How to spend advertising budgets correctly: instruction from RACE speaker

Advertising can be efficient even with the minimum budget if one spends money correctly. We would like to offer you a brief instruction on starting a campaign from Artem Prokofev, RACE speaker and Director of Social Media Holding.

1. Test usability and operativity of the website

Check whether the website is displayed in mobile and desktop versions via all popular browsers.

If time and resources permit, it would be reasonably good to prepare 3-4 landing pages for split testing.

2. Determine promotion channels

They depend on special features of your audience:

• geo targeting: do you work across whole Russia and the CIS countries or only in Moscow?
• what do you focus on: B2B or B2C audiences?

Focusing on B2B, you can use Mytarget, VK target, FB target, Yandex.Direct, Google AdWords, SEO and professional websites.

You can address B2C audience via communities in VKontakte and Instagram; it would be better to start with these ones. Look at statistics and choose groups with maximum concentration of target audience. If it has no effect, add channels similar to B2B.

3. Set traffic for minimum budget

Set minimal limitation of 3000 clickthroughs from one source.

If you have several landings, equally distribute traffic between them using TDS, a traffic directing system. Minimum test budget should be 5000 rubles.

A key factor in choosing platform should be CPM, cost-per-mile of 1000 ads. The average cost is 40-50 rubles, but to conduct split tests, you’d better choose platforms with CPM costing 20-25 rubles or lower.

Bargain with administrators while purchasing advertising. It is realistic to obtain up to 40% discount. Reasons can be different: you are a wholesale customer, administrator is in a good mood, you offer some bonuses in return (for instance, you promise to attract clients for some percent).

Advertisements in the community should stay on the first place in the group for at least one hour, then – for 24 hours in the newsfeed.

4. Analyze metrics and improve conversion

If you are not very good in metrics data, look at least at A/B test results in order to understand what page operates better.

Analyze each traffic source separately.

5. Calculate the lead cost

Figure out eCPM, effective cost per mile. Use the following formula:

eCPM = Total earnings / Impressions * 1000

Obtained value determines approximate price limits: do not buy advertising while scaling if its price is higher than obtained one.

6. If tests show good results, than scale up, increase traffic volume.
7. And the last thing to keep attracted users is retargeting.