Imagine your advertising campaign unexpectedly running at 5 times the budget.
If your technology stack can't keep up, you're now paying huge amounts to send visitors to a page that loads slowly, or that drops connection entirely.
A short audit of your systems before you start scaling up can help find weak spots while they're still fixable.
Uptime and hosting headroom
When you start up an advertising campaign, the resulting traffic arrives in waves.
A campaign launching across several channels at once can multiply your normal load within minutes, and that's when it puts your hosting plan to the test.
You should test for headroom by running a test load at your expected peak levels and watching the response times as the visitor numbers climb.
Monitoring tools such as the following can help keep you in the loop:
- Uptime Robot
- Pingdom
- Better Stack
You can figure out potential downtime by looking at your chosen tech services' uptime SLA and converting the percentage into a real figure.
A 99.9% guarantee still allows for around 8.76 hours of downtime per year.
A 99.99% guarantee looks similar on paper, but that cuts the expected downtime to about 53 minutes, and the difference can matter a lot during an advertising campaign when every hour of downtime means an hour of wasted advertising budget.
These tools can inform you that your website and services are down, which can help prevent you from paying for advertising for a broken page.
Boost landing page speed for conversions
Fast page loading is one of the most effective ways to get conversions.
According to Google Research, when mobile page load speed rises from 1 second to 5 seconds, the chance a visitor backs out of loading the page goes up by 90%.
At 10 seconds, the chances are raised by 123%.
These days, slow pages also rank significantly worse because Google uses page experience as a ranking signal. A slow page costs you all kinds of traffic.
Use services like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to test your landing speed metrics and apply the following fixes if your speeds aren't quick enough:
- Number one, compress images and make them the best size
- Number two, defer scripts that are not needed initially
- Number three, serve static assets through a CDN
You should do these steps before you start scaling up, as you don't want to end up paying thousands of dollars to route visitors towards a slow page.
Connect your CRM and analytics
Scaled advertising spend tends to disappear in places you can't see, and your CRM and analytics setup is one of the most common.
You will be optimizing your campaigns on broken data if your forms don't send leads to your CRM or your conversion events don't work as they should.
Confirm that a test lead is submitted through the entire path and that it is received by your CRM with the appropriate source attribution prior to scaling.
In recent years, browser privacy changes have weakened client-side tracking.
Consequently, a significant number of teams now employ server-side tagging to ensure that their conversion data is able to pass through ad blockers and cookie limits.
As advertising operations become more dependent on connected platforms and customer data, reliable IT support becomes increasingly important.
Many growing businesses supplement their internal resources with specialized tech services providers that help maintain analytics integrations, troubleshoot infrastructure issues, secure business systems, and ensure critical marketing data flows correctly between platforms.
A few tools worth looking at are the following:
- HubSpot or Pipedrive for the CRM side
- GA4 with Google Tag Manager for analytics
- Segment for sending the same event to several destinations at once
Set your security baselines
A spike in traffic elevates your profile among attackers as much as it does with clients, and a hacked advertising account can quickly deplete your funds for campaigns run by others.
Although a complete enterprise security program is not necessary before scaling, there are some baselines that cannot be compromised:
- Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere, starting with your advertising accounts and payment tools
- Keep your software patched and put a web application firewall in front of your site
- Store any shared credentials in a password manager instead of a spreadsheet, and review who has access to your advertising and analytics accounts
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a logical choice for those seeking a free framework to organize this work.
Email compliance for advertising firms
If your advertising firm relies on email for things like the following, you need to make sure they're deliverable:
- Welcome sequences
- Receipts
- Vouchers
Mailbox providers have tightened up the rules, and since February 2024, Google has required anyone sending more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts to authenticate themselves using SPF and DKIM and to publish a DMARC record.
Bulk senders also have to offer one-click unsubscribe buttons and keep their spam complaints low. Non-compliant mail is being rejected significantly.
Even if you're sitting below the 5,000 limit, you should still set up your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC now.
When running a scaled campaign, it's easy to cross that line without realizing it, and you can end up triggering spam filters at the worst possible moment.
It always pays off to check beforehand to make sure your email services stay online throughout the course of an advertising push.
Back up your data and plan for disaster recovery
Data backups can be the difference between inconvenience and crisis.
According to CISA recommendations, you should keep three copies of your data, and those three copies should include two types of media, with at least one copy being stored off-site to prevent physical damage.
The off-site copy is important because, in an event like a fire or a break-in, the physical data in your building could all be compromised.
An off-site backup ensures recovery in such a situation.
Having backups doesn't mean you're safe. If they're untested, schedule a test restore and see how long it takes to bring your systems back online.
Pay attention to software packages like Microsoft 365.
Teams often make the mistaken assumption that Microsoft keeps copies of their email files, but the default retention policies are quite limited.
So if your company is hit with ransomware or something similar, it could mean your team's email inboxes are gone forever without access to another backup.
Understand the importance of customer data.
In the age of AI, when machine learning algorithms and AI-driven analysis are enabling unprecedented insight into customer behavior and preferences, you can't afford to lose that data to a cybercrime.
It makes sense to bring in outside help because regional managed IT service providers can harden your network and tighten up your security settings, producing a tested disaster recovery plan that will help you to keep your systems online and safe and secure during key advertising pushes.
A solid foundation pays for itself
Optimizing and securing your tech stack is crucial, but too often the sense of urgency only builds when a crisis emerges.
An optimized tech stack will cost time and money, but once it's done, it only has to avert a crisis once to pay for itself.
With a solid foundation, you've got a scaled advertising campaign that is much more likely to be successful.
If you're interested in learning more about getting the most out of technology, see the rest of our blog posts for more explorations of this topic.