Digital Marketing is one of the largest advertising expenses a business can take on. Since the science behind digital marketing is growing as more and more data is collected, many of the kinks are being worked out with respect to wasted digital marketing spends. There are many reasons why digital marketing could be ineffective enough to be considered a wasted spend, with two being fraudulent/bot clicks and poor targeting.
Fraudulent clicks makes up a large part of wasted ad spend. While platforms such as Google AdWords attempt to mitigate and investigate fraudulent clicks, it is safe to say that detecting every single wasted click would be a near impossible job. Free analytics solutions don’t really provide the keys to making sure only legitimate traffic reaches a site either. While IPs and URLs can be excluded on platforms like Google Analytics, the interface can be cumbersome and less than straightforward. One solution is to operate on a custom analytics platform. Such a platform could be built that could tell via IP address, country of origin, or referral URL which clicks are likely fraudulent and compile this into a report for further analyzation. If these clicks are detected as being from advertising, a business would then have a good case towards getting some marketing dollars refunded from whatever advertising platform the traffic originated.
Another way digital marketing spend can be wasted is through poor or nonexistent targeting. Simply blasting out a display ad, boosting social content to a huge audience or using generic broad match keyword terms via PPC might be a way to get a lot of traffic, but much of this traffic is unqualified and unlikely to buy. A Zero Moment of Truth approach is to try and catch users when they are closest to buying. This ultimately means making sure to set targeting that makes sense with regards to interest, geography, demographic, time of day, etc. Narrowing down the audience will result in less traffic, but theoretically this traffic will be better traffic that is more interested in a product or service being offered.
All in all there are many reasons digital marketing dollars might be going to waste. Can you name some other basic checks a company should be doing to minimize wasteful spend?
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