In the current digital advertising environment, ad waste has become a major concern for businesses. Whether it’s ads shown to irrelevant audiences or creatives that fail to engage users, squandered ad spend reduces marketing budgets without generating a return on investment.
Estimates suggest that ad fraud, poor targeting, and technical glitches may squander up to half of all online advertising expenditures. Companies seeking to maximize the impact of their advertising expenditures must address ad waste. Optimizing ad delivery and targeting to eradicate irrelevant impressions can significantly increase conversion rates and reduce costs.
Here is where 6sMarketer can assist you. 6sMarketer, a prominent ad optimization platform, focuses on preventing ad waste and ensuring that every ad impression has the potential to engage consumers. Their unique solutions enable marketers to refine targeting, enhance creative messaging, and detect deception — all to optimize ad spending to its fullest extent.
What is Ad Waste?
Ad waste significantly impacts company finances, as a recent study found that Asia-Pacific companies wasted over $53 million on Facebook ads and $10.7 million on Bing ads, too, from January to March 2022.
Ad waste specifically refers to impressions that do not reach the intended target audience or ad experiences that do not meaningfully engage consumers. A few main categories of advertising waste can undermine efforts to optimize the advertising budget and the performance of advertising campaigns. Irrelevant impressions result when platforms show ads to individuals who have little interest in the promoted product or service.
These impressions do not affect key metrics such as leads, signups, or purchases. Advertising that appears off-screen or for a brief moment usually causes problems. Additionally, ad experiences that users actively avoid contribute to expenditure waste. This includes ads that shutter too rapidly, auto-playing videos, and excessively large/disruptive formats. Ads also waste money if people do not pay attention to them. If an ad does not stick in someone’s mind, it will not work to get new customers.
For the purpose of ad campaign optimization, each of these situations represents a wasted advertising budget invested without accomplishing the desired results of increasing brand awareness or driving users to a call to action. They are, by definition, wasted impressions with no return on investment.
Causes of Ad Waste
Understanding the fundamental causes of ad waste is essential to addressing the problem and preventing future marketing budget mismanagement. Let’s explore each of these key causes in greater depth.
Lack of Data-Driven Insight
As modern consumers become more fragmented across platforms, devices, and channels and spend significantly more time and money online, brands require granular consumer insight that goes beyond analyzing actions to map attitudes, behaviors, and motivations comprehensively.
Without this level of understanding of their target audience, brands will struggle to know them well enough to provide the consistent, personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect across touchpoints. Therefore, without data-driven insights to steer their decisions, marketers run the risk of wasting valuable marketing expenditures on ineffective campaigns that fail to resonate.
Uninformed Media Planning
When substantial budgets and long-term brand equity are at stake with each campaign, every aspect must be meticulously planned in advance using objective consumer research and testing. This includes optimizing elements such as advertisement placement and copy, campaign scheduling, targeting parameters, and budget allocation across channels.
For example, although digitally savvy consumers discover new brands through digital advertising, advertisements must be strategically placed in the most effective environments and formats to cut through the din and have the greatest impact. Without forethought, buying several ads might squander money. Without appropriate planning, companies might waste money on ineffective marketing.
Poor Targeting
Ads will waste money if they don’t really interest the right people. Companies need to make ads that appeal to customers looking for what they sell. If ads don’t speak to these people, a big part of the budget may go to people who will never buy things. They will never become regular customers, either. Companies need ads that attract the correct audience.
A local business runs the risk of wasting advertising funds if it does not geographically target its ads. People outside their service area who view an irrelevant ad are wasting impressions.
Ad Blocking and Avoidance
Ad-blocking software lets users disable ads on their devices, which some say enhances their online experiences. This also implies marketers’ creatives may not reach their targets.
While there are no ideal workarounds, harmonizing awareness campaigns across channels with formats that are less intrusive, such as email and social media, can help optimize reach among consumers using ad blockers and reduce potential budget waste.
Preventing Ad Waste
Although a certain amount of ad waste may be unavoidable, marketers can minimize unnecessary expenditures through strategic optimization techniques. Let’s look at some tactics that can help you prevent ad waste:
Focus on Branding
Developing a brand that is genuine and resonates with target audiences is essential for minimizing wasted impressions. Customers will be more receptive to creatives from brands they recognize, like, and trust. Investing in a brand’s long-term viability ensures a better response to new campaigns through more pertinent targeting.
Find Your Audience
Utilizing first-party data and consumer profiles to thoroughly understand attitudes, behaviors, and pain points enables pinpoint targeting by demographics, location, and other factors. Ads that are more pertinent maximize ad efficiency by reducing the amount spent on those who are unlikely to convert. Tools like 6sMarketer provide insights for identifying customers with high lifetime value for campaigns that are highly optimized and minimize ad waste.
