When you’re planning a marketing campaign, it can be difficult to know how long it should run. But before you begin to think about length, it’s important to think about the goals for your paid internet advertising. What are you creating this digital marketing campaign to do? Some questions to help you decide are:
You should be able to categorize your goals into short-term and long-term buckets, and this will impact the ideal length of your campaigns. For instance, you may run a single campaign for an extended period of time to support a long-term goal, while also running multiple, quick campaigns to support your short-term goals.
Budget is another major factor when considering the ideal length of your campaign — however, it isn’t the end all be all. Even if you don’t have extensive resources, you can still run successful short and long campaigns. All it takes is the right strategy.
Explore this blog post to dig into strategies and best practices that will help you create successful digital marketing campaigns that convert across internet advertising platforms.
We know that for different objectives, you’ll want to run different length campaigns. Immediate campaigns are best focused on short-term goals like specific, temporary promotions while ongoing campaigns — or evergreen campaigns — usually focus more on long-term goals like awareness.
Are you promoting something with a clear start and end date? A one week to one month-long campaign is likely to be an effective timeline for supporting short-term goals with paid internet advertising. Examples of these promotions include:
In most cases, the sweet spot for immediate campaigns is one to two weeks.
If you have a goal that isn’t time bound and doesn’t have a defined beginning or end, you’ll want to look at an ongoing campaign. Ideally, you’ll dedicate multiple months to supporting long-term goals with content and messaging that is evergreen — something that’s relevant all year long. These goals could be:
For most ongoing marketing campaigns, three to six months is the amount of time you’ll need to meet your long-term objectives.
The budget you have to work with is an equally important factor that may determine how long you want to run a campaign. Different internet advertising platforms will have different options for customizing your ad spend, but for most, your budgeting strategy will stem from defining a total budget or a daily budget.
If you have a total budget to use for all of your paid internet advertising, immediate-need campaigns are often the best option. Say you have access to $300; while that may not be enough to sustain a campaign that runs for six months, concentrating budget behind specific objects will drive your ROI in the short term.
Depending on the platform, you may have to choose a daily budget. Work backwards from the total to determine a daily amount that will be most impactful — platforms like Nextdoor Ads Manager share estimated impressions as you customize your budget and campaign length. Then, run the ads for the number of days or weeks it takes to hit the total.
If you have more resources available, leveraging daily budgets over a longer period of time through an ongoing campaign is an effective strategy. Let’s say this time you want to spend twenty to thirty dollars a day — you can use those same analytics tools to determine the optimal daily budget to reach your target audience and the timeline it will take to do it.
This approach ensures an even spend of over the lifecycle of the campaign, which boosts your ROI and optimizes the sustainability of your ad. If you want to cap your total budget, simply project your daily budget forward until you hit a number you’re comfortable with. The projection will also highlight the longest your campaign can run.
The length of your campaign will also rely on its performance. If it’s not performing, you won’t want to keep running it, but if it’s performing well, you might want to extend it. The most successful digital marketing campaigns leverage both ad variations and A/B tests, no matter the campaign length.
Begin every campaign ready with content variations you’ll use for the duration, whether it’s long or short. That way, you’ll be setting yourself to drive impact from the very beginning.
This is especially important for ongoing campaigns, as it’s easier to run into ad fatigue: when your ad is overexposed and becomes ineffective. You don’t want your audience to get tired of seeing the same content over and over. A good rule of thumb is to have one distinct image, ad copy, or both for each week you plan to run your paid internet advertising.
To prevent ad fatigue many ad platforms like Nextdoor Ads Manager offer frequency capping, which limits how many times neighbors are served ads from each ad group.
How do you know what’s performing well? In addition to weekly refreshed content for your campaign, test slight variations of images, headlines, and calls to action to see what gets more clicks. This gives you insights into how to move forward and drive conversions. Use this strategy to tweak an ongoing campaign or establish changes to keep in mind for your next immediate-need campaign.
Nextdoor Ads Manager makes it easy to create campaigns of any length. Take advantage of easily adjustable parameters to extend or end a campaign right in the app. If you’re stuck, Nextdoor is by your side with how-to guides and a robust help center that make it easy to define your goals, audience, budget, and more. Built-in performance dashboards help you optimize successful digital marketing campaigns that convert.