Digital Advertising ROI Is Sky-High

At Imagination, our clients’ campaign costs are falling, which generates greater ROI for their budgets as long as performance remains constant or better—which it has.

Chris Schedler, a paid media specialist at Imagination, is managing a LinkedIn campaign for one of our largest financial services clients. He’s seen a month-over-month drop of 16% in the campaign’s cost per click.

“We’re measuring the campaign’s success by site visits and engagement,” he says. “The cheaper cost per click means it costs less for the client to drive traffic to their campaign landing page.”

Just about every digital marketing channel is seeing a similar downward trend in cost. The Wall Street Journal reports that marketers have seen 15%-25% declines in cost per thousand impressions (CPM) on Facebook from February to March. Instagram, YouTube and Google search ads are all selling at comparable discounts to typical prices.

Making greater impressions with digital advertising

At the same time that costs are falling, another trend is increasing the value of digital advertising for opportunistic marketers: People are consuming more digital content than they did before the pandemic.

Diane Bickel, marketing director, Americas, at Taboola, compared programmatic ad CPMs and page views on April 15 to the same data on March 15 of this year. She told us that on average, CPMs have remained relatively steady while available inventory (the number of ads served as a result of pageviews) has increased about 10 percent month over month.

That means that ad value is still trending up as prices remain near March levels and ad inventory keeps rising.

Simply put, it’s costing a lot less to reach an even larger audience through digital advertising. As a result, many marketers can now achieve their marketing goals faster and more cheaply than ever before.

What’s your perspective on digital advertising ROI? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

If you missed it, check out my first article in this series: “History says now is time to lean into marketing.”

And keep an eye out for my next article, when I focus on email marketing and provide some thought starters for content creation during the pandemic.