How to Analyze your Advertising Spend Smartly?

In today’s competitive digital landscape, every marketing dollar counts. Analyzing your advertising spend effectively is crucial for maximizing return on investment (ROI) and ensuring that your campaigns are driving meaningful results. Whether you’re running Google Ads, social media campaigns, or traditional media buys, understanding where your money is going and how it’s performing can unlock valuable insights to optimize your strategy.

In this blog, we’ll explore the best practices and tools to analyze your advertising spend smartly, helping you make data-driven decisions that improve efficiency, increase conversions, and ultimately grow your business. Let’s dive into how you can turn your advertising budget into a high-performing asset.

What is Advertising Spend?

Advertising Spend is the amount of money spend on placing and managing Advertising Campaigns. It can be the money spent on specific Advertising Campaigns or Advertising sets. There are different ways to calculate Advertising spend as some may take into account only the cost for Ads placement, or some may calculate the amount of placement, operational charges, and costs for agencies.

Advertising Spend can be calculated in various ways. A few are listed below:

• CPM (Cost per thousand impressions)
• CPC (Cost per click)
• CPL (Cost per lead)
• CPA (Cost per action)
• CPS (Cost per sale)
• CPI (Cost per install)

How to Calculate Advertising Spend?

Consider the following scenario: you have a specific ad set with a daily budget of $200 and one or more different ads within that ad set. While it is possible that each ad in the ad set spent the same amount of money, this is extremely unlikely. Ad networks will automatically spend more money on the most relevant ads and less money on the least relevant ads unless you specify otherwise. Budget for advertising = $200 Ad 1 is worth $100, Ad 2 is worth $50, Ad 3 is worth $25, Ad 4 is worth $20, and Ad 5 is worth $5.

Ad Spend Formula

ƒ Sum(Ad Spend)

Latest Advertising spend Statistics

 According to the latest data by global Advertising expenditures, the Advertising spend in 2020 reached 586.5 billion U.S. dollars and the forecast data estimates that Advertising spend worldwide will reach 691 billion U.S. dollars by the end of 2023. 

Marketing Spend: The Most Scrutinized Enterprise Spend

When you are paying for a campaign either digitally or traditionally, you will expect instant traffic, which can turn to leads and sales. It is important to analyze your expenditure on marketing products as monitoring budget distribution and ROI (Return of Investment) plays a key role in analyzing the marketing spend. Various metrics which are considered to evaluate effectiveness are as follows:

1. Traffic Metrics: When you are capable of bringing traffic from clicks, impressions, and engagements, then your campaign is considered successful, and when you are paying for an advertising campaign, then traffic is expected. Analyzing the Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a must by marketers. When out of 1000 people only 10 people click on your ads, then you have only 1% CTR. Low CTRs indicate poor campaign strategies, whereas high CTRs indicate that your campaign was successful in reaching out to the correct audience. 
2. Conversion Rate Metrics: The rate at which your campaigns are capable of converting visitors to customers, is termed as conversion rate. Strong conversion metrics indicate that your advertisement is reaching the right target audience. These metrics will help marketers to track the correct investment made in campaigns. 
3. Return of Investment (ROI): The most important part of advertising is getting your desired result. When you have invested in a paid campaign, then expecting huge traffic and a high conversion rate is a must, as these metrics will return your investments. Keeping a track of these two metrics will help you calculate your ROI. 

The marketers collect data in terms of the metrics stated above. Reports are generated on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to keep track. The final reports are analyzed by the marketers, which helps them to make improvement plans. In the diagram below, you can see a report created for the marketing campaign:

Following methods are currently used by the marketing team to collect data on the advertising campaign:

1. Currently, spreadsheets are used by the marketing teams to aggregate data from multiple sources. 
2. Methods like custom scripts, macros, and formulas are used to clean and format the collected data.
3. Several tools are used by the marketing team to track performance.

Challenges Faced by the Marketing Team

In the digital-driven world, these methods are considered slow and inefficient. Let’s see what are the various problems faced by marketers:

1. As they are collecting data from multiple sources manually, it can be a tedious process.
2. Formatting and cleaning of data require tremendous time and effort.
3. Data obtained from various analyzing tools, such as GA and Mixpanel, are not comprehensive. 
4. To prepare a detailed marketing report for your running campaigns on multiple platforms manually requires several hours because of data silos.
5. You have to deal with various data-driven problems, such as data loss and data inconsistency. 

How to Analyze the Performance Across all the Advertising Platforms?

