There’s a lot of classic “mistakes” that can help sink an advertising campaign and drown its potential ROI.
Classic ones like targeting mismatches or bad creatives might be the first to come to mind.
However, the truly insidious mistake is the one that many advertisers fail to notice.
I mean, of course, wasted ad spend.
Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about experiments or tests that lead to nothing fruitful.
I’m specifically talking about the kind of wastage that quietly bleeds your budget, dilutes your impact, and drags down your ROI without anyone raising the alarm.
This is doubly important because even today in 2025, I’m still seeing many advertisers obsess over CTRs, impressions or reach all the while letting 20-30%, or even more, of their budgets leak away to elements that are not delivering returns.
Let’s dig into how big the problem really is and how to plug some of these holes.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: Lots of Ad Spend Gets Wasted
Here are some striking stats about wasted ad spend I was able to pull.
Taken together, the picture is grim:
- 25 % of programmatic ad dollars are wasted: The ANA’s media supply-chain transparency study found that of the $88B spent on open-web programmatic, roughly $22B fails to produce any impact. In fact, only $0.36 of every dollar entering a DSP reaches a consumer. As for the rest? Into the aether.
- An additional 12 % of ad budgets are lost to fraud or stacking/misalignment. According to eMarketer, ad tech misalignments and click fraud lead to about 12% of budgets being wasted. This one is a bit terrifying, honestly, especially as Google and other advertising platforms claim that it’s a non-issue.
- Billions lost to “dull media”. A 2025 report by Amplified claims that brands globally waste up to $245 billion annually – that’s a quarter of a trillion bucks – by running ads in formats or contexts that fail to capture attention.
Taking this data together, we can see that big picture, a third or more of ad spend is simply wasted.
Common Sources of Wastage
The numbers above show us that many marketers don’t notice where their budgets quietly disappear, especially when managing large accounts that spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars a day.
This isn’t because they’re careless, but because digital advertising on the biggest platforms such as Google Ads and Meta is designed to make you spend as much as possible.
Here are three of the biggest culprits we’ve personally seen in accounts we’ve audited:
1. Paying for worthless clicks. Search advertiser is powerful because it allows advertisers to pick the keywords they want to bid on. However, search advertising of today isn’t what it used to be – platforms like Google increasingly match your keywords with irrelevant “synonyms” or “intent-based” searches. Unless the search terms are being monitored closely, it’s nit uncommon to see half or more of a campaign’s spend go towards junk.
2. Letting AI algorithms run wild. Automation can be a blessing or a black hole. Ad types such as Performance Max and Advantage+ make fast decisions, and get your ads seen, but not always by the right people or in the right placement. Without hun guidance they can easily burn through your budget without producing any quantifiable returns.
3. Driving traffic to pages that don’t convert. Even when campaigns drive genuine engagement and the right traffic, a weak post-click experience can undo it all. If your landing page suffers from slow load times, mismatched messaging, or too many form fields, then you’re going to see your clicks peel away before they convert. A solid landing page should convert 3-10% of clicks depending on your industry. If it’s less, there’s a good chance you’re wasting potential.
How to Stop Wasting Ad Spend
The sad truth about wasted ad spend is that even when a campaign is converting, every dollar that leaks out is a dollar that could have fueled higher conversions.
The good news: the fixes are often in your hands, not in an outlandish new tool or channel. All it takes is due diligence.
This can come in a variety of forms, but some of the go-to tips and checks we run regularly here at Acorn include:
- Keeping a close eye on the search terms of search advertising. Note: these are different than your “search keywords.” The search terms show what people are actually typing and triggering your ads. Expect to see some wild things in here.
- Review your geo-targeting for campaigns that focus on more than one region. Often, advertising platforms push all budget towards whichever receives the most clicks but not conversions. You might find a place eating up your budget isn’t delivering the returns.
- Review your landing page for performance and how easy it is to complete the action. From a technical angle, a good tool is PageSpeed Insights which can audit it’s performance. If you receive a failing grade, there’s a good chance it’s affecting your conversions.
The three above should be regular checks in any account. Of course, they take time, and there are many more things to check (some with greater levls of nuance than others), but this should get you started.
Ultimately, at Acorn Digital Consulting, this is precisely the kind of “behind the curtains” diligence we bring to every client.
We audit campaigns not for vanity metrics but for real growth, and build guardrails so your ads don’t hemorrhage budget.
If you’d like us to run a waste audit for your current campaigns (no obligation), or co-design a campaign with minimal leak potential, we’d be thrilled to help.
Just drop us a note and we’ll get started.
