How to make the most of your advertising budget

In the UK, reports have shown that advertising budgets overspend when it comes to three main areas: TV, SEO and display advertising campaigns. Media in particular, from print ads and magazine features to TV spots, can be costly. For those advertising in media, there is a clear need to effectively manage their advertising spend.

Knowing if the spend was worth it is key to improving your spend for the next year and not wasting a limited advertising budget. Here, we look at some of the best ways to make sure you are making the most of your media spend, SEO agency and the accumulated data.

Before we proceed any further, I want to point out that I’ve noticed a trend in advertising campaigns, where more and more companies hire led screen to help them promote their events & new products. The topic is interesting and we will cover it in some of our next articles.

Media audits give you a breakdown of spend and effectiveness

Media is one of the most costly spends in an advertising budget, simply because the medium is so popular and broad. John Wanamaker, “pioneer of marketing” once said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Companies like, Auditstar, are able to provide media audits that break down your costs. Media audits take the guesswork out of assessing your media spend. Identifying how your media is being spent, based on yearly average costs and the market rates, will give you a better idea of what media are best for your business.

Media audits aren’t limited to just analysing your media spend, they can be developed by media auditors into strategies for your next campaigns. If you are working with an agency, they will give you a good indication of if your marketing budget has been widely spent or not.

Using this collated data, you can make clear decisions about what media channels aren’t working for, and which ones you need to be allocating a greater budget too. Print circulations are rising, but if you aren’t seeing a good ROI, then lose it. If however, online video ads are driving a lot of purchases for less, then the decision is clear.

Use agencies for paid search as its time consuming to learn

One of the ways you may be advertising your product or service is through pay-per-click campaigns (PPC), such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads. Paid search can be a tricky medium and the best campaigns require regular maintenance and tweaks. It’s time consuming which means you might be better off taking this work to an agency.

Agencies like, Wordstream, feedback to companies whether their Google AdWords are targeting the right keywords for effective pay-per-click campaigns. As well as blogs, additional services that are available include a ‘20-minute Work Week Google AdWords account’, working under the company’s perimeter to make sure you’re visible in the right online pages.

As experts in pay-per-click campaigns, an agency can offer better value for money and time efficiency. They have the knowledge and experience that would take a long time to learn. During that time you could be wasting a huge portion of your advertising budget for little to no return.

Accurately track where users are coming from

In order to better target your audience it is good to know who your advertising campaigns are reaching. This is the difference between thinking you know who buys your products or services and actually understanding your demographic. Too many business assume instead of know.

Data tracking can be done a number of ways. PPC campaigns have linked in tracking codes for each ad, which allows them to give you valuable reports of click-through-rate (how many of the people who saw your ad then clicked on it). Tracking codes can be attached to your company’s Home Page Url or your company’s services page.

Various media forms can be tracked similarly using an onsite analytical tool like Google Analytics. Measuring your media audit data for when ads were live and streaming, with the traffic to your site, can indicate which campaigns were getting noticed most.

Similarly, analytical software will be able to tell you more about your demographics. Are you attracting the right age range? Is there a gender/sex that you are missing? Are you getting traffic to your site and enquiries from the right people? This data will tell you why and how to make improvements.

If you are reaching the wrong audience with your PPC ads, media or any other advertising channel then you are wasting your advertising budget. Keeping on top of not just the amount of traffic you are getting but also how valuable those potential buyers are is the key to maximising your advertising spend and making it go further each year.