Wasted ad spend: where it hides and how to find it
Most ad waste doesn’t show up in the ad platform. Here are the five places to look, and how to fix each one.
Ask most brands where their ad budget is wasted and they’ll point to campaigns with a low ROAS. That’s the easy part. The bigger leaks rarely show up in the ad platform at all, because they only appear when you put ad data next to your stock, orders and returns.
1. Ads running on products that are out of stock
When a product sells out, its ads usually keep running. The platform still sees clicks, so nothing looks wrong, but every visitor lands on a page they can’t buy from. Check your live ads against current stock every day, not every week.
2. Products with thin or negative margins
A product with a healthy ROAS can still lose money once you count product cost, shipping, payment fees and discounts. Calculate contribution margin per product and compare it with the ad cost per order. If the ad cost is bigger, every sale makes you poorer.
3. High-return products
Returns arrive weeks after the sale, long after the platform has counted the conversion. Products with high return rates look profitable in the ad account and unprofitable in your bank account. Adjust ROAS for returns before deciding where to scale.
4. Overlapping audiences and campaigns
When several campaigns target the same people, you bid against yourself and each campaign claims the same sale. Look for audience overlap and for conversions counted in more than one place.
5. Winners that never get scaled
Waste isn’t only money spent badly. It’s also money not spent on what’s working. A creative that outperforms for a week and never gets more budget is a missed opportunity.
How Purser helps
Purser runs these checks across your ad accounts, store and finance data every day. It flags the leaks, proposes where the budget should go instead, and makes the change once you approve.
