Digital Horizons
Welcome to Digital Horizons, where today's strategies meet tomorrow's innovations in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.
Dive deep with industry trailblazers and thought leaders as we uncover what's driving success right now and forecast the trends that will shape the digital landscape in the years to come.
In each episode, we'll decode the tactics, tools, and techniques that are transforming the way businesses connect with their audience, ensuring that you stay ahead of the curve.
From social media shifts to the newest SEO advancements, e-commerce innovations to content marketing insights, Digital Horizons is your essential guide to the future of online marketing.
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Digital Horizons
5 Ways You’re Wasting Money on Ads (And How to Fix It)
Think your ad campaigns are performing well? Think again. In this week’s episode of Digital Horizons, we’re uncovering 5 costly mistakes most businesses make with their Google Ads, Meta Ads, and overall digital marketing strategy—and how to fix them.
✅ Why Meta’s ASC campaigns might be inflating your results
✅ How brand search is sabotaging your ROI
✅ Why you should ignore Google reps (yes, really)
✅ The truth about ROAS and why it’s misleading
✅ Why spending too little could be your biggest problem
Whether you’re a business owner, eCommerce brand, or marketing manager, this episode will help you cut the waste and scale your ad performance profitably.
💡 We’re pulling back the curtain on agency tricks, platform manipulation, and budget traps—so you can take control of your marketing spend.
📈 Get smarter with your ads. Stop wasting money. Start seeing real results.
🎧 Subscribe to Digital Horizons for weekly insights into modern marketing and AI tools.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
Actually thinking is this in my best interest, Because everything Google's recommending is not there's?
Speaker 2:nothing better than when we're looking at taking over another agency search account for a client and we get the keys to it and we're like, oh, they've been cheating.
Speaker 1:Next time you get a phone call from the Google rep, you're going to be hanging up on him and he'll keep calling back. Just keep hanging up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're back with Digital Horizons this week with five ways you're wasting money with your digital marketing.
Speaker 1:Everybody who's currently spending money on advertising is really just trying to get the most performance out of it. The problem with a lot of these platforms and what Google ads, meta ads, all the different platforms is that they're becoming more and more a black box of data and it's making it harder to understand what to do and what levers to pull to really get the most out of it. So today, what we're going to be doing is talking about the five different things that you can do right now and have a look in your accounts and your campaigns. That is going to increase your efficiency and improve your performance because it's going to eliminate wastage out of your campaigns.
Speaker 2:Let's get into it. So we'll move through these pretty quickly. What is it, how it works and how you can avoid it. Starting with the first one ASC. So ASC stands for Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns, so just the appended shopping campaigns to the end of Advantage Plus there.
Speaker 1:Okay, asc campaigns. Now this is one where Meta brought these out. This was like their response to Performance Max. It was there. Hey, just give us your money, let us take care of everything. We're going to get you the best results we possibly can. And on the surface it looks great. Like you start looking at it, you'd be like, hey, I'm getting 20 rowers from this campaign.
Speaker 1:Problem of what's happening, and especially if you're running multiple channels if you say you're running Google search or Google shopping and then you're running ASC, that ASC is going to be claiming everything that is coming through from a view, through campaign, and measuring that as a conversion.
Speaker 1:So when we're looking at these campaigns, the way that we want to set them up and this is if you go into and have a look is make sure that you have your audiences defined in your settings in Meta. Now what that means is you can then tell Meta hey, I don't want to be targeting my current customers and there's a specific amount I want to be spending on my engaged audiences. So you can give a list or you can connect it into your Shopify and you can say, all right, this is who my current customer base is, and then you can set your engaged audiences so that you're remarketing audiences. So you'll say all right, call anyone who's been to my website in the last 90 days or anyone who's engaged with one of my Facebook ads or any of these kinds of things. Set them as an engaged audience and limit the amount of budget that I'm spending to them. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:And they're likely to convert anyway. They're already on the path to doing that.
Speaker 1:They're probably already converted.
Speaker 1:So they're probably seeing a Google ad taking 24 hours to make a purchase and potentially your meta ads potentially are having a positive impact on it.
Speaker 1:But the but the way that that meta is reporting on it with the view through conversions, and if you're not paying attention to your click-throughs, is that meta is going to be claiming so much over um, over reported row, as and if people are looking at the row isn't like fuck you, I'm just going to keep spending more and more money on this.
