What's the right budget for testing a new ad channel?

When it comes to testing a new advertising channel, or planning a broader pilot for fresh online ad initiatives, one question clients invariably ask the experts at Clever Zebo is: how much should I expect to spend?

The short answer is: you can usually learn a lot about how an ad channel will perform with just $1,000 to $2,000 in advertising spend, given that certain conditions are met.

1. Tracking. You have installed native tracking code for the ad platform being tested, and tested the code to ensure it's installed correctly.


2. Analytics. You have an analytics tool in place that represents the broader "truth" around data for your website visits. This is important because it gives you an apples-to-apples picture of the data for multiple ad channels (and organic traffic channels). It's also key to measuring success because it allows you to look at softer metrics like visitor engagement, time on your website, average pages per session, bounce rate, etc. The native tracking code, by contrast, will only tell you when visitors have converted.

Here's what you can expect to see after spending $1-2k to test an ad platform.

• Clues about which targeting and campaigns are showing promise


• Indications of the ad messaging that resonates with your audience in an A/B test


• Hopefully, real conversions and some insight into their quality


• At minimum, some data around which campaigns and audiences lead to strong engagement

I'll share some real data from our Quora Ads campaign analytics to illustrate this last point.

You can see below that we spent about $85 for a total of 120 clicks, most of which came from ads promoting our Google AdWords management services. We saw 20 clicks for Facebook Ads management services, and just a handful of impressions around our work managing LinkedIn Ads and Taboola campaigns. There wasn't as much traffic on Quora questions surrounding those topics.

When you consider how valuable a real lead is for an online marketing agency, given our client retention rates, these CPC figures seem quite reasonable, averaging just $0.72.

But the soft metrics we saw in Google Analytics tell a different story about just how "real" these potential leads might be.

By any measure, visitors who are spending 6 seconds or less on a website are not very engaged with the content.

You can imagine how some advertisers might learn a lot by comparing specific audiences and campaigns by the engagement stats Google Analytics shows for a certain ad platform.

So which ad platforms should be part of a well-rounded online advertising pilot?

Depending on your product or service, it could make sense to test:

• Google AdWords


• Facebook Ads


• LinkedIn Ads


• Quora Ads


• Outbrain and/or Taboola


• Programmatic networks and exchanges (e.g. AdRoll, Rocket Fuel, DoubleClick)

I've developed a handy Google Sheet that we sometimes use to help clients divvy up their ad budget between relevant channels.

See the modeling tool >>

Using the above modeling tool for projections and guesstimates, you can try adjusting different variables like Avg. CPC and conversion rate by channel, and see how this would influence the CPA / CPL and conversion figures resulting from your advertising pilot.

Does $1-2k reflect the full budget a company should expect to spend on ads? Of course not. As you start to establish baselines and a picture of realistic performance, you can make decisions about channel-by-channel budget that makes sense for your business. But this modest investment amount represents a good pilot to test and learn what impact certain ad channels can have on your business.