Improve Your Blaze Campaign Results

Getting results from Blaze ads works the same as on any advertising platform: show the right ad to the right person at the right time. In a world with countless distractions competing with your ad, this is easier said than done, but you can improve your chances by following the best practices in this guide.

Your “ad creative” refers to the combination of images and text that make up your ad. The best ad combines an attractive image and compelling text to attract your intended audience to click and engage with your content.

The quality of your image can make or break your ad’s performance. If possible, it’s a good idea to create and/or edit images specifically for your ads. 

A good image for an ad should give your audience a clear, accurate idea of what they’ll find when they click. The ad image should also be:

• Eye-catching
• High-resolution (not blurry or pixelated)
• Free of excessive text
• Easy to understand right away 
• Makes sense in many contexts 

The text you use with your ad should convey key information, using as few words as necessary. Be clear and direct, giving your audience a good reason to click.

Take some time to observe the ads of successful competitors in your space. How do they word their ads? How many words do they use? What calls to action do they use, such as “Learn More”? Consider what makes your offering unique, and emphasize that in your text.

Here’s an example:

• Not enough text: Hot Dogs.
• Too much text: Our family farms supply us with all-natural beef that we use in our delicious, all-beef, all-natural Hot Dogs that are available in grocery stores starting at $3.99.
• Just right: Delicious, All-Natural, All-Beef Hot Dogs – $3.99

Don’t worry if you’re not a professional writer or designer. You can use the AI helper tools in Blaze to generate ideas for your ad’s text. Feel free to try a few versions of the text or just use it for inspiration.

Blaze offers targeting features so you can show your ads to your ideal audience. When you are creating images and text for your ad, take a moment to consider the fit between your audience and the ad itself.

Avoid mismatches in language, interests, or geography. If you are showing ads in Spain, you should probably use Spanish text. If you are showing ads to people who are interested in dogs, you should probably not have only cats in the image. 

If someone clicks your ad but doesn’t find what they expected to find when they arrive on your website, this creates a poor experience for them and poor results for you. Ensure that your ad’s text and images set realistic expectations for what visitors will find when they arrive on your website. Don’t mislead the visitor.

Most advertisers use at least some targeting features to narrow the audience for their ads. The goal is to show an ad only to interested people.

Use targeting features to show your ad to more interested people and fewer uninterested people. Targeting is the primary way to control your spending and improve the return on your investment. Unless your ad is equally relevant to everyone who might see it, set the target audience while creating your campaign.

Select one or more locations to limit your ad to people in the areas where your website is most relevant. For example, if your business only ships to certain countries, make sure to select them during campaign creation.

You can similarly use language targeting. If your readers or customers generally prefer to read English, make sure to use that targeting option.

Using interest targeting to narrow your audience is a great way to get more return on investment. When an interest directly matches the content of your website, this is straightforward. For example, a blog about gardening will naturally want to target Gardening as an interest.

What if your website doesn’t have an obvious connection to one of the interests available for targeting? In that case, spend some time thinking about your audience – what kind of people are they? What other interests tend to relate to your website? What interests would imply an interest in your website? For example, there may not be a “BBQ” interest category, but “Cooking” or “Food and Wine” might be suitable.

If you are familiar with marketing, then you’ve probably heard of “A/B Testing”. The basic idea is to test two or more variations of something simultaneously. In this case, two variations of an ad, each with different content or audience targeting, to find out which performs better in the market.

When you’re showing an ad to thousands of people around the world, it is usually impossible to know in advance how they will react. To solve this problem, advertisers often run several versions – sometimes dozens – of a campaign at the same time. Each one is different in a single aspect – image, text, or targeting options.

If you run variations of an ad for a while, one will often emerge as a clear winner. It may get a higher click-through rate, or the people who click may purchase or subscribe much more often. Simply swapping out an image can sometimes dramatically improve results.

Consider testing several variations of your ad. While this practice increases your spending in the short term, it should ultimately allow you to minimize spending and/or maximize your returns. 

Blaze can give you a high-level overview of your ads’ performance, showing you impressions, clicks, and cost-per-click. If you’re looking for a more detailed analysis of traffic from Blaze, you have various options.

Many analytics tools like Jetpack Stats or Google Analytics allow you to use UTMs for analysis. UTMs are a series of text-based tags appended to the end of the target URL for your ad. You can add UTMs to your ad using the “URL Parameters” option in Blaze. There are many tools around the web you can use to create properly formatted UTMs for your campaign.

Your analytics tool sees the UTM when someone clicks on the ad, and you can use it to analyze their behavior later on. 

It’s a good idea to use tools to analyze the traffic on your website and monitor your results. Jetpack and Google Analytics are very popular, but many more options exist. If you’re looking to take your website traffic to the next level, these tools can help you understand it more deeply.

Maybe you’ve tried running advertising campaigns with Blaze and the results aren’t what you hoped for. Troubleshoot your campaign systematically to find out what’s limiting performance, and you can steadily work your way to effective growth for your website. 

Experimenting with different text and images is a straightforward way to improve performance. Performance improvements by changing your ad’s text and/or images will primarily affect the click-through rate.

Testing the same ad with different audiences is an important way to drive results. When you find an audience more interested in your ad or website, you may see improvements in impressions, click-through rate, engagement with your site, conversion, or other metrics. 

Sometimes, you can get lots of traffic but not as many subscriptions or sales as you expected. Consider whether you’ve sent people to the right place – could you try a different part of your website or create a “landing page” designed specifically for people who clicked on your ad?

For merchants, the ideal advertising scenario is when someone clicks on your ad and then immediately makes a purchase. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple. If the people clicking on your ads aren’t taking the action you want, consider adding an intermediate step that’s easier for them to take—following your blog, signing up for a newsletter, or following your social media accounts are examples of intermediate conversions that can eventually turn them into customers.