Speaker 1:Frequency is going to keep going up and you're just capturing people that are going to convert anyway and just dumping money in there. So that's the first place where we see a lot of businesses that are absolutely burning through cash and Put your percentage because you can actually put your spend percentage of how much is going to go to new customers versus old, and I would put it at zero. So we want to see 0% of that budget in the ASC, because if it's going to be a truly prospecting campaign, you want to put it at zero and that way it's only going to be marketing towards your new customers. Set up your other remarketing campaigns. Marketing is a really important part of your campaigns, but you don't want to be sitting mixed up with your other top of funnel campaigns because all it's going to do is over-report and overspend in areas that you don't need to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those prospecting budgets need to be doing their job, reaching new potential audiences. Second one we're going to talk about is overspending on brand. Yes, specifically in search.
Speaker 1:This is the 100% so performance max search shopping, any of these campaigns. You want to make sure you haven't got brand in there and we ordered an account, and this is something we've been noticing more and more is the amount people are spending on converting their own brand and they're all like, hey, my Google's doing all right, I don't really need to work with an agency, we're doing all right. And so we convinced them for us to have a look and I think about 90% of their conversions were coming from brand. This is a company that was spending $5,000 a month on Google Ads and they were just smashing all their brand conversions and thinking they're doing a pretty decent job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's nothing better than when we're looking at taking over another agency search account for a client and we get the keys to it and we see that brand spend and we're like, oh, they've been cheating.
Speaker 1:That's the thing, and I mean on paper, it looks amazing, just like the.
Speaker 1:ASCs. It's like, hey, we're fucking killing it. Look at our great results. Our PMAX has got a 20 row ASL. Our search campaigns are doing great. But then you look at the search campaigns and it's just capturing all brand as well. Even though you're not specifically targeting your brand term, google's still going to think that, well, the intent's pretty similar to your brand term, so we're just going to show you brand there because that's what's converting the best. So, making sure at all campaigns that are not to capture brand search, you've completely removed it and this is something you can do within two seconds and it's going to see an immediate positive impact.
Speaker 2:So how does this happen?
Speaker 2:In a lot of agencies and let's say, large volume agencies, they have a very similar structure for how they build out their search campaigns and a lot of people have generally been taught to do a prospecting campaign, a brand campaign and maybe a test or a retargeting campaign.
Speaker 2:This has been carried through from sort of low-level operators who've taken it through to other agencies and it is always going to mean that brand searchers so people searching for your company name are going to have a higher propensity to convert on your site. And to make the reporting meetings easier for that agency, they're going to pump up the spend in that brand campaign because it's got a higher conversion rate. Then they're going to present to you the total conversions generated by the ad campaign and make it seem like they're doing a whole lot of work to reach new customers in their prospecting activity and look at all the conversions it's generated. But when you dig into the data, the brand campaign spent half of your budget or more and generated 80, 90% of the conversions. You were probably going to get those anyways. So that's the first thing we do we cut it right down, have a minimal level of brand protection if it's a competitive industry and we generally see those conversions picked up in organic anyway.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, 100%, and it's just. I mean, I think that it's gone from in PMAX. You couldn't even exclude brand from the start. So I think the agencies were like fuck it, it's going to fall in there anyway. So we're just going to leave it in there because the client's used to seeing it. So the way that you initially set up a PMAX campaign, maybe years ago, when that type of campaign come out and then the clients may be used to seeing, hey, we're getting a 10 rise from our PX campaign, so they're scared to pull it out because the reality of it is they're going to get a two or this campaign's unprofitable, so it's better to keep never really working, but they're probably a bit worried about that.
Speaker 1:I think there's also a bit of just inexperience from people who have set it up. It's like if businesses are setting up these campaigns from themselves, google and Facebook make it so easy to create a campaign yes, and you don't know what the best things you're supposed to be doing, because the whole way through Google has gone recommended, recommended, recommended, which is all the shit and so you need to be paying attention to that and actually thinking is this in my best interest? Because everything Google is recommending is not, which brings us to our next one, our next one.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you did that segue. So Google offers the access to a Google representative to help you set up and run your campaigns. They offer it to agencies as well. We're constantly trying to avoid phone calls from our Google reps.
Speaker 1:They are persistent fuckers, man.
Speaker 2:They are constant, it's a new person every single week as well.
Speaker 1:They've got their targets. I guess they're doing their job.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's a hassle, but they present themselves as they're coming out to help you. Yeah, which is not the case.
