Half your media spend is wasted - which half is it?

Marketing practitioners know the truism: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". Modern marketing click attribution should mean you know more than John Wanamaker did when he said that.

Justifying your marketing media spend budget is easier when you have robust data on which to base your bid for media budget. Datamine's proprietary "Big Wave" model is the foundation of our media effectiveness and optimisation solution.

Australian brands spent $14.2 billion on digital advertising in 2022, according to IAB Australia. Yet the digital giants controlling online advertising are rarely transparent about critical data points. Practitioners interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald in September 2023 cited misclassified adverts being served to the wrong audience as a key frustration.

The proliferation of media means campaign plans rarely focus solely on one channel. But how do you know you are getting the right mix of media? And are you wasting spend on channels, people or periods that won’t deliver the results you’re looking for?

Here’s how to find out.

Advertising effectiveness model

With the emphasis on digital clicks to measure marketing success, it’s easy to forget that it’s not about reaching the most people - it’s about reaching the right ones. Knowing who your target audience is and how to reach them improves your digital advertising effectiveness.

Using your brand's historic advertising data, we can determine which of your campaign activities see the most significant ROI. Funnily enough, it's not always the 'best performing' campaign that generates the most recurring revenue.

You can reveal your best-performing campaigns through data modelling and media optimisation.

The first is through data modelling – Datamine's proprietary 'Big Wave' model uses historical situations and variables to create a baseline and determine what should have happened and how important different factors are to the result. Click here to read how retailers get an accurate sales baseline for marketing campaigns, operations, and market share.

Another angle that gives insight is a media effectiveness and optimisation project. It provides solid evidence for developing your media schedule and offers clues on how much, where, and when you should advertise.

How does it work?

The first step in this project is accessing and cleaning up your advertising data. Datamine looks at metrics such as the following:

Time and date of advertisements
Mediums
Sub-channels used (e.g. which TV channel, which website, which newspaper)
Type of advertisement (campaign, product)
Physical layout of advertisements
Number of impressions
Customer and purchase information
Call centre information

This baseline can be interrogated to determine:

Who is buying what (and when) across the year.
Whether new competitors have entered the market.
Which media combinations are having a more direct effect on transaction volumes.
The impact of different placement within a channel (e.g. sections of a newspaper).
How to reallocate spend for different times of the year to stay ahead of competitors and optimise for seasonality.
How to adjust offers and experiment with alternative channels.
What’s controllable and what’s not.