Eric Vardon, CEO, Morphio, discusses how instead of continuously looking under the hood for possible errors, digital marketers would see many more benefits and save a lot of time if they could have a “check engine†light that can monitor mistakes for them.
Digital ad spend is expected to account for more than 50%Opens a new window of all ad expenditures in 2020. This milestone is likely to accelerate as more brands shift away from traditional marketing avenues, particularly as consumers spend more time online. But digital marketing is becoming increasingly complex and things can go awry quickly when ‘small mistakes’ turn into big failures and tarnish campaigns that should have gone off without a hitch.
The recent study, “Agency ConfessionsOpens a new window ,†revealed that 60% of digital agency decision-makers witness at least six mistakes every single week. Conducted in partnership with Censuswide, the study found that one-third of respondents have seen their agencies absorb between $5,000 and $10,000 for a single error. These issues can be extremely detrimental, negatively impacting revenue and reputation for both brands and agencies.
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Additionally, as agencies scale and grow, so do the number of mistakes. Agencies with revenue between $1 million and $5 million incur nearly five mistakes a week, while those above $5 million admitted to an average of 7.57 mistakes per week. This indicates that larger firms are more prone to issues and, consequently, economical and reputational side effects.
33% of decision-makers encountered credit card and payment failures, in which expired or declined cards prevented spend from happening as scheduled. On the other end of the spectrum, 31% spent more than intended after accidentally leaving a campaign on longer than planned. 30% were blemished by typos in a live campaign, while 29% suffered from dead, incorrect, or broken links and forms, as well as checkout systems that lost sales or leads.
These are just some of the blunders agencies endure – they pile up quickly and often force agencies to absorb fees or pay for media to cover up mistakes and save face with their clients – cutting straight into bottom-line profits. The research showcased that many agencies continue to rely on old-school, human-centric, rudimentary methods to try and avoid mistakes. This old school approach usually involves a repetitive and lengthy process of logging in and out of ad platforms and analytics to constantly inspect and monitor campaign performance – looking under the hood of the campaign vehicle, if you will.
Get In and Drive
At a rate of at least six mistakes per week, agencies are encountering more than 300 mistakes per year. 42% are trying to reduce these problems by using master spreadsheets to track credit card limits, expiration dates, destination URLs, and ad targeting. The same number of respondents say they constantly and personally double-check ad platforms (such as Google and Facebook) to check for errors. Many (39%) have established a hierarchy of roles to check work for errors so that nothing is sent out or launched without first being reviewed by numerous individuals.
All of these solutions have three things in common: they are outdated, they are very time-consuming and they require repetitive work from your team that should be allocated to further automation, scale, and growth initiatives. The whole process is very similar to the way we drove our cars before car technology evolved. We’d start by popping the hood to look for possible issues. We’d also manually check the tire pressure to make sure each one was properly inflated. This added to the amount of time wasted per car trip as we searched for problems that didn’t even exist.
That all changed when the “check engine†light arrived. Drivers were no longer forced to perform a manual inspection before heading out on their next summer adventure. They could simply get in, start the engine, and drive without having to think twice about what’s going on under the hood.
Marketers could similarly benefit from a “check engine†light that reveals when ads are flagged or disapproved – a problem that afflicts 24% of agencies. Some agencies have already caught on, relying on this technology to reveal when the wrong geography is targeted or when ads are directed to the wrong landing page. If pixels disappear or a tracking code is not implemented in the right place, a “check engine†light prevents the campaign from going off the rails. Payment issues, spending issues (over or underspending), dead links, and other hazards are immediately revealed when technology is monitoring for costly mistakes, ready to send alerts the moment a problem is discovered. This new way of working is even more important at times of market and consumer uncertainty.
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Driven Toward Success
99% of digital agency decision-makers have witnessed mistakes at their firms, resulting in unnecessary costs and/or damage to both the agency and the brand’s reputation. This is an ongoing, universal problem that is not being solved by traditional methods. Instead of continuously looking under the hood for possible errors, it would be much more beneficial – and much less time-consuming – to rely on a “check engine†light that can do it for you.