Speaker 2:And what better person, in the eyes of a new agency or potentially a client who's trying to do it themselves, a better person to advise them than the owner of the platform?
Speaker 1:100% yeah. If Google gives you a call, you'd expect they're going to be telling you how to get the best out of Google, but it is not. Yeah, they'll know better than an agency?
Speaker 2:It's not the case. They've got targets to push the higher margin stuff that's less competitive, like display, obviously. Youtube.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brand performance max.
Speaker 2:So they'll generally run through a checklist of things that seem like failures in the campaign and you have to correct these issues. And in correcting those issues means a higher spend on Google on the inventory. That is less competitive. Yes, so it's a way of them not letting your budget stagnate and get stuck only looking for the stuff you really want and spreading it out to the stuff that no one really wants, exactly.
Speaker 1:And so I guess as a point then here is if you have had a call with a Google rep and you have implemented changes based on that phone call, I would immediately seek assistance from someone who does not work for Google who can potentially provide you with guidance, because there's a good chance you're spending money in areas that you shouldn't be spending.
Speaker 2:The fourth way that you're wasting your money in digital marketing is focusing purely on ROAS return on ad spend.
Speaker 1:That's it, and this is a combination of probably the first two that we talked about, three that we talked about Because if you're just looking at your ROAS in your campaigns, then you would have ignored everything that we've talked about in the first two, because all your brand stuff is making it look amazing, your ASC is killing it because you're just doing all your remarketing.
Speaker 1:But if you're only paying attention to ROAS, you're not paying attention to what it's costing you to acquire a new customer in your business. That's where things can go wrong, because the platforms it's in their best interest to over-report and inflate the results to make sure you continue spending, but if the bank account doesn't align with what's actually happening, so if you're showing in your agency, showing your 20 railways, but you've worked out, hey, I only acquired five new customers this month, but I've spent five grand. That's not adding up. You need to be looking at what your lifetime value is to then understand, well, what can you actually afford to pay for a new customer that's going to be profitable for your business? And pay less attention to the ROAS and the in-app metrics because they're going to be over-inflating to make sure you continue to spend on the platforms.
Speaker 2:Completely agree the focus on ROAS. Again, just to reiterate, you'll get the double counting of the revenue that you're generating because Meta and Google are both calculating that conversion as theirs. But also you're going to be focusing on your existing customers and, yeah, they're going to have a higher return because you've earned that customer. They like your product. They're coming back again and again. So, to go back over it, it is important to consider that there is a return on your ad spend, but it's a much more complex environment.
Speaker 2:There are other factors and strategies. You need to be considering the lifetime value of winning a new customer. You should be willing to spend a bit more to get that, first on that new one. And then you should have more cost-efficient campaigns and ways of communicating with your existing customers to bring them back email marketing, automation, text and so on, still using those campaigns to reignite and re-engage with your existing customers, but not blending all that into the same row as target 100%, yeah, and having used it as a metric, I mean it's still important to be looking at and when you are comparing separate campaigns within separate ad sets, within a campaign or even a performance, it is a good indicator.
Speaker 1:But solely relying on that and I know that we've been guilty of it in the past because it used to be a very reliable number, or much more reliable than other metrics that we were able to see so making sure that you are paying attention to it, but not using that as your sole North Star for how your performance or managing your performance in your campaigns.
Speaker 2:So I love this last one In a session on how you can stop wasting money. This is your suggestion. Is not spending enough? It starts to sound like we're a Google rep right here, like listen, I think you should spend double to save some money. But there is some logic to this. Do you want to jump into it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean the point of this is don't just put 20 bucks a day on a campaign and expect to see a result out of it unless you get willing to wait a long time and accumulate data.
Speaker 1:And if you're paying an agency and you're only spending that much, it means you're paying management fees on top of that and it just means the data is going to take longer and longer to be able to then optimize and learn what's working and improve performance.
