Which ad platform works best for your VR AR business?
We get this question a lot - Which platform should you use for paid ads? Google, FB, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc? The short answer is, you need to test it out. Here's why, and how to objectively compare different ad platforms.
Why?
Every business is different, whether it is B2B or B2C, product- or service-based, and so on. Depending on your business, niche, and target audience, there will be 1 or 2 ad platforms that work best for you. The problem is, you won't know which one until you test out different platforms and let the data objectively determine which platform is the best. We strongly believe in basing decisions on data rather than subjectivity, which could often be wrong and costly.
Accurately testing the effectiveness of different ad platforms requires the following steps. Accuracy is key here - if the data is not correct, any results that you interpret would be meaningless.
Ensure tracking is set up properly for each ad platform
This involves adding the platform's 'pixel' to your website or via Google Tag Manager to ensure clicks from your paid ads are being tracked properly. Furthermore, you should add UTM parameters to the destination URL's of your ads, to ensure that you are accurately capturing on your analytics dashboard where users are coming from.
Also make sure you have set up conversions properly in your analytics platform. Depending on the goal of your campaign, you would need to set different conversion goals. For example, if your goal is awareness & engagement, you could perhaps set a conversion as a stay of over 1 minute, whereas if your goal is lead gen, then you could set a conversion as a form submission.
Keep other factors constant
Since we are comparing different ad platforms, we should strive to keep everything else constant. For example, we should use the same budget, creatives, and ad copy across all platforms. This ensures that the only variable in our test is the ad platform. In other words, we are only testing the effects of different ad platforms and nothing else.
Compare data using one single source of truth
It may not be a surprise that Facebook and LinkedIn Ad Manager, as well as other ad platforms, inflate their results. Moreover, each platform may measure the results, such as clicks and views, slightly differently. That's why it is crucial to pool all the data from your ads into a single source of truth for an apples-to-apples comparison among different ad platforms.
We use Google Analytics to compare all our paid ads data. Once you set up tracking and UTM's correctly as described in the previous step, you will be able to see not only the quantity, but also the quality of traffic, from each ad platform.
The advantage of Google Analytics, or other website analytics platforms, is that it shows data from users after they've landed on your website. This allows you to compare user activity and quality, such as the average duration of stay, and the bounce rate of users from each ad platform. These metrics are a lot more meaningful than just the number of users that arrive from each ad platform.
We hope this blog provides you guidance on how to objectively, scientifically determine which paid ads platform works best for your business. We cannot stress enough the importance of actually testing it out. For example, many folks may think that LinkedIn ads are effective for a B2B audience. However, we've found that LinkedIn Ad Manager often heavily inflates their results, and the quality of traffic they attract to your site is actually quite low.
Testing ad platforms is one of the first steps we would recommend to businesses that are starting paid ads. This provides insight into where they should allocate their marketing budget and time for the most impact.
If you are a VR AR business looking into paid ads, or if you're already running paid ads but are seeing suboptimal results, we can help. With almost a decade of experience managing paid ads for VR AR businesses, ASATA is the leading marketing agency in this space. We guarantee to improve your existing CTR and conversion rates within two months.