Next&Co has revealed brands wasted over $100 million in digital ad spending in the first quarter of 2023.
New figures from the independent digital performance agency’s latest Digital Media Wastage Report show advertisers wasted more than $104 million in digital ad spending between January and March 2023 – an average of 43% across total audited media spend.
The wastage is above last year’s overall average of 40% of audited spend and up on Q4 2022 figures.
In its latest report, Next&Co audited 61 companies with annual digital ad budgets of between $500,000 to $21 million. Most of the companies were multinational (43%) and national (33%), along with ASX-listed organisations (11%) and SMEs (13%).
The data, compiled from Next&Co’s Prometheus proprietary media auditing tool, found retail brands wasted the most digital ad dollars last quarter at $40.6 million. This was followed by finance at $33.3 million, insurance ($9.3 million), health ($7.3 million) and real estate ($7.3 million respectively), and education ($6.2 million).
Across digital media platforms, the most Q1 2023 ad spend was wasted on Facebook at $45 million, followed by Google ($42 million), LinkedIn ($10 million) and Bing ($5 million).
John Vlasakakis, Next&Co co-founder, said: “Media agencies are continuing to waste record amounts of ad dollars, despite the tightening market conditions. As brands respond to an overall decline in consumer spending, they will need to seriously consider where and how they spend their advertising dollars for the remainder of 2023.
“Knowledge will be power for advertisers in the coming months, and give them an edge in the market – they will need to know exactly how much they’re spending and the ROI to ensure their spend is delivering the best results possible.”
More than 500 companies across Asia Pacific have used Next&Co’s auditing platform Prometheus to determine exactly how much, and where, ad spend is being wasted on their digital platforms.
Prometheus has in-built KPIs, including leads, customer conversions, ROI, and reach, enabling brands to choose their targets across each metric. The auditing tool then determines the exact wastage of their total annual digital spend in dollars and where that wastage is occurring, campaign-by-campaign, and on a creative level.
It provides a score out of 100 on the overall performance of each metric and the exact dollar figure of ad spend wastage. The data is then individually audited for each type of advertising activity run within the tool and an individual score prepared for each.
Prometheus can also predict how many conversions advertisers could potentially achieve and make creative and CPA (cost per acquisition) improvement recommendations.
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Top image: Nick Grinberg and John Vlasakakis