When to Expect Results from Advertising

One of the main advantages of digital advertising is that you essentially choose how much you’d like to spend, and you’re able to start and stop as you please with no commitment. While that flexibility is great, it’s also a double-edged sword because the expectation can seep in that you’ll always get big results with a small budget.

Yes it’s possible to go viral with a good ad on social media or land a big sale with just one well-placed search ad, but luck is not the same as a plan. Forecasting results is a numbers game based on staying consistent.

A good analogy is that advertising is like exercise. If you were to go to the gym for the first time, pick a machine, and get started, that’s progress because it’s a big step to go from nothing to something. But if you checked the mirror after just a few reps and didn’t see any difference in your physique, declaring “exercising doesn’t work” would be false.

There are stories of miraculously quick success, it’s just more realistic to expect that the level of results will have a strong relation to the level of investment.

Of course our goal is to get results as quickly as possible from your advertising, and we do what we can to optimize your campaigns via continuous improvement. We analyze the data to see what’s working, test creative, adjust targeting to pivot with audience behavior, and so on. It’s also quite common to see the most stark changes in the KPIs of our clients’ campaigns over the first few months simply because starting fresh has no historical data, and as time goes on, we have more to leverage. Making decisions based on data, however, requires a decent sample size, and the amount of data we accumulate can be limited by your budget.

That doesn’t mean we recommend spending recklessly, it means that in most cases accelerating the progress is done by being more aggressive. Just like hiring a personal trainer; if you tell them you want to reach your goals quickly, they won’t tell you to do the bare minimum, because how quickly those results arrive will largely depend on how much you’re willing to commit.

Some ad platforms even enforce minimum budgets for different campaign types, which can surprise people if they enter a number for their daily budget only to see an error message informing them that it’s too low to even run. That’s basically the platform acting like a personal trainer saying “either get serious about your goal or don’t bother using me, because I don’t want you to say this doesn’t work”.

Everyone likes the idea of “going viral” because it’s quick, it’s lightning in a bottle, but that’s not something you can plan for. Yes, it’s possible, it’s just not something you can predict.

In the same way a financial planner wouldn’t recommend that you base your retirement plan on buying $10 worth of lottery tickets and banking on that turning into millions, we don’t recommend banking on the smallest possible advertising budget having a massive impact right away.

We love optimism, we just want to have realistic expectations.

So What?

Especially if your organization is just starting out with advertising, you need to remember that your audience may not be ready to transact with you after seeing your ad for the first time.

Are there instances where a customer can be convinced in a moment of need? Sure, that happens, and it’s a great benefit particularly of search ads (such as those on Google), because people are saying what they need and you can swoop in at that moment.

However, not everyone makes snap decisions; people typically research before committing. Therefore it’s wise to stay consistent and build familiarity, guiding people along your marketing funnel. That means patience may be required if you’re advertising with a small budget, whereas a larger budget would get noticeable results faster.

The good news is that we can help you forecast regardless of your budget size! We discuss making data-informed decisions on a budget in this post.

We can start with your desired outcome (such as a number of leads generated) and estimate the budget needed to make that happen, or start with your budget and estimate the outcome. The beauty is we can revisit any time with more accurate forecasting as we get more data under our belts.

Want to brainstorm a plan that works for you? Get in touch with us, and let’s drive results at your speed.