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Improve ROI by THOUSANDS of Percentages?

{Spoiler Alert}  Yes.

Media buying is a lot like oil drilling.  If you drill in the wrong places, you can lose a fortune.  But if you drill in the right ones, you can get filthy rich almost overnight.

The question is – how to find the right places?

{Here comes another spoiler} Competitive Intelligence.

There is no question – competitive intelligence can offer valuable insights to billion-dollar corporations.  Yahoo can use it to learn about Google’s strategies.  But Competitive Intelligence is a powerful tool for smaller-scale operations too. Let me disclose that Yahoo and Google are not AdClarity customers, but MANY performance marketers are.  And ALL are seeing improved ROI by using the intel they learn about their competitors.

Return on Investment can, by definition, be directly improved in two ways: raise the income (return) or lower the cost (investment).  Competitive Intelligence can help you do both.

For argument’s sake, let’s say you have invested $10,000 in a campaign.  What would good return on that investment be?  Some aim for positive ROI (that is – not LOSING money), others set their sights higher.  As a rule of thumb, know what your current ROI is…and let’s improve it!

For argument’s sake again, let’s say your current $10,000 campaign is bringing in $20,000 (nice job, by the way)

Increase Returns

How can we increase the 200% ROI to be 300%, 400%, 2,000% or more, through competitive intelligence?

  1. Spy on Competitors.  Use competitive intelligence to beat your competitors.  You can easily uncover the right ad to use.  In an instant, you can be sure which publishers to run on.  You can save MONTHS of research time (and negative, or barely positive, ROI during that time).   If competitors are offering their widgets on sale, offer a bigger sale.  If their messaging focuses on their widgets being better – focus yours on being the best.  Read this white paper on the 3 Steps to Knocking Out Your Display Competitors.
  2. Find New Opportunities. Use the intel you uncover to find new opportunities for yourself.  For example, if your competitor’s campaigns are doing great on a certain travel site, find other sites in the travel category to run your campaign.  If competitors are ignoring certain markets (selling in Germany, but not in the Netherlands), take those markets for yourself.
  3. Be Firm about Being Flexible.  Often times, when a campaign does well (let’s face it, 200% return is adequate), we leave it alone.  But the only constant in our world is change (that..and death & taxes), and you must constantly flex to accommodate.  Competitive Intelligence enables you to get a constant reading on the heartbeat of your campaign, your competitor’s campaigns, and industries as a whole so that you can consistently mend and adapt…and improve ROI.

Let’s say that beating competitors improved returns on our widgets campaign to $40,000, new opportunities to $60,000, and being flexible to $65,000.  We have more than tripled our ROI!  Improving your income, as discussed above, is only half of the equation.  Now, let’s use competitive intelligence to lower our costs.

Lower Costs

With a 650% ROI, you are probably quite happy with your campaign.  As our favorite infomercials like to tout, “but wait, there is more!”

Competitive Intelligence can help you lower your costs.

  1. Cut Out the Middlemen.  By exposing deployment chains, you can unveil all of the entities making money on your campaigns.  Perhaps you have contracted with a network, you can see if they are subcontracting to other networks.  You can uncover where your network is running your campaigns and go direct at lower costs.
  2. Stop Paying for Deployment Mistakes.  An interesting way to use competitive intelligence is on your own properties.  Ever wondered how your campaigns look to users from the UK or Australia?  Are French users seeing ads in English or in their own language?  Mistakes are costly and the quicker you find and eliminate them, the more you will save!

Cutting out the middleman can lower your costs sometimes by 50%.  Finding and eliminating mistakes can cut more.  You could very well be up to 1,000 – 2,000% or more ROI only by using competitive intelligence.

Now…your only decision is whether you want to turn your $10,000 investment into $150,000…or double your investment to $20,000 and earn $300,000!

Good Luck!

Kfir Moyal
Kfir Moyal
Kfir Moyal is CEO of BIScience (AdClarity) and General Partner of Cyhawk Ventures. Kfir co-founded Matomy (previously AdsMarket), a worldwide leader in multi-channel performance based advertising, with revenues of above $100M. Being a savvy technologist and a successful businessman, Kfir’s gift is identifying market trends and new businesses with potential and using his product development, strategic planning, marketing, business development and M&A experience to bring them into the fold as mature, profitable entities. Active in the online industry for more than 15 years, his special focus is on New Media, Online Advertising and Digital Marketing.

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