Speaker 1:So I feel, unless you're willing to invest in the success of your marketing, it's better not to doing it and the money that you are spending, that small amount of money that you may be investing into it and when we're saying small, it's going to be different for different industries and different businesses but if you're only putting a small amount in and you know that you probably should be putting more in, maybe it might be time to start thinking about make sure that I'm not wasting it in these areas that we just talked about and go all in yes, Don't go all in. Go hard yeah, Just don't go too soft, because you're just not going to get the results. You'd be like this shit doesn't work because you probably wasted it and you need to be serious about the way you're going to take on your performance marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a variable of budget and it's different for every client depending on whether they're using an agency or the competitiveness of the environment that their industry is in. And the number, the threshold that I like to think of, is a variable number that you'll work out. If you try with like a hundred bucks or, you know, 500 bucks spend in search over the month, what are the chances that no other competitors are willing to pay more than you to capture that, those audiences, you're just going to waste that budget on the few clicks that do come through and you're not going to get enough traffic to convert.
Speaker 2:So, you're just going to see a little drip feed of traffic and you're going to call it a failure and never come back to it.
Speaker 1:That's right, or just continue putting the money in and not seeing anything out of it because there's not enough data for it to learn. Like you look at Google, you look at meta, they have thresholds to get out of the learning phase and then that's supposed to be when it's doing its optimal performance, the algorithms working for you properly, and I think that requires about 20 conversion events per week. It might change a little bit, but I'm pretty sure it's about 20 conversion events per week. So if you want to think about that and say, all right, well, on average it's costing me $50 CPA to get a conversion, then I need 20 of them. Then I need to be spending a minimum of $1,000 per week to get out of that learning phase. Per ad set or per campaign. I'm pretty sure to spend 50 bucks a week. My average CPA is $50. So I'm going to get one conversion.
Speaker 2:Like what's the point? You might as well just quit there. Absolutely. That threshold goes up again if you're paying an agency. So we can extract way more value than a client side specialist generally who says they can do paid search or someone giving it a crack for themselves, who may be an entrepreneur or starting their business out and running their own search campaigns. Of course an agency can get more value for the same budget, but you have to offset their fees. The additional value that they can bring really needs a higher threshold of spend for it to be worth their while and worth your while in having that agency run those campaigns. So if you are going to an expert and a specialist agency to do this, make it worth it by spending enough for them to extract that value out for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I think you at least want to be looking at two for one ratio, so you'd be wanting to look at say, your management fees $1,500 per month.
Speaker 1:You want to be looking at a two-for-one ratio. So you'd be wanting to look at, say, your management fees $1,500 per month. You want to be spending at least $3,000 per month to make sure that you're going to get the benefit of actually the management fees diluted enough in your overall marketing spend that if you're spending $1,000 and your management fee is $1,500, there's no way you're going to see a positive return on that.
Speaker 2:So you need to make sure that you're spending enough to make it worthwhile in that investment. I would also use that as a red flag check for agencies who are willing to let you spend $1,000 a month media on Google, but take $1,500 a month in management. You're better off looking to the Google reps.
Speaker 1:Listen to your Google rep.
Speaker 2:Your money's just going to be spent anyway, thrown away anyway, until you can get it up to a threshold to really take advantage of those agencies. That's it.
Speaker 1:So, to wrap this up, what we're going to do is check your ASC, add your defined audiences and then make sure you're reducing your spend on returning and engaged audiences.
Speaker 2:You're going to reduce your brand overspend? Yes, so you're not spending too much budget on the traffic you're already going to get who likes your brand and is searching for your brand terms.
Speaker 1:Yep. Next time you get a phone call from the Google rep, you're going to be hanging up on him and he'll keep calling back. Just keep hanging up, yep.
Speaker 2:Until you have an issue within your account that you need, like something turned on or something Great with tracking.
Speaker 1:I feel the Google reps are great for tracking situations, not so much on performance advice.
Speaker 2:You're not going to purely focus on a blended return on ad spend across the entire campaign. It's a much more complex strategy. Strategies are needed for that. You want to spend more on a new customer than you are on getting your own customers back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look at your ANCAC, look at your LTV, look at your ROVs and make sure that you're paying attention to these numbers and what's actually sitting and hitting your bank account, not just what the platforms are telling you. And the last one, what was it? Again You're not spending enough.
Speaker 2:Spend more.
Speaker 1:Just fucking spend more. That's what we find. Any account, every client, everyone that we work with the ones who are spending the most are the ones who are getting the best results. Yeah, and that's just. There's more data within their ad accounts, they're able to learn faster, they're able to test more creatives. Spend more, you're going to get better results, and that's just the reality of it. That's right.
Speaker 2:There are points of diminishing returns after you start outpacing the available audiences. But I guarantee you you're probably not there, not even close, yeah. So that's. Digital Horizons for this this week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching.