Putting aside the typical cliches associated with any form of Performance Marketing (fast-paced, ever-changing, constantly evolving and all other such hyperbole), there remains a rich seam of value in taking a regular step back from the coal face to assess your progress.
The industry constantly throws up new opportunities and while this shouldn’t mean you blindly chase innovation, it does mean your competitive edge can be maintained (or indeed sharpened) by regularly reviewing and replacing the lowest performing 10% of tactics in your existing media plan.
This type of audit is not just advisable best practice, it’s an imperative step towards keeping your activity in good health, in much the same way as you’d do with your car as part of an annual MOT cycle. This is why we think Paid Media auditing should be a cornerstone of your strategy:
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Starting with a more holistic viewpoint, a Paid Media audit can provide foundational comfort that what you’re investing in aligns with business objectives and goals. Daily dashboards – certainly over a period of time – lack the deep-dive context provided by an audit to assess whether campaigns are driving the right outcomes. This could be the profile of leads generated, the type of sales driven via each channel or even upper-funnel KPIs related to brand awareness. The audit alignment is the comfort blanket of knowing your investment is contributing meaningfully to your strategic objectives.
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The core value of Paid Media auditing sits within the twin zones of effectiveness and efficiency. Delivered correctly, an audit goes further than a typical optimisation cycle and identifies both short-term and long-term opportunities across the whole media plan, not just at a channel level. Whether it’s individual keywords, suboptimal creative or poorly targeted audiences, a comprehensive audit will put it all on the table at the same time, allowing you to prioritise fixes based on ROI impact. In many cases an audit can lead to budget savings which can be repurposed elsewhere.
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We all know the value of bottom of funnel activity that contributes directly to the commercial targets and there’s no disputing that every business needs to maintain short-term momentum, but a Paid Media audit should also look longer-term and assess whether the current approach is sustainable. Harvesting leads and sales through Paid Search is wonderful, but without a presence further up the funnel will lead to leakage to competitors and – eventually – lead and sales volumes dropping to unwelcomingly low levels.
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Yes, yes, I know we were putting aside cliches but auditing your Paid Media setup is not just inward looking, but also outward looking to make sure you’re keeping ahead of the curve in terms of industry trends, best practices and emerging technologies. Sorting the fads from the fabulous on an ad hoc basis isn’t effective, but a structured approach to assessing the landscape, evaluating tools and adopting new techniques can provide huge amounts of value if done as part of a single project viewpoint.
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The topic of ad fraud has hit the headlines in recent weeks and auditing plays a critical role in safeguarding against fraudulent placements or clicks. Of course, we recommend an always-on tool to be in place alongside careful monitoring from your internal team or agency team, but an audit can drill down to monitor and flag any signs of suspicious activity. This identification and mitigation of fraudulent behaviour is not just a benefit from the obvious cost saving perspective, but also significantly reduces the risk of reputational damage to your brand by association.
- Our final benefit of regular Paid Media auditing relates to accountability and transparency within your organisation. Media is often a black box to other stakeholders and given the amount of investment carried by the collective channels within, is often the first port of call when problems occur. Having a robust audit framework in place and proactively sharing findings and opportunities with key stakeholders puts Media Leads on the front foot and fosters a culture of continuous improvement and accountability, allowing everyone to focus on driving better commercial outcomes.
To wrap up, periodically auditing your paid media channels as part of your marketing strategy is a multi-faceted benefit that – much like an MOT on your car – helps with safety, reliability and performance. You wouldn’t be confident in the longevity of your car if once every few months a cursory look under the bonnet was the only input, so why trust the same approach for your valuable media channels?