Yes, you read that right. 

At TRU Venture Marketing, we’ve built, run, and tested:

• Thousands of Ads
• Hundreds of Landing Pages
• Dozens of Email Campaigns

All across multiple platforms. 

And the common retoric we still hear is “You need more content”. Which is true… sometimes. 

What you don’t hear, is what happens when you have too much content that isn’t up to par. 

Let’s look at this channel by channel:

When running ads on Facebook or Instagram:

While the Facebook ads platform does a fantastic job spending he majority of your budget on your top performing ads, it will never dedicate 100% of your budget to your best performing creative.

Let’s look at two scenarios: 

In the first, you launch 3 ads, let’s call them A, B, and C. Ad A is doing marginally better than the other two. Facebook will recognize this and choose a favorite based off of initial performance indicators such as click through rate (CTR), and cost per conversion. However, as anyone who has spent time advertising on Facebook could tell you, performance on the platform is limited. What happens is, old creative starts to see attrition, and eventually performance on your top ad will drop – but just because performance drops doesn’t mean that facebook will stop spending money on it. In this case, ad A faces so much attrition that it begins to underperform ads B and C, but spend continues on A, and ad spend goes down the drain. The solution: to keep a close eye on ads (or to use software such as Reveal Bot to do this for you), and shut off ads when they see attrition. 

In the second scenario: let’s say you are running 20 ads at once in one ad set — you have three ads which out perform the rest, but the other 17 are still on. Facebook will never spend 100% of the budget on the three top performers, and so your ROAS will see attrition just because your budget is being spread across low performance ads. 

I.e. If your champion ad has a CPC (Cost per Click) of $1.00, but 15% of your budget still goes to ads with a CPC of $2.00, your overall cost per action will be $1.15 – a 15% increase in cost. 

Yes, we’ve built, run, and tested hundreds of ads, and less than 5% of those ads are still running. 

For Google Adwords

Here, things are a bit more tricky, but the same concept is applicable. 

We’re all familiar with the 80-20 rule. 20% of the work we do provides 80% of the value. 

This concept holds remarkably true with Google Adwords. 

What we’ve seen here at TRU, is not rather, that our landing pages cause the bloat… what causes bloat is poor keyword selection. 

If we aren’t relentless about creating, testing, and yes, cutting out keywords- we see inflated ad costs. 

In Adwords, however, the key to success comes down to matching Ad Groups with the right ads, and the right ads with the proper landing pages. When we break each stage down, testing becomes imperative. And yes, taking a machete to that which is not working is the key to success.

For Email Marketing

This can easily become a gray area, however, when you are dealing with an email list with tens of thousands of members, the difference between a 1% conversion and a 2% conversion is a 100% difference in campaign performance. 

The key here is to test messaging and emails before hitting the whole list. And yes, in the spirit of keeping things lean, throwing out that which underperforms.

And of Course – For SEO

No, SEO is not something we often pitch at TRU Venture Marketing – that doesn’t mean we’re not up to date on the latest trends in search.

In the words of Brian Lester, a Marketing Specialist at TRU “If you look at any type of written content – the goal is to foster engagement. You don’t foster engagement by putting out a bunch of fluff – you foster engagement by producing good content.” he continues, “Sometimes, if you have 2-3 articles on one topic, the best play is to merge portions of the lower performing content into the top performer as a means of increasing relevancy and depth.” 

In fact, many of the leading experts in search have been saying the same for months, if not years now. Seriously, check out Neil Patel’s article Less is More: Why I Wish I Never Wrote 4,784 Blog Posts. 

To wrap things up:

Content creation is, and will continue to be critical for the success of marketing professionals, however, the big idea is that poor quality content drags down the performance of entire campaigns, and in order to stop that, it’s time to weed things out.