Why I’m Cautious of Best Practice

Since launching Status Agency, I’m steadily becoming wary of common refrains that gradually become accepted truths. Things change quickly, no matter what business you’re in and the tricks that worked in the past won’t always work today. 

In digital marketing, we’re constantly racing to keep up with consumer behaviour and Google is a platform that you could call a market leader in adaptation. Using machine learning, it constantly learns about customers based on their behaviour across its entire network, from Search to Shopping, Maps, YouTube, and more. 

These days, Google Ads gives you an optimisation score, which is an estimate of how well your account is set to perform. The platform also gives you recommendations that will help your campaigns perform at their full potential. 

Google is constantly in observation mode (and shouldn’t we all be given the day and age). It’s constantly gathering data and its AI has a very deep understanding of how people behave online, as well as the campaigns that drive the best results across its entire ecosystem.

Sure enough, in the last few months, I’ve started to notice Google giving me more and more recommendations that challenge the best practice ideas I’ve hung my hat on for a long time.

Initially, I wasn’t quite ready to let go of what I “knew” in my heart “works.” Luckily, I get to partner with clients that give me the freedom to experiment. 

So, to be sure of these new recommendations I set up a test. I set up one “best practice” campaign and another in which I applied all of Google’s recommendations and requirements – and guess what, the Google campaign performed better. Far better in fact. After just a month and a half, the cost-per-acquisition had dropped by 47%, the conversion rate increased by 72%, and the return on ad spend doubled. That got me thinking. 

We often try hard to refine our campaigns based on what we know has worked for us in the past. But once I gave Google the information and specs it needed to do its thing, the budget started being spent exactly where it needed to be spent to drive results. 

Then guess where I could start spending my time. Rather than tinkering and toiling away with “best practice” tweaks, I could sit back and observe what was going on in my client’s industry and tailor the big picture strategy around that. It’s been a rocky start to the year for many with the pandemic reaping its ongoing effects on the economy and consumer behaviour, so it’s been important for me to be able to take a step back to observe and reset game plans as required. 

Don’t get me wrong. Best practices aren’t necessarily wrong. But it’s better to use them at the start of a project when you don’t have enough data to make more of an informed decision.

So how about you try it? Launch a campaign like it’s the best campaign in the world but test and evaluate it as though it could be completely wrong. 

In marketing and agency land, we often read the same publications, attend the same conferences, and engage on the same platforms. As a result, we constantly reaffirm our own beliefs and that doesn’t take us far when a client brings us an entirely new problem. 

So how about you start testing your thinking and see how much you learn?