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The past few years have been a rollercoaster for marketing leaders managing paid media budgets. Years of economic uncertainty drove many companies to pull back their media spend. CMOs were asked to do more with less and focus on cost-effective channels like organic search, email, and organic social to drive conversions.
A few years after the pandemic's peak, paid media budgets have rebounded significantly. Companies are back on stable financial ground, so they’re more comfortable giving marketing teams higher budgets to drive growth.
This blog post breaks down the latest paid media budget numbers. In addition, we share how marketing leaders can capitalise on these trends by using AI to improve the efficiency of paid media spend. Keep reading to learn more!
Paid media budgets have begun to rebound, and this trend is expected to carry over into 2025. According to eMarketer, in 2025, U.S. ad digital spend will reach a whopping $315 billion, a 7.5% increase from 2024 levels. It’s important to note, however, that while budgets are growing, they’re not increasing as quickly as they did in the pre-pandemic days. To avoid getting your budget slashed, it’s more important than ever to spend wisely and back up your performance with metrics.
Our recent State of AI in Digital Marketing Report backed up these findings. When we surveyed 500 marketing leaders, 91% said they have bigger paid media budgets at their disposal than they did last year.
The AI hype wave has been in full effect over the past few years — you’ve undoubtedly seen articles about how AI’s wide range of business applications. Companies use it to write content, design graphics, optimise ad bidding, analyse data, predict trends, and much more.
This flurry of media coverage has caught the attention of the C-suite. Many are feeling pressure to increase AI use and worry that the competition will surpass them if they don't. To increase adoption in their organisations, many are adding new line items to their budgets for AI. In our recent survey of marketers, 91% said their companies have a budget dedicated to AI tools, a 5% increase year over year.
Can you invest in AI tools to help spend your bigger paid media budget more efficiently? According to our survey, 94% of marketers think so! In the next section, we’ll show you how Invoca’s AI helps marketers generate more leads from their digital advertising at a lower cost.
When marketers run paid media campaigns, many overlook a critical conversion: phone leads. If you’re not accounting for the high-value phone calls your ads drive, you’re significantly underreporting your true ROI. You’re also missing out on optimisation opportunities to take your results to the next level.
Many marketers use AI-powered revenue execution platforms like Invoca to get attribution for phone leads. Revenue execution platforms are software solutions that connect the entire customer buying journey. They work by bridging the data gap between the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals. This creates a cohesive view of the revenue journey for interactions that occur online and continue over the phone.
Below, we’ll break down how revenue execution platforms use AI to help you prove — and improve — your paid media results.
With an AI-powered revenue execution platform like Invoca, the marketing team can track which channels and campaigns drive phone leads and conversions in the contact centre and at business locations. This allows your paid media team to benchmark its full ROI — including offline conversions. You can also tie your phone leads to revenue, showing your finance team exactly how your programs impact the bottom line.
With benchmarking in place, the marketing team can allocate its budget to the channels, campaigns, and keywords driving the most conversions — both online and over the phone. You can also reduce spend on underperforming campaigns, thereby reducing wasted budget.
In addition, you can use revenue execution platforms to improve your ad targeting and suppression. You can retarget callers with ads for the products or services they talked about over the phone, touting the value propositions they mentioned. You can suppress callers who purchased over the phone from seeing future ads, reducing wasted ad spend.
Once high-value leads are flowing in over the phone, revenue execution platforms allow your paid media team to track how they’re being converted in the contact centre. You can generate reports showing how many of your marketing phone leads go unanswered and how many go unconverted. You can also pinpoint customer experience issues that may lead to low conversion rates.
With these insights, you can collaborate with contact centre leaders to improve the conversion rates of your paid media phone leads. You can also use Invoca’s tools to enhance the buyer experience, such as intelligent call routing and insights about caller intent that agents can use to personalise conversations. As a result, you can ensure the valuable leads you drive are converted to customers at a high rate, maximising your impact on revenue.
Check out this short video to see how PreSense works:
Revenue execution platforms use AI to give your paid media and contact centre teams the shared data they need to collaborate more effectively. This allows you to drive more high-quality phone leads at a lower cost and convert those leads at a higher rate. You can also prove your paid media budget’s full impact on revenue growth.
Though there is an upfront investment for an AI-powered platform like Invoca, it soon pays for itself with the new insights and efficiencies it unlocks (more on that next).
Founded in 1960, Rogers is Canada’s largest telecom company, serving over 10.8 million subscribers. Despite the importance of phone calls in the telecommunications customer journey, Rogers didn’t have visibility into the full digital-to-call experience. This prevented them from tracking how many phone leads their paid media efforts were driving. This made it difficult for them to understand which campaigns truly gave them the best ROI.
With Invoca’s AI, Rogers can now understand not just which customers converted over the phone, but the average conversion value for each customer type. With this data, they can track the revenue each paid search campaign, ad, and keyword drives — online and over the phone. They then feed this revenue data into Google Ads to inform Smart Bidding. Smart Bidding weighs their bids in proportion to their returns, decreasing their cost per acquisition by 82% in a two-year period. They also achieved an 18% lift in net revenue from paid search.
“The results with Invoca have been phenomenal, to say the least. The benefits are constantly compounding with such minimal lift for the returns. I’ve never had a product where I spend more time selling people on the results than doing the work to get it going,” said Charlie Farrell, Senior Manager of Search Engine Marketing at Rogers.
In addition, Rogers uses Invoca to build lookalike audiences. Invoca’s AI automatically identifies the most valuable callers who made a purchase — Rogers then feeds these audience members back into their martech stack to find similar people who have a high probability of purchasing. This has been a valuable tool to help the team expand their reach.
Read the full Rogers Communications case study here
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you drive more ROI from your paid media budget? Check out these resources:
