Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the ever-changing landscape when it comes to online marketing and the services that entrepreneurs and corporations buy from digital marketing service agencies.

In recent times, many of you may remember the news about a number of corporations withdrawing advertising dollars from YouTube, leaving several prominent YouTube content creators very upset over declining revenue, and I’m sure that Google and YouTube weren’t happy. about the situation either.

Then I read where Proctor & Gamble, a large global digital marketing investor, recently cut more than $ 140 million in digital advertising due to ineffective online ads. Why did they say that these ads were ineffective? The top two reasons cited were that many of their ads ended up attached to content of objectionable quality, meaning YouTube couldn’t discern which channels were good places to place these ads and companies were getting their names and ads associated with the content. they didn’t want to be related in any way. And second, many of their ads fell on channels and places where the “bots” were looking at the ads instead of human eyes. And bots don’t spend money on products, so these ad dollars are just going to waste.

The funny thing was, after these ad cuts occurred, these corporations saw virtually no loss in sales or business growth. The only thing that changed was the increase in the percentage of effectiveness of ad spend related to sales.

JP Morgan Chase cut the 400,000 sites it had allowed to place ads on in March to just about 5,000 pre-approved sites and, as its chief marketing officer, Kristin Lemkau, quoted the New York Times: “We haven’t seen any deterioration in our metrics. performance “since the change.”

In recent years, we’ve seen corporations make constant moves from spending money on television advertising in the direction of digital advertising because frankly, you could get a lot more leads per dollar spent online. Many digital marketing companies enjoyed spectacular growth in just a few years due to this windfall of money being spent on the media.

For a time, it was a utopia, but now corporations are learning, as the examples above demonstrate. Now they are creating the statistical charts and graphs they need to show their management teams how effective their media spend is. And now they are able to discern where their investment is missing and dig into those statistics to find out why, which is why you are now seeing these types of movement cuts happening in the corporate landscape and statements. on why the cuts are occurring.

To get the media spending capital of these corporations today, it is increasingly apparent that digital marketing services companies must be better prepared to show statistical evidence that the money spent will generate the anticipated financial returns. And as a marketing company, you will need to be able to start answering questions about how you can manage your funds so that real people and not bots see the ads being placed and that the ads are placed in quality places, sticking to quality. happy. If you can’t, you may end up getting taken down just like the 3,500 websites that had benefited from the JP Morgan Chase ads.

In short, it’s getting harder and harder to be a digital marketing company these days and it will be even harder. Online marketing service companies will have to do more diligence as they find places to spend corporate advertising budgets. And more due diligence means more work that will reduce profit margins. However, if you want to stay in business for the long term, you will have to be good at this. Those that do will gain additional business from the advertising companies that don’t.