5 Performance Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid

Rohan is a digital marketer of a retail-based app business. He’s excellent with numbers and quite well-versed with the latest industry trends and market reports. His day begins going through various campaign reports, where he tracks down the hits and misses of his latest performance marketing campaigns; measuring all relevant KPIs and important metrics like DAUs, user visits, product views, etc. – the traditional marketing drill.

In spite of doing everything right, his marketing campaign scorecard is full of red marks.

Now, there are many mobile marketers like Rohan who’re losing out on marketing ROI due to issues that aren’t even visible on the surface.

To avoid such fiascos in executing your marketing campaigns, make sure that you’re not making these mistakes.

1) Setting the wrong KPIs

Even though this might seem basic, most marketers make this mistake. To ensure the success of marketing campaigns, it’s important for app marketers to choose those KPIs, which are relevant for their app business and serve as correct measures of profitability. For example, monitoring the instances of ‘add-to-cart’ that are triggered by a promotion campaign is way more significant than just focusing on ‘content viewed’.

How to solve this?

Rely on audience-intelligence that are specific to your app’s target users so that you’re able to identify the exact KPIs for your marketing campaigns.

2) Not optimising your re-marketing campaigns

Remarketing campaigns are supposed to be extremely effective if marketers want to reach out to their target audience with tailored mobile ads. However, the easiest way to goof up here is while creating your user segments or ignoring other CRM-based programmatic sources for re-marketing like Facebook, Google Display Network, etc.

How to fix this problem?

While segmenting your target users, marketers should note their past in-app activities and then design offers for every individual user segment. It’s also important for marketers to schedule and send out push notifications on the routine basis to achieve the desired results.

3)  Neglecting Programmatic advertising

At a time when an audience-centric approach in marketing is the way to go ahead, ensuring the correct mix of search, social and display along with programmatic traffic is extremely important for marketers. According to the ClickZ report on the State of Mobile Advertising in 2016, 54% of mobile marketers had increased their mobile budgets for programmatic in 2016. This shows that marketers have understood the full potential of going programmatic while purchasing their advertising inventory.

How to dodge such situations?

Get started with programmatic. By targeting users based on their interests, marketers can optimize the specific targeting of relevant users and ensure greater success of their marketing campaigns. For example, the target users of a fitness app mostly fall within the 14-40-year age group, who would be interested in lifestyle or fitness products, consuming health food, watching movies, etc. So, it makes sense to target these users through online portals pertaining to their interests.

4)  Missing out on Fraud Analytics and Attribution Data

With the prevalent vulnerabilities in the mobile ad ecosystem, click or install fraud have been on the rise.

Today, most marketing campaigns are the soft target of fraudulent activities like geo-fraud, spoofing, attribution fraud or click stuffing, fake impressions through ad stacking, amongst others. In fact, marketers lose out on their marketing ROI by putting money on fake traffic sources or low performing traffic sources when they don’t pay attention to attribution data.

This not only burns a hole in the pockets of marketers but also erodes the entire purpose of running a marketing campaign in the first place.

How to repair this?

Fraud Analytics is the answer to this problem. Today, most analytics platforms offer ‘fraud analytics’ as an exclusive feature. Marketers can choose to integrate with such reliable software platforms to ensure greater transparency in terms of accurately measuring the quality of traffic sources and prevent cases of ad fraud.

5) Failing in leveraging location-based targeting

Thanks to the popularity of location-based features on mobile devices, relevant user-targeting has become way easier than ever. Location-based Ad Campaigns are actually effective in improving the performance of an ad and help marketers fetch higher ROI at a lower price point. However, traditional marketers are still lagging behind in embracing the perks of using this location-based technology.

How to repair this?

By getting access to location-based user data, marketers can gain a competitive edge and improve the performance of their marketing campaigns to a great extent. This enables them to effectively target users with highly relevant ads and realise higher conversions.

Apart from these 5 mistakes, marketers should also work towards optimising across media sources or channels by using marketing automation tools and also take app store.