Digital advertising. The phrase itself conjures images of instant reach, optimized campaigns, and a direct line to your ideal customer. (Or, it might add some extra anxiety to your day, depending on the state of your marketing.)
The barrier to reaching your customers has never been lower. With a credit card and a few clicks, you can launch a campaign on Google, Meta, or any number of platforms, in literally minutes.
This ease of access, however, is a double-edged sword. While getting started is simple, truly mastering digital advertising is a different beast entirely. It’s intimidating to launch an ad campaign. Our digital advertising experts have been doing it for years, and we sometimes forget just how challenging it is to navigate these ad systems. Luckily, the most common digital advertising mistakes aren’t about technical wizardry or obscure settings…The most common mistakes we see are actually about marketing fundamentals.
We live and breathe digital advertising, and sometimes we need to remind our clients to take a step back, and go back to fundamentals. Let’s unpack the most common digital advertising errors, and more importantly, how to fix them.
Mistake 1: No Clear Goals or ROI Targets
This is perhaps the most pervasive and insidious mistake. Many digital advertising campaigns are launched without clearly defined outcomes. What does success look like? Is it a specific Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)? A target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)? A certain volume of qualified leads? Without these benchmarks, you’re essentially driving blind…you also aren’t giving the algorithms the right inputs in order for your campaign to be successful.
The bad news here is that many businesses struggle to define what a proper goal is for them. They know they need leads or sales, but have not done the hard work to determine ROI or costing targets that make sense.
Fix that, and you’re already halfway to having a successful campaign.
The problem is compounded by a failure to implement proper tracking. Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversion pixels, CRM integrations, call tracking – these aren’t optional extras; they are the bedrock of any successful digital campaign. Without them, you can’t accurately measure performance, identify what’s working, or, more critically, what isn’t. You’re left with vanity metrics and guesswork.
Tobie Tip:
Before you spend a single dollar, define success. What is the precise financial or lead-generation goal you’re aiming for? What’s your acceptable cost per lead or sale? Then, implement the right tracking tools before launch. Ensure GA4 is configured correctly, your conversion pixels are firing, and any CRM or call tracking systems are fully integrated.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Mistake 2: Weak Understanding of the Audience
It’s tempting to try and reach “everyone.” You love your product. It doesn’t mean that everyone else has to as well…Not if you want effective results.
Generic targeting and messaging is a recipe for wasted impressions, low-quality leads, and ultimately, wasted spend. Many businesses skip the crucial step of truly understanding who they are trying to reach.
This means no persona development, no deep dive into their behaviors, their pain points, their desires, or where they spend their time online. How often does your team analyze your customer base? Are you current customers your ideal customers? What does an ideal customer care about? What are their needs and desires? There are clues to your digital advertising targeting hidden in those questions.
Tobie Tip:
Invest time in building detailed audience personas. This goes beyond demographics. Conduct customer interviews, mine your CRM data for insights, and leverage tools like SparkToro to understand interests, influencers, and content consumption habits. Once you truly understand your audience, align your targeting, creative, and offers precisely to their behaviors and pain points. Speak directly to them, not to the masses.
Mistake 3: Channel Misalignment
Just because a platform is popular doesn’t mean it’s right for your business or your audience. We often see businesses allocating their budget equally across every trendy platform – “We need to be on Instagram,” “We need to be on TikTok,” even if their ideal customers are primarily searching on Google or engaging on LinkedIn.
This often leads to poor performance, ineffective reach, and diluted insights across channels.
Tobie Tip:
Match your platforms to your audience’s habits and their stage in the buying funnel. Is your audience actively searching for solutions (Google Ads)? Are they discovering new products (Meta Ads)? Are they primarily engaging with professional content (LinkedIn)?
Prioritize channels based on buyer intent and demonstrated performance, not just popularity. And be ruthless: if a channel isn’t delivering, cut it and reallocate the budget to what is working.
Bonus Tip: Remember that your prospects don’t cease to be who they are when they step outside the building where they work. B2B campaigns can be successful on platforms that are accessed while your target audience is at home, on the couch, late at night as well. There is something to be said about reaching someone when they are in the buying mindset, but influence doesn’t have to be bound by time block or what platforms are and aren’t available on a work internet network.
Mistake 4: Blind Trust in the Ad Platforms
The ad platforms themselves, designed with impressive user interfaces and “smart” features, are fundamentally built to make money for them, not necessarily for you. They thrive on ad spend, and their default settings often encourage a “set it and forget it” mentality that can quickly drain your budget without delivering real results.
Remember – “smart campaigns” offered by Google, Meta, and others are designed for ease of use. But that ease often comes at the cost of control and visibility. Over-reliance on automation, recommended settings, and automated bidding strategies without expert oversight can lead to misguided campaigns and significant budget waste. The platforms want you to spend more, not necessarily more efficiently. We expect to see even more of this as AI becomes more integrated into ad platforms.
Tobie Tip:
Audit every campaign manually and regularly. Don’t just accept platform recommendations at face value. Disable automated features that obscure data or limit your control. Question everything: why is the algorithm doing this? What data is it relying on?
When in doubt, tap an expert to help fight for your goals… not the platform’s. But always remember: your digital advertising campaigns require a strong marketing foundation. As our founder Ryan always says, “Digital ads won’t fix your marketing problem.”
Ready to stop making these common mistakes and start seeing real results? Let’s run a digital ad audit together.
