Retail · Omnichannel
Online ads were paying for in store demand.
This marketing & margin audit identified $88k in wasted annual spend in a Retail business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 7 days.
The business
An omnichannel retailer credited paid social with driving a large share of its in store demand, and used that narrative to protect a substantial and growing social budget. The story was intuitively appealing and widely believed internally: the ads ran, footfall was healthy, and attributed reporting connected the two, so paid social was treated as a proven driver of store traffic.
What triggered the audit
A regional CFO was openly skeptical that online ads were really the reason customers walked into stores, and asked for proof rather than attribution. Store demand is notoriously hard to attribute and easy to overcredit, so the audit ran a proper matched market geo lift test to isolate what paid social genuinely caused.
What the audit found
The geo lift test undercut the comfortable story badly. Comparing matched markets with and without paid social, much of the spend turned out to be nonincremental to stores. Customers were coming in at broadly the same rate whether or not the ads ran, driven by the brand, location and habit rather than the campaigns. Attribution had been crediting paid social for footfall it merely coincided with, and because that footfall was real, the illusion held. In truth, a large slice of the budget was buying visits that would have happened anyway, wasting roughly $88k a year, one of the largest single leaks the audit uncovered, on ads that moved store demand far less than everyone believed.
What we changed
Cut the nonincremental social spend and reallocated it to the channels and markets that actually passed the geo lift test, so budget follows measured store impact.
Made geo holdout testing a standing part of budget planning rather than a one off exercise, so incrementality is proven continuously rather than assumed once.
Rebuilt store demand reporting around measured incrementality instead of attributed footfall, ending the overcrediting at its source rather than just its symptom.
Redirected the recovered budget into the demand generation that geo testing showed genuinely lifts store visits, so the spend finally moves the needle it was meant to.
The result
The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. $88k a year redirected from ads that weren’t moving store demand to ones that provably do, an annual figure equal to 15× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee, one of the largest leaks we found. Any omnichannel leader should note the CFO was right to be skeptical: attribution had been crediting footfall the ads merely coincided with. If you can’t prove your paid social lifts store visits with a geo test, much of it may be buying demand you’d get for free. A fixed fee audit runs the holdout in days and converts skepticism into a measurement discipline that keeps paying.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 7 days.
What the client said
$88k a year of wasted spend cut in 7 days
Paid social proven to lift store visits: ~1 in 3 → 9 in 10
“Our CFO doubted that online ads drove store visits. David's matched market geo lift test proved the doubt right: footfall barely changed where the ads were off. The budget moved to markets and channels that passed the test.”
David JacksonSenior Auditor · signed this audit off