Data is the lifeblood of every successful marketing campaign. You know that the more data you can feed into your Facebook and Google ad campaigns from website micro-conversion events, the more accurate they will be. When your campaigns are more accurate, it drives down your cost, improves your conversion rates, and boosts your bottom line.
This is especially important when social media ad costs have been rising steadily, reaching over 13% of marketing budgets by 2020, and you’re competing for eye space with companies that have large marketing departments and an average of 3.1 people managing their social media campaigns. The trouble is that when you’re a solopreneur or running a small business, you don’t always have the means to tap into it fully.
Almost one-third of marketers still say that their organization isn’t able to extract meaningful insights about content consumption from their data and analytics, and that number rises far higher for solopreneurs and small business owners who are running their own marketing at the same time as running the company.
Using data to optimize your Facebook and Google Ads campaigns is a complex process that generally requires help from a developer. You need to add code snippets to your site in each place that conversions occur and configure them correctly to drive data to Facebook and Google Analytics. It’s a barrier that effectively makes the whole process off-limits to small business owners, who don’t have a developer at their beck and call.
That’s why it’s good to know about alternative options that make it possible to draw data from your website to your marketing campaign platforms whenever you like, without expanding your staff or going back to school to learn coding.
1. Use Oribi to draw data from custom events
Oribi is a tool that enables you to track any custom events on your website, like someone watching a video in full, adding a product to cart, or subscribing to your email newsletter, without using any code.
You can add buttons or other actions to your site, and Oribi automatically places them in the right event group and sends the data to Facebook and Google, without doing any coding.
If you make any changes to your Oribi button settings, the data will be automatically updated.
Adding Oribi events to your Facebook ad campaigns allows you to build more powerful lookalike audiences, refine your retargeting campaigns, and improve your ad sets by analyzing key events. When you send that data to Google Ads, you’ll be able to enhance your remarketing campaigns and analyze events more deeply by keyword.
2. Set up Google Data Studio to help you visualize insights
Google itself has a useful tool called the Google Data Studio, which enables you to combine all your data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ad Manager, and Google Ads. You’ll need to use a Connector, as it’s called on the platform, to integrate your data.
Supermetrics is a popular choice for integrations with Facebook Ads Manager, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and more. Google Ads and Google Analytics are native connectors, so you won’t need an integrator for them.
Once you’ve gathered all your data on the Google Data Studio platform, you can create a whole range of charts that make it easier for you to analyze and draw insights. These visualizations can help you to see marketing trends, spot your most profitable ads, and draw conclusions about your marketing campaigns, but you’ll still need to apply those conclusions yourself.
3. Use A/B testing tools to discover the best scheduling time
A/B testing is still a tactic that’s loved by many marketers, and it can certainly deliver a whole slew of valuable data that you can use to optimize your Google Ads and Facebook ad campaigns.
While you can run A/B tests through Google Analytics alone, there’s also a range of tools that help make it easier to set up, run, and analyze A/B tests, so it’s worth taking advantage of them.
AdEspresso has a popular tool that helps you see which times of day your ads perform the best so that you can schedule them in advance for the optimal time. You can also use it to see which ads are driving the most clicks, impressions, conversions, etc.
Google Optimize is another option for A/B testing for basically everything, including your landing page content, email subject lines, and more. It plugs straight into Google Analytics, but you will need to either master Google Tag Manager, or find someone to help you manipulate code.
4. Create better UTM tags with a smart UTM manager
One of the biggest challenges of using data to optimize your ad campaigns is trying to establish last-click attribution. Click throughs from Facebook, in particular, can show up on Google Analytics as m.facebook.com/referral, facebook.com/referral, or other variations, making it extremely challenging to work out exactly which visits came from which Facebook ad campaigns.
UTM tagging helps you ensure that every click driven by Facebook is correctly attributed. You can use Facebook’s built-in Facebook UTM builder, but there’s still a high risk that you’ll end up with different versions of Facebook written in the tool. A UTM manager like UTM Smart Manager helps standardize all your Facebook UTM tags so that you end up with reliable, quality marketing data to drive your marketing campaigns forward.
A UTM manager can also help you out with data analysis by providing an easier to use analytics platform than Google Analytics, which often gives an incomplete picture of Facebook marketing data.
UTM Smart Manager offers an intuitive executive dashboard that displays metrics like Facebook ad spends, Google Analytics bounce rate data, click-through-rate for each ad, and more. It gathers information from both Facebook and Google Analytics into one place and automates analysis to display actionable insights, making it faster to draw conclusions that sharpen your Facebook marketing decisions. The only downside is that you’ll still need to translate these insights into action on your own.
Data has the power to transform your ad campaigns
As you can see, there are a number of ways that you can use your data to optimize your Google Ads and Facebook ad campaigns to get the maximum bang for your buck.
If you’re willing to get your hands dirty with some basic coding, you can find many more options, but there are still possibilities if you can’t code yourself and don’t have a developer at hand.
Oribi, Google Data Studio, UTM managers, and A/B testing tools all help you achieve code-free ad optimization, but some of them are definitely easier than others.
Guest author: Zac Johnson is a world-renowned blogger and entrepreneur with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space and has helped his readers generate millions of dollars online. He shares his story and guidance at ZacJohnson.com
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