Next&Co has released its latest Digital Media Wastage Report, revealing that advertisers continued to waste more than $74 million in ad spend between July and September.
This amount of wastage sits at an average of 40 per cent of audited ad spend, down less than one per cent on the previous quarter.
Next&Co audited 32 companies with annual digital ad budgets of between $500,000 and $21 million across a mix of ASX-listed, multinational, national, and SME companies.
The data was compiled using Next&Co’s Prometheus proprietary media auditing tool, found that ecommerce brands wasted the most digital ad dollars last quarter at $20.2 million. This was followed by retail at $17.2 million, finance ($8.2 million), insurance ($7.4 million), education ($5.2 million), and other sectors ($16.4 million).
Across digital media channels, companies wasted the most ad spend on Google at $33 million, followed by Facebook ($31 million), LinkedIn ($6.7 million), and Bing ($2.9 million).
“Ad spend is still sitting at an industry high, but we are heading into a period where brands will need to think smarter, not harder about where and how they spend their money,” said Next&Co co-founder, John Vlasakakis (lead image).
“We have been using our Prometheus technology to audit brands across a range of sectors and it is clear that efficiency will be key for brands to succeed over the next year. Assessing the efficiency of media spend will be crucial, and also the thing that sets them apart from the competition.”
Next&Co’s Prometheus platform has now been used by more than 500 companies across Australia. Next & Co says it has the ability to tell advertisers exactly how much, and where, ad spend is being wasted on their digital platforms.
Prometheus has in-built KPIs for advertisers, including leads, customer conversions, ROI, and reach, enabling brands to choose their targets across each metric. The auditing tool then determines the exact wastage of their total annual digital spend in dollars and can identify where that wastage is occurring, campaign-by-campaign, and on a creative level.
It provides a score out of 100 on the overall performance of each metric and the exact dollar figure of ad spend wastage. The data is then individually audited for each type of advertising activity run within the tool and an individual score prepared for each.
Prometheus can also predict how many conversions advertisers could potentially achieve and make creative and cost per acquisition improvement recommendations.
