You have to nourish the ideals you support. And without the proper tools, your ads probably won’t deliver optimal performance.
In this blog post, we’ve gathered nine tools that will help you improve your social media ads and enable you to increase brand awareness, create the right leads and, eventually, help you grow your business.
Lars Krarup Olesen
Marketing Manager
1. Google Analytics
Poor performance? Good performance? Without data you can compare it with, there’s no way to know. And that can be harder to come by now that iOS 14 and 15 have cut off your data stream. That’s why Google Analytics, the free tool that helps you figure out where your website traffic comes from, is now more important than ever.
Are you unfamiliar with Google Analytics? Or do you want to dive deeper into your analyses? Google has a Google Analytics Academy that will help you learn more about Google Analytics, Google Data Studio and Google Tag Manager.
Tip: Take a look at your audience in Google Analytics and compare your visitors’ devices. Because of iOS 14, you can get valuable data by comparing your mobile traffic with tablet and desktop, then check that data against, for example, Facebook.
2. SuperMetrics
Speaking of getting a handle on your data, SuperMetrics is a paid tool (with a free trial period) that gives you and your marketing data superpowers. All the platforms are here: Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, HubSpot, Shopify, Google Sheets, Google Analytics and many more.
Example of an excerpt from a performance-dashboard made in Google Sheets
SuperMetrics lets you extract all of your marketing data from your preferred platforms and collect it in Google Sheets. SuperMetrics is one of the most indispensable tools we and our specialists use to analyze data across different channels.
Tip: Supermetrics also has templates that give you a quick overview of your data with a dashboard in Google Data Studio. And speaking of…
3. Google Data Studio
Example of an excerpt from the dashboard of Google Data Studio
What to do with your marketing data from SuperMetrics? Why not structure it, get an overview and present the data with the free tool Google Data Studio? That’s what we do.
Google Data Studio lets you collect and organize all your data. You can design it to fit your company’s visual style and configure it so it only shows data that’s important to your business. Convenient, right?
Having trouble getting started? Then try basing your own Google Data Studio design on one of Google’s templates. We can help you tailor the dashboard to fit your business perfectly, too.
4. Facebook Ads Library
Do you want to get a better handle on other companies’ ads?
Facebook Ads Library lets you view all the paid ads currently being run by a specific Facebook page. Do you sell running shoes? Then have a look at some of your competitors that do the same. Speaking of running, speed is important…
5. Google PageSpeed Insights
Having your website load fast is essential.
This blog post isn’t supposed to be just one long ad for Google. However, Google Pagespeed Insights will give you indispensable information about speed: Just how fast is your website loading?
The fact is that many people have slow wi-fi, and most of us view these sites from a mobile phone with a suboptimal connection. When users can’t load your site, it’s like a closed store. Your customers are being turned away and your ad money is being wasted. In the end, you lose sales.
Google PageSpeed Insights gives you suggestions on how to improve your site’s loading speed. You should take these to heart if you want high ad conversion rates.
6. A versatile editing application
Video content is often essential to good ad performance. But sometimes you need to edit the content before publishing it. You need calls to action. Audio, light and colors need to be adjusted. And you need subtitles. This is often beyond the scope of iMovie or your phone’s standard video editing app.
If your budget is zero kroner, you should download and get to know one of the world’s best editing applications: DaVinci Resolve. It was originally used primarily for professional colour grading in the film and advertising industries, but today, it’s used by most video editors. Even the free version is amazingly good and full of features.
DaVinci Resolve is just as good as (and sometimes better than) giants like Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro when it comes to functionality, stability and accessibility. And a full license costs only a one-time fee of DKK 1,900.
The learning curve for DaVinci Resolve can be steep if you don’t use YouTube tutorials along with it.
Do you want tools that will allow you to create great content but which are a bit more accessible? We can recommend Canva, Kapwing, Veed.io and Motionbox, among others.
7. Confect
Confect.io is also great if you want to produce quality content for your dynamic ads (and do easy split testing) on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat.
Why Confect? Because it’s extremely user-friendly. And there’s a wealth of product images – currently more than 100 million – available on the platform. Finally, Confect users have an average ROAS increase of 30 percent, which means that most businesses can benefit from using the platform.
With a free 30-day trial period, there’s no reason not to get started right away. It will provide you with an opportunity to test the result of your ads. The price starts at $149 a month, depending on how many products you need.
8. Screen recording
Screen recordings can be useful for providing answers to questions such as: How fast is your checkout flow? What does your website look like? What are you working on? How do people use or access your product?
On a PC or Mac, Loom lets you make fast and simple recordings that combine webcam and screen recording. Do you need to make a screen recording on your phone? Both iOS and Android have a built-in screen recording feature that can handle most of that job.
9. Remove.bg
The name Remove.bg comes from “Removebackground.” And this tool does exactly what it says, removing the background on images you upload. That saves you the hassle of removing them manually in Photoshop.
Let’s say you have an image with a person in it and you want to change the background – to replace it with your brand colour, perhaps, or a background from another image. Well, no problem. Let remove.bg do it for you. That’s what we do when we produce content for our customers, and it’s saved us an incredible amount of time.
I hope that this blog post inspired you to improve your social media ads.
Do you have suggestions for must-have tools? Or did I forget something important? Please feel free to mail me at lko@pl-partners.dk.
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PL & Partners is a performance marketing agency. We are a group of advisors that go to work every day with the desire to create visible results together with our customers. We are built on ambition and knowledge. We are driven by people, by advisors, by data and by a shared wish to create visible results.
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