Upcoming sale season: Brands ad spends on festive season getting wasted

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Advertising
4 min read

Brands for big events like Amazon Prime Day Sale spend 30-35% of their ad budget for the promotion during such events. Considering it's a long season in the Indian e-commerce landscape brands must be ready for sale days like Independence Day, and Diwali sale thereafter. Brands are geared up to meet the high demand of sales season pumping up sponsored activity on platforms, google and meta-ads, However, the major concern is ad spending getting wasted.

Amit Relan ,
ETBrandEquity

Updated On Aug 15, 2024 at 08:50 AM IST

Read by: 100 Industry Professionals

Read by 100 Industry Professionals

Upcoming sale season: Brands ad spends on festive season getting wasted - ET BrandEquity (3)

Shopping for an umbrella, when you are already drenched in rain, is never a good idea. Being proactive is the key to excel in the fiercely competitive e-commerce landscape. Prime day is done but the massive sale season is ahead. Brands are proactive in targeting shoppers for the upcoming sale season. However, making sure your advertising budget is well spent is the utmost priority.

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Brands are geared up to meet the high demand of sales season pumping up sponsored activity on platforms, google and meta-ads, However, the major concern is ad spending getting wasted.

How brands combating ad fraud during festive season sale

During the festive season, when consumer attention peaks, brands invest heavily in advertising to capture the surge in demand. However, the thin line between a successful ad campaign and wasted ad spend becomes even more precarious. Many brands remain unaware that a significant portion of their ad spend is being wasted. Fake clicks, impressions, installs or bot traffic leads to high payouts to fraudsters while delivering low ROI to advertisers.

To combat this, brands need to be proactive, optimize ad campaigns with advanced AI-ML tech and adopt stringent measures to safeguard their ad budgets. Monitor and analyze traffic in real-time, identifying and filtering out suspicious activity and working closely with trusted partners for implementing strict vetting processes for publishers and networks to ensure the integrity of their campaigns.

Transparency, validation, and continuous monitoring, can help brands mitigate wastage of ad spend, maximize their ROI, and make their festive season campaigns truly successful.

How to protect your ad campaigns during sale season

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The sale scenario is changing with customer behavior, picking up the top slot in search results is key to achieving optimal results. This makes the battle for consumer attention more exciting as every brand hits hard on the sponsored advertising.

Brands significantly ramped up their sponsored ad budgets, often 2X or even 3X are spent as compared to regular business days. However, the underlying strategies remained relatively unchanged, suggesting a missed opportunity to innovate in this high-stakes environment.

Ad fraud menace plaguing advertising campaign

Are you reaching genuine customers? Fraud at Click and impression level lead to heavy payout that not only degrade brand performance. For instance, a major electronics brand before the sale season was running search and display ad campaigns to attract new customers, acquiring traffic from various meta platforms.

Despite a healthy spend on these channels, the conversion rate was low & under suspicion. To ensure cleaner traffic and improve the conversion rate, they started the blacklisting process and weeded out invalid and bot traffic. 18% percent of average fraud detected and ad traffic validation improved conversion as genuine customers witnessed their promotion.

Another example of a popular beauty and personal care brand spending heavily on e-com banner ads. The brand wanted to increase brand awareness, visibility, and conversions on multiple eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Blinkit, Flipkart, etc., using banner advertisem*nts. The brand was unaware of the visibility of banner ads across the category, sub-category, homepage, and other pages.

A higher share of visibility on banner ads directly correlates with higher click-through-rate (CTR), views on product pages, interest in the brand, and enhanced conversions. After analysis, the brand found that most competitors had an average of 10% share of visibility for ‘promos’ on the homepage and 15% ‘sale’ on the category page. The brand used this insight and implemented the recognized themes in their ongoing display advertising campaigns on the respective pages. Propping up its banner performance before the sale season led to its share of Visibility being 12% and category page being 17%, which is a substantial jump for the brand.

Conclusion

Such proactive measures can help brands excel during the sale season, optimizing ad campaign performance, monitoring e-com banner ads along with digital shelf analysis across e-commerce and quick commerce platforms.

According to a report last year brands wasted approximately $73 billion of ads spent during the festive season. This year is going to be no different, but brands are now more about measuring and monitoring their ad spend on digital ad campaigns, affiliate ads and influencer promoting products. Monitoring and analyzing marketing spend on promotional campaigns enables brands to boost performance during sale season and beyond.

Brands bet big on influencers to stay active, virtually

Hindustan Unilever (HUL), Dabur, and Godrej Consumer Products (GCP) are enhancing their influencer marketing strategies to boost customer engagement, brand loyalty, and awareness. The rise in short-form content on platforms like Instagram and YouTube has led to companies engaging with macro, micro, and nano influencers to drive brand visibility. A recent EY report predicted India's influencer marketing industry will reach INR 3,375 crore by 2026, largely due to the growing use of social media influencers for sales and brand engagement.

Why attention matters in digital advertising

In today’s fast-paced digital world, capturing consumer attention is crucial. With audiences constantly bombarded with content, advertisers face challenges in engaging them. Attention has become a key focus for brands aiming to optimise their strategies. Despite the complexity and debate around defining attention, industry experts agree that harnessing it is essential for successful advertising campaigns.