10 lessons learned from running ads globally

If you don’t know, I work full-time for WELS World Missions with Multi-Language Productions. If you’ve heard of Academia Cristo or TELL, those are my people!

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned over my few years of online marketing for these programs:

1) The best ads use the customer’s own words.

Some of the best ads we’ve run simply restate positive feedback we’ve gotten from our students.

What do you hear from your people that they love about your church or school? Flavor your ads with this and watch the ads naturally connect with your target audience.

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2) Google Ad Specialists are paid on commission. Proceed with caution.

When you run Google ads, you’ll be berated contacted by your personal Google Ads Specialist. Once in a blue moon, you’ll get someone really good, but most of them don’t know very much and just want you to spend more money.

If you need help, email me instead. 😉

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3) Different groups of people have different favorite ways of interacting with you.

In some countries, students prefer WhatsApp. In others, Facebook Messenger. Others, Viber.

Moral of the story: get your message on the platform your people prefer.

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4) The best ad in the world won’t fix a bad landing page.

I’ve seen nice looking ads that, when clicked, direct people to a plain sign-up form. This is a sure-fire way to scare people off (aka waste the money you spent on the ad).

If you’re going to steward your budget well, make sure you craft the viewer experience all the way through to the end goal.

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5) Start with a strong budget.

You have to give Google or Facebook enough “gas” to get the machine running. Once their algorithms figure out what’s working, you can drop your budget back down.

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6) 1.5% is worth celebrating.

We all really care about the thing we’re advertising, obviously. And – we think others should care, too. So when we see a measly 3% of the people who saw our ad click on it, the temptation can be to think that’s bad thing.

But – average for most display ads is .05%. This means if 1000 people see your ad, on average, 5 will click on it.

Anything that exceeds that is actually a good sign that you’re targeting correctly.

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7) Intent > everything

If you sell masking tape, you want your product in the Home department of Walmart – maybe near the paint. You don’t want to be on a random end cap in the grocery department.

When advertising online, do whatever you can – and this may mean getting creative – to get your church or school in front of the eyes of people who are looking for a church or school.

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8) Trial & error is a good thing.

Each “error” shows you something that doesn’t work. If you’re not happy with your results, try something else. Eventually, you’ll get to a place where you can apply lesson #9.

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9) Once an ad works, don’t touch it.

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10) Don’t trust Facebook’s click metrics.

Facebook inflates your numbers by counting just about any interaction with an ad as a click – including someone clicking your ad to simply expand it to full screen mode. They’re transparent about this, but I personally think it’s a bit misleading.

Read about that here.

If you really want to know about how many clicks to your site you received from an ad, install Google Analytics on your website and track it from there.