Competitive Analytics Intelligence Should Be Part of Your Ad Budget

You know you need to be spending more on paid digital advertising. Your brand is not going to reach its quarterly or yearly goals at this rate, and you’ve optimized and re-optimized your digital campaigns. There’s just not enough money in the budget.

But this can be hard to prove to the brand manager or marketing director. Luckily, competitive intelligence tools give you access to crucial data to back up a budget pitch. Having competitor data, compared side-by-side with yours, could be the missing element of an effective ask.

Let’s walk through the competitive analytics data you can take to the financial decision makers for a budget boost. 

Spend Data

For this post, we’ll pretend your brand is Nissan, the thirteenth highest spender in Q1 2017. 

First, let’s take a look how you’re spending compared to your competitors. As you can see above, Nissan is not the only automotive company in the top 15 spenders of Q1 2017. Showing the C-suite that your brand, Nissan, is only spending about $24 million, while Toyota and Honda are spending about $37 million and $29 million, respectively, should grab their attention. Think it’s time for a budget increase pitch? Not quite yet. There’s even more data you can take to the boss.

Impression Data

Turns out, while Nissan is behind on spend, the brand is ahead significantly on impressions. In this case, you’d want to show the C-suite how effective your advertising strategies have been to-date compared to your competitors. Then, here’s the start of your pitch:

“With just a small increase in budget to tighten the gap between ours and our competitors’, we could far surpass the brand awareness of Toyota and Honda, even without spending as much.”

On the other hand, in a more typical situation where the top spender gets the most impressions, you can also make the argument that with an increased budget, your brand could reach the impressions of your competitors’.

Ad Type

If you were Nissan in Q1 2017, you spent a lot of your budget on banner and video ads, which were clearly effective in terms of getting impressions. However, one of Toyota’s most expensive ads was a page skin, which can garner more attention than a banner ad.

Despite Toyota’s higher spend, the brand may have gotten more clicks, as the ad is harder to ignore. Once your C-suite sees the more effective ad types your brand could afford with a higher budget, along with your ability to manage an ad budget effectively, they’ll start to budget.

Top Sites

Are you spending on the right sites? Are you missing any crucial sites for targeted traffic? You’ll also want to take a look at where your competitors are publishing their ads that you aren’t. While competitors like Toyota and Honda are paying more, they may have their budgets going toward more effective sites.

Building Your Pitch

Nobody likes to lose, including your brand director. Seeing the advantages your competitors have over your brand with access to a higher budget can be a powerful wake-up call. Pulling all of this budget allocation data together into one solid pitch is your best bet for securing the higher budget your brand needs to move the needle. 

Want to learn more about what competitive ad intelligence can offer? Check out some of the related reads below.

Related Reads:

• Pros and Cons of Ad Intelligence: Is It Really Worth It?

• How to Report to Your C-Suite and Brand Managers on Digital Ads