CPA is the holy grail for digital marketers – but I didn’t need to tell you that. What happens when there are forces working against you? Research shows up to $ 37 billion of worldwide marketing budgets are being wasted on poor digital marketing performance.
That’s why we’re covering 4 reasons why digital marketers can’t afford to waste precious ad spend.
1. Digital Marketing Spend Is Growing
As television, print, and radio continue to take a back seat for marketers, digital is surging ahead. Digital marketing will account for 45% of all ad spending by 2020, and is set to surpass TV ad spending next year.
Even though digital marketers are used to defending their budget, it’s critical to not let any budget go to waste as more and more marketing spend shifts to digital channels.
2. The Need to Measure Cross-Channel Influence
Digital marketers juggle campaigns across multiple channels, and it’s clear we need to measure the full impact of these campaigns across every channel and device consumers use. Without this insight, data gets disjointed, we’re not accurately optimizing our campaigns, and budget is placed in jeopardy. For example, one study analyzed mobile search results and found that they saw a 6.3% lift after mobile searchers were exposed to ads on Facebook.
Then, to get a wholly accurate picture of your CPA, digital marketers must capture every conversion. One item that’s often overlooked in this analysis are customer calls. Customers are calling businesses by the billions from digital marketing (in fact, 108 billion this year). Offline conversions shouldn’t be ignored. By not using call attribution technology to measure customer calls, many marketers miss 49% of their conversions. They are then optimizing on incomplete data – and wasting spend.
3. Poor Targeting and Consumer Relevance
There is simply too much ad clutter in today’s market to not efficiently target your audience. The average adult is exposed to 362 ads each day, and thousands more brand exposures. This inevitably leads to wasted budget – digital marketers end up throwing money at campaigns in hopes of increasing conversions. But that’s not really helping CPA, is it?
While targeting may bring a slightly higher price tag to your digital ads, 55% of US consumers feel strongly that personalization helps them avoid irrelevant content and wasted time. Not to mention that when you personalize ads based on their previous purchase history it drives a 39% increase in future purchase intent. And this relates back to point #2: with complete data, including how people convert both online and offline, you’ll be able to better target these audiences.
4. The Ad Blocking Battle
While the number of people actually blocking ads is still small, this is a practice digital marketers must pay attention to. We’ve discussed the growing threat before, and that’s the reality – it’s growing. (Especially on mobile, where 1 in 3 users are already using ad blocking technology.)
Relevancy is crucial to stem ad blocking growth among Internet users. If digital marketers can position their content as useful instead of intrusive, they’re set up to engage consumers. Otherwise you end up wasting budget to reach the right audience, even with good targeting, and ultimately hurt your CPA.
Understanding the customer journey and unifying your reporting is the first step for digital marketers who want to increase efficiency in their budget. Learn more about unifying online and offline conversion reporting in our eBook, Calls and the New Customer Journey: How Marketers Drive Revenue by Mastering the Call Channel.
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