When you are analyzing the performance of your advertising campaign, then you should consider your traffic metrics, conversion rate metrics, and your ROI. These three metrics play an important role in determining the effectiveness of your campaign on different platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Let’s go through the process of analyzing your performance:

1. Identify your Goal for Campaign and Advertising: Whenever you are advertising, you should identify your goal, whether you want to create brand awareness or you want more conversions of visitors to customers. Building an advertising campaign with a clear goal will give customers a clear picture of your product.
2. Identify your Key Metrics from the Advertisements: If you are advertising for brand awareness, then focus on traffic metrics, whereas if you want to increase the number of your customers, then focus more on conversion metrics. 
3. Keep a Track of your Conversion Rate: Keep a daily/weekly/monthly track of conversions, conversion rates, and cost per conversion. It will help you evaluate your ROI.
4. Evaluate and Analyse Performance: After you have collected your data, you can prepare reports from the data from different platforms. It will help you analyze your performance. 

Whenever you are advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook, Bing, you expect ROI. So, investing more in one platform and getting poor results will cause drop-in sales. If you analyze your performance on all these platforms, you will be able to keep track, and hence, climb the stairway to success. Integrating the performance of campaigns on different platforms will provide you a clear picture of your ROI.

How to Integrate Data Across Different Advertising Platforms?

Data integration across different advertising platforms can be done in a few simple steps with the help of Hevo. The integrated data can be used to analyze the performance of your overall advertising spend. Let’s discuss the steps required to achieve data integration on Hevo:

Step 1: Connect: Connect your sales and marketing data sources with Hevo just by providing the credentials.
Step 2: Integrate: Integrate your data from multiple sources, store it in our fully-managed data storage, and make it analytics-ready. 
Step 3: Analyze: Connect and visualize your unified data in your preferred BI tool and derive actionable insights in minutes.

Hevo provides various benefits as stated below:

1. It provides a single source of truth for your marketing data.
2. It provides access to the most accurate and real-time data without any coding.
3. Now you can focus more on insights, not on data preparation.
4. You will have more time for doing research, identifying opportunities, and new customer acquisition.
5. It will help you improve sales, retain customers, and increase profitability.

What is KPI Dashboard for Overall Advertising Spend?

A KPI dashboard is a single board containing information about the metrics which you are using to track your progress. It can be an individual KPI or a company goal. Let’s discuss the different ways to create a KPI dashboard:

1. Using Spreadsheets: The data present in your spreadsheet can be visualized by making a dashboard using the charts and graphs in spreadsheets. If there is any update in the data, you have to manually update it on your dashboard.
2. Using Presentation: The dashboard can be created using the charts and bars available on the presentation platform. All the changes are done manually, as this platform can’t show changes in real-time. 
3. Using a Data Visualization Tool: It is the most popular method for creating a KPI dashboard, as it supports changes in real-time. You don’t have to update your dashboard manually.

Let’s see what needs to be taken care of while designing your KPI dashboard:

1. It should be on a single page or screen. A KPI dashboard is a quick overview of your progress. It should help you identify any issues immediately. Keep it less detailed.
2. Your dashboard should be easy to understand. It should be easy for the reader to get an insight into the data and navigate accordingly. Try to arrange data logically.
3. You should include the necessary KPIs. Display only the information that can be viewed on a single page and depicts the entire story. 

What are the Benefits of Automating the Process of Data Integration and Reporting?

Before understanding the benefits of automating the process of data integration and reporting, let’s first discuss the challenges of data integration using the manual method:

1. You have to manage multiple data sources manually. It is a tedious job.
2. It takes a lot of time to clean and format data.
3. The data available in analytics tools like GA and Mixpanel are not comprehensive. 
4. You have to prepare detailed marketing performance reports for campaigns running on multiple platforms that take several hours because of data silos.
5. You have to deal with data loss and data inconsistency.

If you automate your data integration process you will be  benefited from the following:

1. Data Silos will not be a problem.
2. You will be able to focus on insights, not on data preparation.
3. You will have more time for doing research, identifying opportunities, and acquiring a new customer.
4. It improves sales, retain customers, and increase profitability.

What are a Few Ad Spend Optimization Strategies?

• Set Clear Goals: Define specific objectives (e.g., lead generation, brand awareness) to guide your ad campaigns.
• Target Audience Refinement: Use data-driven insights to target the most relevant audience segments for higher engagement and conversion.
• A/B Testing: Continuously test different ad creatives, copy, and formats to determine what works best.
• Use Retargeting: Re-engage users who have interacted with your ads or visited your website, increasing conversion rates.
• Optimize Bidding Strategy: Experiment with automated bidding strategies like cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) to maximize ROI.

Conclusion

In this blog, you have learned how to analyze the performance of your overall advertising spend. You have also learned about the marketing spend, KPI dashboard, and how to integrate and analyze your advertising spend on various platforms.

Data integration is a key component in analyzing the performance of your overall advertising spend. Hevo supports pre-built data integrations from 150+ marketing data sources at a reasonable price. With the help of Hevo, it becomes a cakewalk to analyze your overall advertising spend.

Give Hevo a try by signing up for a 14-day free trial today.

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