5 tips to get the most out of a digital ad campaign once it’s live

Ensure it aligns with your goals

Whether it's sales, building community, or signing up for demos, you’ll have a goal for your campaign. LinkedIn splits objectives into awareness, consideration, and conversion, which is a useful way to think about it. Are you looking to expand your reach, nurture a middle-funnel audience, or try and generate leads?

As your campaign goes live and you start to see the results roll in, check whether it’s staying true to your definition of success. The effectiveness of your campaign will depend on how close it gets you to achieving those goals, and you may find certain elements need to be changed or tweaked.

Compare it to previous benchmarks

Any campaign will collect a lot of data spanning clicks, engagement rates, impressions, leads, and even insights on demographics and geographics.

If you’ve run previous campaigns, utilize all of this as a benchmark and a source of research to assess the performance of your current campaign.

This will typically mean looking at metrics across the platforms you're using, seeing where you found success (and gaps) from before, and comparing it to what you have now.

Go beyond the numbers

While we’ve just spent a couple of paragraphs encouraging you to look at what the numbers are saying, it’s also important to think beyond them. For example, if your campaign’s goal was lead generation, how many of those have been high-quality, and how have initial conversations with those potential clients been?

Similarly, if a campaign has been running on social media, has it received any comments, shares, or prompted any messages, and what do they say?

A digital ad campaign also typically means more eyes on your website. Ask yourself, does your site provide a seamless experience or need an upgrade? Is there content someone can explore that’s engaging and humanized? Does it include case studies that showcase your products in action? How are new visitors interacting with that content and navigating your offering?

Look at the bigger picture

B2B ad spend was set to surpass a staggering $35 billion in 2023, a 9.3% increase from 2022. That’s a lot of marketing noise to fight through.

When you’re focused on your business, products, and services and busy finalizing the moving parts required to get a campaign out into the world, it’s easy to get caught up in that and nothing else. This is your reminder to not lose sight of what your competitors are doing and how the industry itself is shifting.

Once a campaign is live, look at where it sits in the larger picture of your industry, its trends and current conversations, your customers and their evolving concerns, and how your competitors are positioned.

Focus on the future

For all the preparation you could and should do before a campaign goes live, nobody can predict the future.

Once an ad is running, you may notice it’s not performing as expected, certain metrics are doing better than you thought they would, or different media types are resonating with customers. To get the most mileage, revisit it regularly and adjust as you see fit.

Remember, an effective ad campaign is never a ‘set it and forget it’ tactic. It’s about being adaptable, agile, and willing to learn as much from what isn’t doing well as what is.