They were probably spending something like 20% of the entire budget on pointless advertising. Commercials, Radio, Billboards, planes, buses, google. In one example they were paying 10's of thousands a month each for some premium listings on several free listing sites where we literally never had a single conversion or even click through to our website. There were targeted ads where the cost of the ads were more than even if we had sold every single item that was advertised. There were long running ad campaigns running on products that had zero sales.
I actually realized my bias and possibly the perception of it to others. I made a dynamic dashboard setup with all the data I could find on sales and marketing and let them mix max slice and dice it themselves. I figured that if I simply delivered a super negative report it would be ignored.
One of my favorite additions to the report were sliders that let them increase or decrease the threshold of which ads counted towards a sale. Say an ad placed today and a spike in sales tomorrow or next month. The stats were still bad with huge gaps in time that counted towards a sale.
I actually realized my bias and possibly the perception of it to others. I made a dynamic dashboard setup with all the data I could find on sales and marketing and let them mix max slice and dice it themselves. I figured that if I simply delivered a super negative report it would be ignored.
One of my favorite additions to the report were sliders that let them increase or decrease the threshold of which ads counted towards a sale. Say an ad placed today and a spike in sales tomorrow or next month. The stats were still bad with huge gaps in time that counted towards a sale.