B2B SaaS · Vertical
A $1.2M ad budget hid a 40% wasted impression rate.
This marketing & margin audit identified $74k in wasted annual spend in a B2B SaaS business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 7 days.
The business
A vertical SaaS company had been running a $1.2M annual advertising budget largely on autopilot since its original launch campaign. The core targeting, placement and scheduling settings had barely changed in years; the account simply kept spending to a plan set long ago, on the reasonable sounding assumption that a large, established budget was being managed with proportionate care.
What triggered the audit
Efficiency had decayed slowly and, tellingly, no one clearly owned the day to day media hygiene of such a large account. The audit ran a full delivery quality teardown to establish where the impressions were physically going, on the principle that on a seven figure budget even a modest percentage of waste represents a very large absolute number.
What the audit found
The teardown found an account coasting on stale settings while its delivery quality quietly degraded. Placement targeting, dayparting and geo controls had never been meaningfully optimized since launch, so a large share of impressions, around 40%, was landing on out of hours slots, out of market geographies and low value placements that buyers in this vertical never convert from. None of it was catastrophic in isolation; it was simply budget being sprayed inefficiently, day after day, because the account was on autopilot and no one was watching the delivery detail. The reported annual amount of wasted spend was roughly $74k within the $1.2M budget. The 40% figure measures impressions, not the share of dollars spent.
What we changed
Rebuilt placement exclusions, dayparting and geo targeting around exactly when and where buyers in this vertical actually convert, rather than the launch era settings the account had coasted on.
Cut the long tail of junk and low value inventory that had been absorbing a large share of the budget while returning effectively nothing.
Established a monthly delivery quality review with a clear, named owner, so the hygiene gains hold rather than decaying back to autopilot over time.
Reallocated the recovered budget into the high performing placements that had previously been starved by all the wasted delivery.
The result
The before and after percentages cover all impressions. Outcomes were measured for three months after the 90 day implementation period. $74k a year of wasted delivery eliminated, an annual figure equal to 12× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee, with reach concentrated on inventory that converts. For anyone overseeing a seven figure media budget, the number is a warning: 40% of impressions were landing where buyers never convert, purely because the account ran on autopilot. On a budget this size, even modest waste is a very large figure, and it accrues every single day nobody owns the hygiene. A structured audit teardown finds it in days, and the monthly review that follows pays for itself many times over.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 7 days.
What the client said
$74k a year of wasted spend cut in 7 days
Share of all impressions hitting no convert inventory: 40% → 6%
“Forty percent of our impressions landed where buyers never convert. Cristian's delivery teardown found placement, dayparting and geo settings untouched since launch on a seven figure budget. We rebuilt them.”
Cristian BragauSenior Auditor · signed this audit off