Paid Media Success: Lessons From a Top-Performing Campaign

Paid advertising success can boil down to several factors. From investing in the right channels to fine-tuning messaging to leveraging unique pieces of collateral, brands have many means at their disposal to create an experience that customers can’t help but gravitate toward. 

It’s just a matter of uncovering and exploring what makes the most sense for your unique brand and your ideal customers.

To see what paid media success can look like, let’s dive into the paid advertising strategy of MyComputerCareer.

Campaign Overview 

MyComputerCareer’s Cyber Warrior Program works to put IT students on the path toward a cybersecurity job in just a few months. In March 2023, the company wanted to focus its efforts on targeting active military members and veterans to join the program. So we set out to help them improve their lead quality, generate more high-quality leads, and decrease the cost per lead. 

Early on, offline conversion tracking challenges arose and pulled in non-military leads. To troubleshoot the problem, the MyComputerCareer team built a HubSpot report that allowed us to home in on the keyword and audience nuances that were bringing in non-military applicants. 

Those findings alerted us to which keywords and audiences we needed to temporarily phase out in our paid display and search campaigns going forward. Those tweaks attracted an increased number of high-quality leads — within a quarter, that figure jumped from 1,316.6 to 2,816.3, a 229% quarter-over-quarter jump. 

The Takeaway 

Using platforms like HubSpot for insightful reports can aid in identifying and rectifying targeting inefficiencies, subsequently refining lead quality. 

You know your audience — what drives them, what defines them, and what turns them away. As you look for the X factor for unlocking paid media campaign success, keep these three strategies in mind:

1. Harness data.

Whether you’re pre-, mid-, or post-campaign, invest in a platform that collects data and segments it so you can act upon it. Without tapping into the power of a tool like HubSpot, the Cyber Warrior Program might have continued peppering its collateral with non-specific keywords.

That would’ve been more budget toward an unqualified audience that could’ve gone to a more engaged one. Use HubSpot, Google Analytics, and other reporting tools to identify those key performance drivers that can improve your performance. 

2. Leverage creative iteration.

Don’t be complacent with your campaign strategies. Test everything — from taglines to pictures to headlines and everything in between. These details might seem small, but even small adjustments can have a big impact. 

3. Implement offline conversion tracking.

Offline conversion tracking can give you a comprehensive view of campaign performance, ensuring high-quality lead acquisition. This tracking helped inform us and the Cyber Warrior Program team that we were bringing in non-military leads. This intel allowed us to pinpoint where the non-military leads were coming from so we could reduce the number of those leads that were generated and put the campaign back on track. Once you identify which keywords are bringing in low-quality leads and which are bringing in high-quality leads, you can shift your budget to focus on campaigns and keywords that are generating the kinds of leads that move the needle.

Paid media success isn’t one-size-fits-all. But if your goals are high, make sure you are informed, focused, and adaptable to any situation.