20 Billion $ of Ad Spend is Wasted!? How can we avoid this?

"Learn from past mistakes, but it's even better to avoid them!" This saying holds true in the world of digital advertising.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that 23% of programmatic dollars, or about $20 billion out of $83 billion, was wasted. But what if there was a way to avoid this wastage and maximize the outcomes of ad performance?

The Problem of Wasted Ad Spends

Wasted ad spends can significantly impact business growth. Digital ads are often oversold based on the number of people who buy after clicking on them. The issue arises when a majority of these people are likely to make a purchase anyway, even without the ad's prompt or that some of them may not buy even after clicking the ad multiple times. An alarming study revealed that the effectiveness of brand search ad was overestimated by up to 4,100%, and for Facebook ads, the number was a staggering 4,000%. The pertinent question here is: which part of the advertising budget is truly wasted?

The Solution: Advertisers CDP

Enter Advertisers Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDPs have emerged as a crucial technology infrastructure layer for businesses aiming to manage customer data and use it for business value but not all CDPs are created equal. While unifying first-party data and pushing it out to advertising channels is a common use case, a CDP can also be instrumental in driving ad spend savings for a company by ingesting Ad campaign data in realtime, visualizing performing vs non performing campaigns and connecting ad to transact journeys of the customers to bring visibility into which ads are truly leading to ROAS Impact.

How Does an Advertisers CDP Minimize Wasted Ad Spends?

Advertisers CDP offers several strategies to improve ad spends:

1. Connect Campaign level data with Business Impact data - One of the primary ways to enhance ad spend and reduce wastage is by removing individuals who currently aren't in the market for your product or shouldn't be receiving your ads from your ad activations. An Advertisers CDP can connect your ad campaign data at a line item level with your business impact data be it leads or sales. This ensures that you don't spend money on display or social campaigns that won't drive business goals.
2. Focusing Your Remarketing in Growing the LTV and lowering CAC: With a CDP, you can narrow down your best customers into audience segments and multiple micro-audiences, reducing noise and finding more accurate audiences. By targeting smaller, more relevant audiences, you can increase your return on ad spend and retargetting to customers are that truly going to buy more from you.
3. Decreasing Retargeting Pools: Often, retargeting audiences are automatically added based on visitors to a page/site who don't take the required action. However, with CDP, you can avoid adding a customer to a retargeting pool if they are already in your database and are being marketed as a known profile. You can move such audiences to remarketing by email, sms and whatsapp or any channel more effective than advertising of the ad spend is not delivering additional ROAS. This improves the overall customer experience and lowers costs because you're not targeting a device with ads even though they are customers/prospects on another device【20†source】.

Advertisers CDP do one thing very differently to other CDPs, they bring all of your ad signal data i.e. all your campaign data, targetting data, ad performance data and post click customer behavior on your assets in a single 360 profile of the customer. Hence your ad to transact journey about a customer/prospect is enriched in realtime and and systematically available to other systems to make them smarter and more efficient. By eliminating data silos and manual list loads from various sources, all these strategies can be automated, a big win for resource-strapped marketing departments.

The ReBid Solution

We at ReBid believe that marketers need to rely on real-time tech and not people when it comes to identifying what's working and what's getting wasted in their Ad spends. We've built an Advertisers CDP that brings in data from 15+ ad platforms and build a 360 view of your customers journey from ad to acquisition. We overlay this data with state of the art visualisation that makes business impact.

For eg. We have a live ad performance dashboard that can track real-time which of your search, social, programmatic, and native campaigns are performing and which are not. ReBid is an Advertisers CDP that empowers large advertisers to maximize ad performance outcomes!

In conclusion, the shift towards data-driven decisions is crucial in today's digital advertising landscape. The wasted ad spend problem is pervasive, and its impact on business growth is significant. The solution lies in adopting technologies like Advertisers CDP to leverage real-time insights, minimize wasted ad spends, and optimize ad performance outcomes. As the saying goes, it's great to learn from past mistakes, but it's even better to avoid them. And with the right tools at our disposal, we can do just that. So why not take the leap and explore the benefits of an Advertisers CDP like ReBid for your business?