennifer Garcia who each bring 20+ years of business and marketing leadership, teach you:
As the Founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Raj strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
Danielle Cantin is an award-winning creative, mentor, and strategic branding and marketing expert. She helps companies reconnect with the Soul of their Brand so they can uncover missing pieces and achieve the deeper brand alignment needed for ultimate profits and success. Honored with the Vanguard Award for Innovation in Communication and a Cannes honorable mention for her work with Mazda, Danielle is a lifelong seeker, bringing the highest tools and teachings to her clients so they can break through to the next level.
Jennifer Garcia, CEO of Red Bamboo Marketing, brings a wealth of industry experience and an entrepreneurial spirit to lead an agency that blends marketing strategy, technology and creativity to drive genuine growth for clients. In her most recent role as Director of Marketing for Visual Lease (SaaS financial services), she drove 150% ARR growth during her tenure. She recently partnered with &Marketing to offer Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership to growing businesses.
In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.
&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.
Whether your brand markets to products, services, & everything in between, knowing how to bridge the gap between you and your customer base is essential.
The easiest way to build that customer base is to use effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to help your clients find you.
If you want to grow your business, start with these simple tips around SEO for beginners.
The first and easiest step to effective SEO is identifying your target audience. In short, your unique target audience is the group of people you want to reach – your ideal web traffic.
When you start working on SEO for beginners, you may think, “Don’t I want as many people to see my website as possible?” In a way, that’s true! However, it’s essential to consider what you want the audience to take away from you once they get to know you.
Identifying your audience will help you answer what you want them to do with your content. For example, if your website is selling custom-made motorcycles, you already know several things about your audience:
Given this information, your branding and voice should match what your audience is looking for. While being genuine and honest is a tried and true business trait, connecting with your audience at their level is also important. This could mean:
Understanding your audience is a crucial step in SEO for beginners towards turning web traffic into clients.
Simply put, keywords are the short phrases or important terms that help your client base connect with your content.
While almost every SEO guide will suggest using keywords in your content, it may be difficult to know which keywords to use. A good rule of thumb is to imagine what your user is searching for on Google to find you.
For example, if you are marketing to customers looking to compare new roofing options, you might use phrases like:
Search engines are more likely to connect you with your customer base when your content matches their search criteria. As you advance your skills from SEO for beginners toward more advanced practices, you may consider using a keyword research tool like Semrush to analyze your web traffic and search engine trends.
When Googling “hotels near me,” you will likely see ads for sites like Expedia and Priceline at the top. While paid advertising is a tempting option to get your brand noticed, it won’t build your customer base sustainably.
In fact, 81% of all Google searches click on an organic search result vs. a paid advertisement.
Alternatively, you can naturally place your content in the hands of users by incorporating solid SEO practices for beginners. By tagging keywords and adding multimedia elements to your content, you’re targeting a client base already searching for you.
Add pizzazz to your content with multimedia and photos. Using a visual aid not only draws in your audience but helps improve SEO functionality as well.
However, it is essential to note that, while visuals are important to improving your content’s SEO factor, it is imperative that you use only common domain media to avoid copyright snags. Several websites offer free range photography, including:
More importantly, adding a multimedia element communicates your main message to your audience. Help your brand shine through by using a photo or two to highlight the tone of your content.
Hit a home run with your audience by giving them a way to respond to your content. Whether that means subscribing to an email newsletter, donating to a worthy cause, or enrolling in a service product, consumers want to engage with you.
Keep your writing “user friendly” and to the point to draw in your audience. Use short blocks of text. Vary your sentence structure. Shoot for listicles, bullet points, and numbered steps.
You don’t need to be an SEO pro to be effective at building your client base. Use these simple SEO for beginners steps to get started today. And if you decide you want to become an SEO pro, check out our eBook guide to simply successful SEO use.
Marketing Manager Dexter Burgess takes the lead on implementing new tactics and promoting change through data-driven strategies. Dex works hard at client relations through consistent communication and positive feedback, never settling until the customer is understood and happy.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
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