Seasoned marketers know: the best way to tell if your advertising campaigns are performing at optimum potential is to conduct a professional and comprehensive digital media investment analysis.

But what is a marketing investment analysis? What processes, channels, and metrics should it evaluate, and what insights should the audit seek to provide? Who is capable of running it?

In this article, MatrixPoint explains why you should consider running an advertising investment analysis, what that analysis should include, and how you can use the insights it uncovers to improve the results of your digital marketing campaigns.

Introduction to Media Investment Analyses

The abundance of digital marketing channels, media buying strategies, and performance data assets available has scaled much faster than most brands can keep pace with, making it difficult to truly evaluate digital marketing performance.

That’s why it’s so important for anyone spending significant advertising dollars online to invest in a comprehensive marketing investment analysis.

This type of analysis evaluates the effectiveness of digital media campaigns, determining your total return on investment (ROI), ROI by channel, target audience, creative strategy, and more to provide you with actionable intelligence that will help improve future performance by allowing you to optimize your spend, strategy, and tactics.

Running a comprehensive digital media investment analysis is the best way to determine how effectively your advertising dollars are working at generating real revenue, but to truly make this process useful, it should evaluate not just the media you’ve purchased, but also the media being run on your behalf by vendors and partner buying agencies.

Most brands, even large ones, don’t have the technical expertise or experience in digital advertising to conduct their own media analysis, which is why we suggest hiring a third-party group like MatrixPoint to conduct the analysis on your behalf.

Our analysis will not only verify your media placement and delivery but will also dive into a detailed review of performance to help identify how well media you ran is performing overall, by channel, with specific audiences, etc.

By conducting a detailed marketing analysis with MatrixPoint, you’ll be able to clearly identify how well your digital media initiatives are performing at funneling consumers through the customer acquisition process.

Included in our detailed review process are recommendations for refining and optimizing your online marketing strategy to ensure optimal return on investment.

What is the Purpose of a Media Investment Analysis?

Is your digital strategy truly working, and even if it is, how well is each component of your marketing strategy performing? Should you adjust media spend for any channels? Do you need to change any of your audience targets? Is it time to reconsider creatives or modify landing page content?

These are the types of questions that our marketing investment analysis will provide answers to, allowing you to maximize the ROI of your digital media campaigns.

Our analysis will identify channels where your advertising spend is underperforming compared to known industry benchmarks, signaling that it’s time to re-evaluate your campaign strategy, spend, creative, or some other component of the process that could be negatively impacting your ROI.

Understanding how well each of your digital marketing channels is functioning will help increase the quality of your media placements, improve the results those placements generate and ensure that each dollar spent is being used optimally.

Unlike conventional channel by channel performance reports, MatrixPoint’s comprehensive media performance analysis includes a much more in-depth approach to understanding the complexities of your digital marketing campaigns — reviewing display ads, PPC ads, SEO initiatives, email marketing, and Social Media spends to assess the performance of each channel individually, as well as aggregated.

If you’re looking for insights on how to improve the results of your digital marketing spend, there’s no better solution than MatrixPoint’s comprehensive advertising investment analysis.

What Does Our Media Investment Analysis Include?

MatrixPoint’s media investment analysis goes far above and beyond traditional performance reports to provide insights that lead to real-world improvements in marketing ROI.

This is not merely a performance analysis, but an investigation of opportunities to refine and optimize your future marketing strategy and tactics, ensuring that each dollar you spend delivers maximum return on investment.

During our review, MatrixPoint will work closely with your team and your media agency (if you prefer to include them) – reviewing ad spends, audience targets, creative strategies, and specific tactics on a channel by channel basis to determine the effectiveness of each of your digital marketing initiatives.

We’ll conduct a multi-funnel review of all your performance data to determine not just how each channel is performing, but also how all the channels work together to generate leads and sales. It’s the perfect solution for any brand that lacks insight into the full consumer journey.

