Home featured Advertising | Marketing Editor's Choice Featured Advertising | Marketing Is half of your marketing spend wasted? Loren Webb April 18, 2019 Byline: Drew Bowering, Senior Director of Market Management, Expedia Group Most of us in business have heard the old adage, “half of your marketing spend is wasted, but you do not know which half”. We now no longer need that to be true. Why? Well, you see we used to talk about how many people are online, now we talk about how many are online constantly. We’ve been saying that the future is mobile. Well, two thirds of all online traffic is now mobile [1]. Mobile is not just the future, mobile is now. My point is that with so much searching and shopping happening online, we have very specific data to understand how to target effectively, which means online marketing spend can be optimised as there is true visibility. Expedia Group conducted a lot of research in this space, and from that we’ve identified four fundamental themes that we need to hit for online success; (1) relevance, (2) trust, (3) convenience and (4) value [2]. By masterfully taking data and applying it to our online businesses, we can deliver on these while also eliminating wasted online spend. For me, the first focus is relevance. It’s the theme technology has fundamentally turned on its head. Relevance in the digital age is about identifying the correct intent in the exact moment it is intended. Put simply, the Netflix