Whether you’re an agency working with a series of established clients or a marketer that has used the online channel for a long time, it is easy to fall into a rut with your online advertising campaigns.

Once you’ve found something that works, the temptation is always strong to stick with it. But you shouldn’t ignore the opportunity to improve return on investment from online advertising by making a few small adjustments. It’s also critical to keep improving your campaigns to stay ahead of a market where users are becoming increasingly sophisticated and jaded.

Here are a few ways of touching up your campaigns and making them shine anew.

Optimise your campaigns frequently

The most obvious way of freshening up online planning is to simply tweak the frequency with which you optimise your campaigns. It’s easy to settle for routine and simply optimise once a month, but that might mean missing opportunities to improve your conversion rates. Increasing the frequency of optimisation (from once a month to once every two weeks, for example) might improve your success metrics by a few percent; it might not. You’ll never know until you try.

Look to rich media

South African companies still under-use rich media and count on the same old banner and search engine campaigns to make their online advertising work. However, our experience shows that rich media ads have a response rate that is two to three times better than standard ads because they’re interactive and grab a user’s attention.

Rich media ads are developed using multimedia technologies such as scripts, animation, audio and streaming video. Experiment with these technologies as a way of drawing your audience into your adverts. Rich media ads come in a range of formats and sizes – try seeing which work best for you.

Optimise your creative

One of the most significant benefits of online advertising is that it allows you to trace the success of your campaign, and easily and cost-effectively make adjustments that improve ROI. The impact of your creative will determine whether a user will follow your call to action or not, so it’s worth testing and optimising creative in a number of sophisticated ways. Try out different colours, copy, sizes, screen placements, images and more, to see which of them works best and use this information to optimise your campaign.

Try landing page optimisation

So many online marketers invest heavily in putting together stunning creative and placing their ads on the country’s most popular web sites, yet don’t give a second thought to the page a user will arrive on after he or she has clicked on an ad.

It’s a good idea to experiment with different landing pages to see which of them are most successful in driving the behaviour you want from your audience. All too often users simply end up on a company’s home page, left to their own devices to find information about the product advertised in your ad. Does it work best to direct a user to a page that offers detailed product information, or to send the user to a registration form? Which headlines and body content work best out of a set of options? These are questions that are worth asking and answering through experimentation.

Online is now an established channel for advertising and marketing, but that doesn’t mean that we should simply do the same things over and again because we know they work. The pace of change and innovation in online advertising is as quick as it ever was – online media planners and marketers cannot afford to become complacent.

Jacqui Boyd is director of Online Media – Acceleration Media. Acceleration Media is a media strategy, planning and buying company that helps agencies and marketers maximise their use of online media. For more information, visit www.acceleration.biz