Our comprehensive marketing investment analysis will review:  

Display Advertising Audit

The display advertising analysis will review all of your display initiatives, ensuring you understand where the successes and failures lie so that you can optimize the future strategy and maximize ROI.

Our display performance analysis will help you determine which products to advertise, which audiences to target, where to target them, as well as when and how to message them to maximize traffic, leads, and sales.

Programmatic Marketing Audit

The programmatic marketing analysis helps you optimize your predefined bid rules and identify areas of friction causing problems for optimizing budgets.

This review will provide guidelines on reacting to changes in performance in real-time, training your team on how to adjust their display strategy based on real-world results.

Organic Search (SEO) Audit

Our comprehensive SEO analysis will review your current SEO strategy to look for strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement, ensuring you generate maximum visibility within Google’s search results.

A core aspect of this review is determining whether or not you should even consider running SEO in the first place, based on your current rankings, Google’s reported search volumes for potential keyword targets, and the level of competition for those target phrases.

If SEO is determined to be an effective opportunity, we’ll then provide specific instructions for optimizing your site per modern best practices.

Email Marketing Audit

Our email marketing analysis includes an analysis of individual performance factors – such as open rates, click-through rates, email lists, and contact segmentation – each of which influences the success of your email marketing initiatives.  

This review will help your team pinpoint performance and especially conversion issues by identifying any concerns about list quality, messaging, creative, landing pages, timing, and other factors influencing your results.

Paid Search (PPC) Audit

Our PPC (Pay Per Click) analysis will identify areas of opportunity for optimizing Google Ads spends, ensuring you’re not just limiting performance to basic metrics like impressions and CTR, but understanding the full consumer journey, and PPC’s role in the multi-channel purchasing funnel.

Utilizing multi-channel analytics, we’ll help you gain insights into your customers’ journey from research through purchase. We’ll also provide recommendations on how to optimize your budget depending on factors like click rates, location, timing, and device, ensuring your PPC campaigns generate maximum ROI.

Social Media Audit

Our Social Media Audits analysis will review your social marketing strategy, including both paid and non-paid channels, to understand where and how Social Media is working for your brand, as well as where it should be revised to ensure that it produces actual business value, rather than empty impressions.

We’ll evaluate the performance of each channel, provide recommendations for a preferred social media content strategy by channel, and explain which messages are working, as well as which audiences should be prioritized for your future social marketing efforts.

Affiliate Marketing Audit

Our affiliate marketing performance analysis includes an in-depth review of your affiliate programs, as well as a review of your terms and conditions to identify any potential issues or concerns

We’ll also review the competitiveness of your compensation rates and model, as well as the full structure of your affiliate programs to make sure you’re providing compelling enough offers to attract and retain top-performing affiliates.

Finally, we’ll analyze your landing pages and creative strategy to ensure they’re perfectly optimized to maximize conversion rates for the traffic affiliates are providing.

Media Technology Audit

MatrixPoint’s media investment analysis doesn’t end at reviewing the performance of each channel, or even with our multi-funnel review, but also includes an audit of your chosen technology and analytics platforms to ensure you’re using the right mix of tech to capture data and provide proper transparency.

The goal here is to make sure that your brand can accurately measure, monitor, report, and calculate your actual digital marketing performance, and especially to identify areas of opportunity for improvement.

Contact MatrixPoint to Improve Your Marketing ROI

While most media agencies and many brands prefer to wait for problems to arise before they initiate a marketing investment analysis, we consider it best practice to conduct a comprehensive digital performance audit once per quarter, or at least twice per year.

And while we understand the sensitivities involved in auditing digital media campaigns, we also know how important it is to be open, transparent, and honest about the results of the review, as this will be vital to ensuring that your brand’s limited marketing dollars are being spent intelligently.

Matrix Point’s media investment analyses ensure greater accountability for your digital marketing campaign spends, evaluating the effectiveness of everything you’re doing to surface insights that will help maximize your marketing ROI.

Ready to schedule a consultation with MatrixPoint? Contact us today!