How to know if you’re over-investing in a media channel
AI and a lack of transparency behind automated decision-making on media buys is wasting brand budget. While they reduce the barrier to entry for some, money is often spent on appealing to current customers, instead of the difficult job of acquiring new ones.
Taylor Fielding, CEO of TFM Digital, explains.
Technology should always be viewed as a tool, and not a strategy in and of itself. Right now, those media buyers using Meta’s Creative Advantage+ or Google’s Performance Max (Pmax) are taking the path of least resistance and limiting their growth potential.
Growth for a brand comes from the hard stuff and if it’s your priority, Pmax and Meta Advantage+ are not for you.
Pmax campaigns can look like they’re delivering value on conversion and business outcomes, but we’ve had a number of clients complain that they don’t see any incremental lift in sales, despite investing more in AI-driven campaigns. Which can often lead to an over-investment across these platforms.
Clouded optimisation
Google’s Pmax aims to use machine learning and AI to optimise Google Ads across its suite of platforms, including search, Youtube, maps, and numerous others. Which is great for Google, as daily budgets are always now consumed by serving ads wider on its network to the likes of Youtube display or ads on shopping, no matter the volume of search terms recorded that day.
And for smaller or newer advertising brands that don’t have a marketing strategy to reengage with existing site visitors it can do a good job of talking to your existing audience.
However the new suite of AI features have not been without their complaints. Transparency has been a pivotal issue. Advertisers have found limited visibility and reporting for ad placements, poor targeting with a focus on brand-related keywords, leading to wasted budgets and many citing increased cost-per-lead.
For brands that put their faith in Google’s algorithm, we found some concerning issues. We put one brand’s recent ‘shared budget’ campaign through TFM Decoded, our internal auditing process, and found that only 3.31% of franchise locations had spent their allotted budget correctly.
Almost a third had overspent the marketing budget.
Only 7.5% of the budget was spent as it was intended. We were able to identify tens of thousands of optimisable spend by utilising that budget for reportable programmatic spend aimed at ‘in-market’ new customers. Programmatic allows for options to exclude previous converters.
PMax can maintain a customer base, and the numbers reported back may look impressive, but you won’t be getting in front of new customers. ROAS is the main culprit here as a return of 20-30% can mask any real growth for a brand.
Advertisers are unable to understand the full extent of the misrepresentation of its marketing impact until the campaign is live, whereas with Meta’s Creative AI, you can see changes and it’s obvious it doesn’t align.
To be honest, unless you have a holistic view of how your brand’s marketing is performing it may lure you into believing the ‘positive’ output it claims.
Taylor Fielding
Where next?
Google has sought to address some of the complaints by introducing a ‘search term visibility’ on ‘Search Query Reports’ (SQR)Terms’ report, offering advertisers the chance to see the ‘Search Query Reports’ triggered by their Pmax ads. However our internal reporting has found that around 40% of search queries end up in ‘other terms’, meaning that advertisers lose visibility on what those terms are. (Google confusingly cites ‘privacy thresholds’ or ‘low impression counts’ as reasons for this.)
The negative keyword summary limit has expanded from 100 to 10,000 – which seems like a step in the right direction, but if you still have less visibility on what people are searching, how can you optimise your negative keywords?
Despite the advancements that Google claims Pmax is able to perform, it still can’t do placements on Youtube, display, or shopping, nor can it utilise third-party audience targeting.
Want to target your audience effectively based on location, forget about it.
The PMax audience is often one achieved via bidding on brand-based terms. It can’t control what websites are preferred and to be honest the reporting isn’t much better.
Without being able to apply appropriate brand safety we’ve seen reports of brands’ content ended up in highly unwanted places. It’s possible that if your brand uses Pmax this is happening to you too.
Through programmatic advertising, there are more options available. The Integral Ad Science (IAS), which is deployed to provide brand safety parameters (e.g. ad fraud, viewability and safe content), is TFM’s preferred ad fraud provider. It delivers a greater level of transparency of where content ends up. These features don’t seem to exist on the likes of Pmax and Advantage+.
Regaining some control
For marketers, and any advertisers, it’s worth getting this right. If you’re a marketer spending tens of thousands monthly on digital advertising, it would be worth conducting an audit for your brand and seeing whether there is an over-investment in any of the platforms you use.
Agencies offer a greater level of objectivity, given they work across multiple businesses, and are able to apply learnings from one sector to another while spotting for inefficiencies and automated errors, which may limit a brand.
While internal teams may be great at getting results, the longer someone is with the brand, the less objective they can become.
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Nice article.
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