Create a Plan and Get Ready for Action

Take another look at your business goals, target audience, and promotional materials. Running a business often means revisiting your previously developed brand strategy. This strategy sets the foundation and direction for decision-making and evolves over time. Use it to create a plan that will lead you to launching effective online advertising campaigns.

Focus on your website’s goals. Consider its purpose—should the user fill out a form, make a purchase, or simply learn about a new service? Try going through this process yourself and note every event that indirectly leads to achieving your goal. This list will come in handy in the following steps—we’ll get back to it later.

Describe your target audience—who do you want to reach, who should visit your website? Can this group be divided into smaller segments? Also, think about the types of audience groups you can create from users who have already visited your site. Will these be users who added a product to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase, or users who spent more than 5 minutes on your website? What criteria are important to you? At a later stage, these groups can be used for remarketing to achieve desired results, such as completing a sale.

Consider the promotional materials that will strengthen the message of your campaigns. These might include graphics, GIFs, or videos. Such creative assets will certainly have a stronger impact on your audience’s senses than text alone. Remember that each advertising platform has specific guidelines regarding formats and sizes. It’s time to move on to the next step!

Set Up and Configure Ad Accounts

Familiarize yourself with the advertising platforms that will help you achieve your objectives. The most popular platforms include Meta Ads and Google Ads. They are not competitors but complement each other. You could say they offer entirely different ways to reach potential customers at various stages of the purchasing process. Additionally, you’ll find other popular advertising channels, such as TikTok Ads, Pinterest Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Which one should you choose? That depends on who you want to reach, at what stage of the purchasing journey, and how you want to present yourself to your audience. However, for each platform, after setting up your account and linking payment methods, you will receive a tracking code that should be embedded in your website’s code. This code sends data about traffic from clicked ads on your site to the advertising platform. Statistics will provide you with information such as the click-through rate (CTR) of your creatives and the cost per click (CPC) or per thousand impressions (CPM).

At this stage, it’s also essential to revisit the list of events that lead to achieving your website’s goals, which you noted earlier. Each system allows you to monitor specific user behaviors, enabling you to optimize your campaigns effectively. For example, when tracking form submission events on your site, you can check which campaigns generate the most leads and discontinue those that aren’t meeting your expectations.

You can also use these events to build audience groups and exclude users who visited your site but didn’t take any actions indicating interest in your product or service. This way, you avoid wasting your budget on ineffective ads and focus your efforts on users who are more likely to bring value to your business. How do you implement tracking codes? It’s time to get acquainted with Google Tag Manager.

Use Google Tag Manager

Manage tracking codes for all your advertising platforms (and more!) in one place. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that allows you to implement code snippets on your website without the need for a developer. GTM doesn’t store any data itself but acts as an intermediary, transmitting data from your website to specific tools. How does it work, and how do you get started with Google Tag Manager?

Go to tagmanager.google.com, where you can easily set up an account and a container. A container is a space where you store all the necessary scripts. If you have two different websites, you’ll create one account and two containers—one per domain. The container is then embedded in your website’s code. Every time your website loads, GTM activates, followed by the tracking scripts you’ve set up in the container.

Implementing tracking codes involves configuring tags and rules. In a tag, you define which tool, using its ID, should receive the data and what the event is called. The rule defines when the event should be sent. For example, a form submission event might be triggered by displaying a thank-you page after the user submits the form.

Why is it better to use Google Tag Manager instead of embedding all scripts directly into the website code with the help of a developer? Using GTM is simply faster, easier, and cheaper than involving an IT specialist each time. Additionally, GTM allows you to safely test changes to tags, detect errors in code structure, and pause selected scripts. Another benefit is that GTM loads tracking codes asynchronously, meaning slower scripts don’t block the faster ones. This keeps your website running smoothly and slightly faster than if all the scripts were directly embedded into the site’s code.

Implement Analytics on Your Website

Base your actions on reliable data, minimizing the risk of strategic mistakes. You now have ad accounts, promotional materials prepared according to platform guidelines, a list of website goals and events, a GTM container, and tracking codes. The last essential step before launching ad campaigns is to implement analytics on your website. What benefits does this offer your business, and which tools should you focus on?

The leading tool in the world of digital analytics is Google Analytics 4 (GA4). It’s one of the most popular tools for measuring traffic and analyzing user behavior on websites. You’ll implement tracking codes on your site using the previously mentioned GTM. GA4 allows you to: precisely track users’ paths to completing your website’s goals across devices (cross-device tracking), identify which channels bring valuable traffic to your site, locate pages where users encounter problems, and deepen your understanding of your audience through demographic data. By turning data into actionable insights, you can optimize your advertising budgets, build audience segments worth investing in, and improve problematic areas of your website. This will increase your goal completion rates, boost revenues, and strengthen your brand image.

In analytics, it’s essential to take a multi-faceted approach, relying on various data sources. This is why it’s also worth implementing HotJar on your site—a tool that provides insight into user behavior. Unlike GA4, this service focuses not just on numbers but also on heatmaps and session recordings. By analyzing this data, you can easily identify UX issues and bottlenecks in the purchasing process that need to be simplified to improve conversion rates.

Both tools have alternatives, such as Adobe Analytics and Piwik Pro for GA4, or CUX and CrazyEgg for HotJar. Here, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the specific tools and choose those that best suit your brand’s needs. It’s certainly wise to start with two reliable services and, over time, expand your analytical capabilities into additional areas, tools, and valuable statistics.

You’ve reached the final step! Now you can launch your campaigns. Remember, modern customer journeys are complex, and the market is highly competitive, so success cannot be based on intuition alone. The digital world of users must be explored through measurement, and decisions should be data-driven. Only in this way can you reduce the risk of business mistakes and steadily improve the effectiveness of your paid campaigns, as well as the reach and impact of your brand.

Key Takeaways

Before launching your advertising campaigns, make sure you’ve completed the following four essential steps:

1. Create a plan and prepare for action – Return to your brand strategy, reconsider your website’s goals, identify key events and audience groups for your efforts, and determine what promotional materials will enhance your campaign message.
2. Set up and configure ad accounts – Familiarize yourself with advertising platforms and choose the ones that will help you achieve your objectives. After setting up accounts, linking payments, and configuring settings, revisit the list of events and audience groups that will be crucial for your success.
3. Implement Google Tag Manager on your website – This will allow you to quickly and efficiently manage the events sent to all your advertising platforms.
4. Implement analytics on your website – Start with two key tools, GA4 and HotJar, or their alternatives. Over time, expand your resources with additional areas, tools, and valuable statistics.

By leveraging analytics, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that will boost your website’s goal completion rates, increase leads or customers, grow revenue, expand your reach, and strengthen your brand’s image.