With countless forms of marketing available to businesses these days, knowing where to begin can be a tricky endeavor. Whether targeting email lists, social media, search engines or something entirely different, each platform and channel requires a specific approach in order to deliver optimal results.

Yet all too often, basic mistakes and failures occur that can jeopardize online campaigns regardless of format. Some basic rules apply no matter the platform, which means understanding how to avoid them is more crucial than ever.

Online ad campaigns in particular can be rife with lost potential: let’s take a look at what you can do to resuscitate any efforts in this arena that currently are not producing results.

Your Audience Data Is Flawed

For many PPC campaign situations, there is no ability to use a platform to garner research before publishing various ads. While some platforms (most notably Google) help brands uncover important details about their audience beforehand, you’re forced to start out pinging noise (potentially) at audiences on most other platforms, only to then uncover whether or not your assumptions about an audience were true.

Likewise, you may very well have existing customer and audience data that you’ve exported and subsequently imported into your recent efforts. While this can be very useful, if certain basic assumptions are incorrect in the data – or seemingly identical audiences are in fact very different from platform to platform in terms of behavior – then your data could be inherently flawed.

Your Audience Isn’t Interested in What You’re Offering

Speaking of differences among audiences across different platforms, what may work for an ad campaign in one situation may not in another. Different users, even if they have the same interests, can behave very differently depending on where they are. Individuals interested in the latest shoe fashions on Pinterest will likely have fundamentally different consumer behaviors and conversion tendencies than individuals who see a Google PPC ad from your brand. In knowing this, there is strength.

Furthermore, your target audience may simply not be who you think it is: some platforms only allow targeting based on broad-based behaviors and select socioeconomic characteristics. While it may be possible to more accurately filter down audience profiles using such data, it is not always guaranteed. Ultimately, your ads may not be working because they aren’t designed for the people who are seeing them.

Your Campaigns Aren’t Using A/B Testing

Every successful brand in the PPC game knows that a variance of ads is necessary for optimal performance. The simplest way to ensure your ad sets are featuring a variety of successful ads is to embrace the notion of A/B testing.

By taking seemingly one ad campaign or set and splitting it into multiple unique ads – each with different messaging, multimedia and even landing pages – you’ll begin to uncover which styles resonate most broadly with your audience. While you’ll undoubtedly find yourself pinging noise at audiences with some of your initial choices, that is the point: to find out which strategies work and which ones do not.

Online ad campaigns can fail for a variety of reasons, but these three examples are the most common culprits. Now that you know where to re-center your efforts, you can quickly improve the quality of your ads and send your digital marketing efforts in the right direction.