Australian digital ad wastage up $50 million from last year
Australian advertisers are losing record amount of money into digital black holes, with digital ad wastage up $25 million in just three months.
According to Next&Co’s quarterly Digital Media Wastage report, advertisers wasted $123.1 million in digital advertising dollars in the second quarter of 2024, up from $98 million during the first three months of 2014 – and close to $50 million higher than wastage for the same period in 2023.
This latest ad wastage figure represents an average of 44% across total audited digital media spend, and marks one of the highest quarterly amounts recorded – with wastage usually sitting between $70-110 million.
According to Next&Co, who compiled the data from their own Prometheus proprietary media auditing tool, this “represents the millions of advertising dollars that failed to further digital advertising objectives across a range of verticals, including real estate, retail, insurance, finance and FMCG”.
The report audited 37 companies with digital ad budgets of between $500,000 and $21 million were audited, with a make-up of multinational (42%), national (357), ASX-listed (11%), and SME (10%) companies.
Google advertising was responsible for $55.4 million of wasted spend – up nearly $20 million on the previous quarter — beating Facebook and Instagram, with Meta’s platform’s responsible for $52.9 million in wasted advertising. Lower down were the likes of Bing, with $8.6 million wasted, and $6.1 million on LinkedIn.
Retail brands recorded the highest amount of wasted digital ad dollars at $48 million, followed by the finance sector with $32 million, followed by real estate ($16 million), insurance ($11 million), health ($8.6 million) and education ($7.3 million).
Next&Co co-founder, John Vlasakakis, said: “It’s astounding that, given the national cost-of-living crisis impacting consumer spending and shrinking advertising budgets nationwide, digital advertising spend wastage has peaked in the last few months. The digital ad spend waste trend line is definitely moving in the wrong direction and this is concerning.
“Now more than ever, brands need to look closely at their ad performance and really understand their wastage levels. There is no room for wasted advertising dollars – brands must ensure every dollar they are spending is delivering results. In this economic climate, understanding the exact ROI on your advertising spend could be the difference in maintaining client confidence and short and long-term success.”
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Can the article define “waste”
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Why can’t they clearly define waste? Is it because their definition can be picked apart? It’s an arbitrary term like ‘effective’. Effective against what?
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Ummm … waste. Money? Time? Contacts? Results?
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As others have said, what do they define as waste? Are they across every media plan, in order to understand the objectives of every single client and campaign included?
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