Steps to Tighten Your Digital Marketing Budget

Update March 23, 2016

If you’re a digital marketer, there’s a good chance your digital marketing budget is leaking and you may not be aware of it. With so many measurable aspects of digital marketing, it can be easy to overlook the areas where your budget is dripping.

We’ve discovered a few common places where you may need to tighten up, your digital marketing budget and offer suggestions to help.

Frequency

Did you know that roughly 4% of a digital marketing budget is wasted by targeting the same group of users over and over again? It’s true — those ads that seem to shadow you after you looked at a product but didn’t buy it are wasted when you’ve already made up your mind not to purchase. It would serve a marketer’s budget well to identify their frequency cutoffs (the number of impressions made daily or per campaign) and trim the fat in this area. The repeat impressions should be funneled towards users who haven’t been exposed to the ad at all.

Frauds

The number of ad impressions attributed to fraudulent bots is the curse of many analytics, and the cause of some painful budget drains. A quick summation, in case you’re unfamiliar with the topic of digital fraud: bots mimic human activity on the web, and create false data for impressions and views that lead marketers to invest advertising money on sites that aren’t actually getting traffic from humans. To combat this problem, it’s suggested to partner with a third-party monitoring company that specializes in identifying suspicious traffic. These companies can save your budget from leaking valuable dollars to robots instead of potential human clients.

Behavioral targeting

It’s common for marketers to capitalize on obvious targeting opportunities, like exposing a user to a different brand of the same product he or she is searching for. Someone looking for an iPhone may soon see ads for an Android, for example. Going deeper into a buyer’s behavior has the potential to salvage 8% of a digital marketing budget. For example, is there a specific time of year when consumers are more likely to buy? Near the holidays, or as kids are going off to college? Capitalizing on these yet-untargeted behaviors can plug a hole in your budget that would easily go overlooked.

by Christine Kelly

CEO and Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC