Advertisers using FouAnalytics know which "half" to save
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”
Practically everyone in advertising and marketing has used this Wanamaker quote jokingly over the years. But would any CEO or CFO consider it a joke to lose half of their digital budgets to fees, fraud, and waste?
The "50%" has been corroborated many times over by studies commissioned by industry trade bodies (4 examples above) -- at least 50 cents on every dollar spent by advertisers does not go towards showing ads, but rather to middlemen margins, tech fees, or "went missing" -- the infamous "unknown delta" of the ISBA 2020 study. This is even before taking into account fraud and waste. That's a 50% tax before ad fraud and other forms of waste. In what other industry would companies willingly pay a 50% tax? What consumer would be OK with paying for 10 oranges and only getting 5 to take home?
Also consider the fact that every adtech middleman is maximizing their own revenues and profits by taking the largest cut possible for themselves. Their fees are usually CPM+ (mark up on the CPM) or hidden in the media CPM. This is a problem because it effectively hides the "take rates" from advertisers. This is the "transparency" problem everyone has been talking about, but the suggested solution of getting log-level data will not solve.
Have a look at the data in the 2 slides below. How much of the advertisers' dollar goes to publishers for showing ads -- i.e. "working media" if SSPs take "up to 99%" and DSPs take "up to 99%"? This is conveniently blended away in the averages shown to advertisers in month-end excel spreadsheets.
Use FouAnalytics to determine which "half" to save
Advertisers using FouAnalytics can literally see which half of their dollars are being wasted. The slide below shows a campaign with about half (48%) dark red (fraud and waste). Within the first 5 days of measuring with FouAnalytics, the client added the most egregious bad sites and apps to their blocklist, effectively cutting the dark red in half, to 23%. If you can see where the fraud is coming from, you can do something about it. It is utterly useless to get reports from legacy verification vendors that say your fraud levels are 1%. Without sufficient details of why and where, what can you do about that?
What if I told you there were other "halves" involved too?
For example, domain spoofing remains rampant, and only half of the seller IDs were "found" or "matched correctly." Do you know if your DSP checks for ads.txt or enforces it for you? See: Domain and App Spoofing are Thriving
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For ad tech targeting, less than half of the targets were accurate, with just one parameter -- gender. This is worse than "random" and the advertiser could have achieved the same or better targeting without paying for the targeting parameters. See: Are you doing Audience Targeted campaigns?
In the following charts, you see that a quarter (25%) to a third (33%) of ads didn;t get served or didn't get rendered on screen (because the ads took too long to deliver). The details further below shows the difference between bids won and ads served. In the first campaign (left) about a third (32%) of the ads were not even served. In the second campaign (right) which involved low CPM publishers, three quarters (74%) of ads were not served, even though the bid was won and paid for by the advertiser. See: What you didn't know you didn't know
I have hundreds more slides on ad fraud and waste. I won't get into that now. But just ask yourself, how many 50% chunks can you chop off before you get to zero? Too little of your ad budgets are going to showing ads, let alone showing ads to humans, etc.
Advertisers and marketers, it's time to ask yourself how much budget you can save right now and re-deploy in better ways and to better places (showing ads to real human audiences on real publisher sites). What can you do now before your CEO and CFO step in?
Further examples: 614 other articles on digital marketing, analytics, and ad fraud