Are your ad dollars going to waste? Learn how to find out.

Media buyers should provide detailed ROI for your campaigns

In the ad industry, there are countless iterations of the sentiment that money is wasted because there’s no accurate way to tell how your advertising investments and strategy are performing. With today’s plethora of data and analytics tools, the “we hope the ads are working” mindset is a representation of the past. Or so you’d think.

This year, I met with executives puzzled over their return on investment from the advertising dollars they spend on their target audience. I asked basic questions to help them interpret the data they should have at hand, such as what is your average customer acquisition cost? They had no idea. Astonishingly, their chosen media vendor provides them only with impressions and click-thru rates. In today’s world of metrics available at every turn, that’s inexcusable. At best, it’s bad information; at worst, it’s unethical.

Media companies that place your buy and just let it bake in the market are operating 15 years in the past

If you’re not getting a true representation of ROI from your media agency, it’s time to start asking these questions — the ones you should have ensured they could answer when you were hiring an agency.

• How much is the vendor spending — on each platform, across each segment and on each piece of creative?
• What’s my combined CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action), across channels and across audiences? 
• What’s my true ROI? What’s going to drive value for my company, and how is my media getting more of it for me?
• How am I getting more efficient over time? The goal eventually is to spend less and realize greater return.
• When, where and how are my leads converting? What does success look like across different attribution models? (Top-of-funnel metrics alone are not good enough!)

Media companies that place your buy and just let it bake in the market are operating 15 years in the past. Ask the right questions, demand real-time data, transparency and a team dedicated to you, and you’ll know to the penny what your ROI is without wasting a penny.