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. On a $1.2M base, that inefficiency compounded into roughly $74k a year of spend reaching inventory with effectively no chance of producing a customer.
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
$74k a year of wasted delivery eliminated — a 12× return on 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 — inside our fixed 5–7 day window.