Optimize Messages as the Campaign Runs
Continuous A/B testing of creative elements such as headlines, images, and text permits real-time optimization based on user engagement. Marketers can emphasize elements that increase click-through rates or time spent on a website while refining or eliminating weaker elements to enhance performance. This method maximizes the value of each marketing dollar while minimizing the number of impressions wasted on ineffective creatives.
Optimize your Landing Page
Ensuring marketers optimize landing pages for usability, load swiftly on all devices, and contain relevant information and calls to action maintains customer engagement and reduces abandon rates. Testing elements such as layouts, forms, and copy keeps pages converting visitors into leads, thereby minimizing wasteful post-click impressions.
Avoid Over-Diversifying
While testing various ad variations and formats is beneficial, marketers who spread budgets too widely across too many campaigns run the risk of wasting budgets. Before diversifying further, marketers should initially divide initial budgets to the top-performing channels and formats, as determined through testing and analytics. This helps to concentrate efforts and reduce wasteful spending.
Target the Right Times
Utilizing data on customer lifecycles and prime online and purchase periods for products/services enables the targeting of the most receptive audiences during their most likely conversion periods. This timing optimization reduces impressions that occur when leads are unlikely to convert, thereby minimizing ad spending wasted on ineffective leads.
Use the Right Keywords
Testing various keyword combinations reveals the phrases with the highest intent that generate qualified traffic via search/display ads. Refining keyword lists to emphasize these converting keywords reduces wasteful impressions from queries with low intent that are unlikely to result in the desired action. This optimization increases the quality of leads and reduces ad waste.
By focusing on these strategies, marketers can significantly improve ad efficiency, reduce wasteful ad spending, and more effectively optimize their diminishing marketing budgets. 6sMarketer’s tools automate many of these optimization best practices for ongoing campaign refinement and reduced ad waste.
Why Choose 6sMarketer to Combate Ad Waste?
Setup Product Listing Ads (PLA)
The PLA specialists at 6sMarketer assist businesses in establishing and optimizing their Google Shopping campaigns. They analyze catalog data to meet Google requirements for accurate product listings. Professionals write targeted product titles, descriptions, images, and bids to increase click-through rates, outperform competitors, and reduce wasteful ad spend.
Review and Improve Campaigns
Regular campaign audits identify optimization opportunities to improve performance and lower marketing expenses. A 6sMarketer examines metrics such as view-through conversions and audience data to refine targeting, placements, and creative elements. The budget allocates to the top-performing ad groups to maximize ROI.
Ads Account Setup
6sMarketer skillfully configures Google Ads accounts for new clients with customized settings, monitoring, and reporting for actionable insights.
Write Ads Copies
Professionally written ad copies emphasizing unique value propositions and benefits have increased click-through rates compared to generic advertisements. The 6sMarketer develops persuasive, targeted messages.
Landing Page Optimization
Optimization services ensure that landing pages are seamlessly incorporated with ads to provide pertinent content that maintains customers’ interest. This optimization reduces ad spending lost due to subpar post-click experiences.
Wrapping Up
Ad waste has become a significant problem that costs marketers billions of dollars annually in misallocated budgets. Ads that fail to reach their intended audiences or engage users provide no return on investment. However, with the appropriate optimization strategies and tools, businesses can reduce ad waste significantly.
6sMarketer provides a comprehensive suite of digital marketing solutions to prevent wasted ad spend. Their specialized services maximize ROI by optimizing targeting, creative messaging, landing page experiences, and more.
Contact one of their digital marketing specialists today to find out how 6sMarketer can audit your current campaigns and provide suggestions to reduce ad waste. Complimentary campaign analysis is the initial step toward optimizing your future advertising investments.
FAQs
How can I measure the amount of ad waste in my campaigns?
Analyze metrics such as view-through conversions, location data, device categories, and audience interests to determine the most effective ads, placements, and targets.
What is the difference between reach and impressions?
Reach is the number of distinct individuals who view an advertisement. Search engines count impressions each time they advertise so that a single individual can view the same advertisement multiple times.
How do I optimize targeting to reduce wasted impressions?
Utilize first-party data and customer profiles to target advertisements to the most likely-to-convert audiences based on demographics, location, purchase history, and interests.
What is an irrelevant impression?
An irrelevant impression occurs when a search engine advertises a person who has no interest in the advertised product or service and is unlikely to take action.
How do I prevent users from blocking ads?
Focus on formats that are less intrusive, such as email and social, and optimize ad relevance so that fewer users feel compelled to use ad blockers. There is no complete alternative.
What is the view-through conversion rate?
The proportion of conversions that occur when a user observes an advertisement but does not act on it. Helps measure the efficacy of impressions without clicks.
How often should I review campaign performance?
Set a minimum of monthly evaluations, but consider weekly analysis of high-budget campaigns in order to identify optimization opportunities faster.
How to increase view-through conversion rate?
You can increase your view-to-conversion rate with clear call-to-action, ensuring mobile-friendliness, conduct A/B testing, build trust with testimonials, simplifying checkout and offer incentives, etc. along with regularly analyzing analytics for ongoing refinement.
