Blind spots in the media mix: five insights from audit practice

A customer generates over 75% of its traffic on mobile, but the revenue per user on a smartphone is only half as high as on a desktop. The reason was quickly found in the audit: A complex checkout form with more than 20 mandatory fields was blocking mobile purchases. On the surface, the customer was efficiently generating reach, but the break in the purchase process meant that a large proportion of the traffic was not generating any sales.

Discounts work, but not at all times. One client already communicated product offers in the awareness stage of her campaigns – in other words, direct sales messages. This produced reach, but no conversions. The audit showed that the same assets in the lower funnel, where they belong, generate eight times more return on ad spend. Each funnel stage needs specific content: brand messages at the top, hard sales arguments at the bottom.

Traffic from AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google AI Mode is steadily increasing. However, it is not yet recorded separately in most analytics accounts. In such cases, we implement specific categorizations to make the influence of AI search on the customer journey measurable. If you ignore this area today, you will lose track of the target group’s modern information procurement.

Another audit revealed a company’s dependence on performance marketing: we used regression analyses to check how strongly sales depend on short-term discount communication. If sales collapse almost completely as soon as the performance push is removed, there is a lack of genuine brand loyalty. An audit can reveal whether a company is simply “buying” sales or whether the brand has developed its own pulling power that works independently of discounts.

Technical details often determine success. Enriched product images in the campaign feed that contain logos or prices perform significantly better than standard images on a white background. We also regularly find “zombies” – products that are theoretically in the advertising feed but never receive a click. Scripts can be used to bundle these and reactivate them in your own campaigns. Enhanced conversions are also a critical point: Just because an interface reports the status “active” does not mean that actionable information is actually flowing. A faulty data field can stop this important feature. Such small fixes make a big difference – but the errors have to be found first.