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This established online fashion retailer was experiencing declining performance despite increasing media investment. With over £50 million in annual advertising spend across multiple programmatic platforms, they lacked the internal expertise to evaluate whether their agency partners were delivering optimal results.
Fuel Media conducted a comprehensive 6-week digital media audit, examining all programmatic buying activity, agency contracts, and performance data across the previous 12 months.
Our audit revealed significant opportunities for improvement. We discovered that 23% of impressions were served to overlapping audiences across different platforms, essentially paying multiple times to reach the same users. Additionally, the agency's bidding strategies were not optimised for the retailer's actual business objectives—campaigns were optimised for clicks rather than conversions, leading to high traffic volumes but poor-quality visitors. We also identified that nearly 15% of programmatic spend was going to low-quality inventory with minimal brand safety controls. Through detailed analysis of the customer journey, we determined that the current attribution model significantly over-credited last-click touchpoints, leading to misallocation of budget away from crucial upper-funnel awareness campaigns. Our recommendations included consolidating DSP platforms to reduce audience overlap, implementing a more sophisticated attribution model, renegotiating agency fees to align with business outcomes, and establishing stricter inventory quality standards.
"Fuel Media's audit was eye-opening. We thought we were getting good value from our agency, but the independent analysis revealed significant opportunities we were completely unaware of. The recommendations were practical and actionable, and the results have exceeded our expectations. The ROI on the audit investment was achieved within the first month."
Week 1-2: Data collection and stakeholder interviews
Week 3-4: Platform analysis and benchmarking
Week 5-6: Recommendations and presentation
Month 2-4: Implementation support and optimisation
Independent audits reveal opportunities even experienced in-house teams might miss
Audience overlap across platforms can waste 20-30% of programmatic budgets
Aligning attribution models with actual customer behaviour is crucial for optimal budget allocation
Agency transparency and fee structures significantly impact overall media efficiency
Brand safety and fraud prevention measures should be verified independently, not just trusted