Adpulse.app runs a number of scans daily across your imported accounts to find instances of wasted spend.
What is wasted spend?
After reviewing hundreds of paid search accounts, we have found that on average an account is wasting 20% of its budget on activity that isn’t providing positive results. This is wasted spend and is reported for you on an account by account basis within the adpulse.app platform.
You can read the published research here: How Much Spend Does The Average PPC Ad Account Waste?
How we find wasted spend
Adpulse.app wasted spend scans are specifically designed to detect spend in underperforming areas of an account. These scans run on multiple levels, looking at areas such as campaigns, ad groups, search queries, locations, and devices to understand where money has been spent but has either not resulted in a conversion or has resulted in a high CPA or low ROAS as compared to average.
Once a scan finds an instance of wasted spend, adpulse.io reports this number to you as an insight, alongside details about what was found and a recommendation for how to fix it. In each account, we roll up all of these wasted spend insights into one total overall wasted spend figure that gives you context on the optimization opportunity in the account.
How do we calculate an account’s wasted spend number?
We’re committed to providing valuable and relevant insight into wasted spend, not sensationalizing it in the hopes of creating a bit of drama! We have built this commitment into our scans and into how we calculate the overall wasted spend figure.
Wasted spend can be found in many parts of an account and at times, scans may report wasted spend for a few different areas, such as search queries and ad groups. This can lead to duplication, where spend in one area (such as an ad group) may also be related to wasted spend in another area (such as a search query in that ad group). To ensure that the final figure reported to you is relevant, we have de-duplicated the findings which is why you might see an account’s wasted spend figure presented as a range, or as an equal to or greater than the figure, to give you a more accurate reflection of the total wasted spend figure found.