Mutinex is urging marketers to stop ditching upper funnel investments in favour of lower funnel activations, warning performance is well and truly overinvested.

The latest Marketing ROI Index report analysed over $2 billion in marketing investment up to May 2024. The report reveals a trend of marketers shifting their investment from upper funnel to lower funnel actions due to constrained budgets and stagnant marketing ROI.

The report indicates that investment in search and affiliates has increased at the expense of online video and Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising. Despite a small increase in marketing ROI in Q1 2024, driven by increased investments in paid search and affiliate marketing, overall performance is tapering as these channels become more competitive.

"Marketers really can’t be faulted for trying to drive as much revenue as quickly as possible in the lower funnel in these tough economic conditions. But the numbers indicate that the short term gains of that strategy are basically played out at this point," said Henry Innis, Mutinex Global CEO and Co-Founder.

However, the report advises marketers to diversify their investment strategy rather than focusing solely on lower funnel actions.

"Marketers need to stop trying to simply “wait it out”. When the economic conditions are not in your favour, it’s tempting to think that if you hunker down and harvest demand that can see you through until the tide turns. But the reality is that the bottom of the funnel is very hot right now. If you don’t want to get burned then you need to buck the investment trend and diversify," said Will Marks, Mutinex Director of Marketing Science.

The full Mutinex MROI Index Report Q3 2024 is available online. The report is based on anonymised Mutinex customer data across a range of major categories, with all marketing investment figures baselined to 2021 numbers.