Marketers often come to us looking for insights & recommendations on improving their performance.
They want to know “which creatives to launch?” or “how to allocate ad spend?”
But recently, one of our customers came to us with a strange request.
They wanted to reduce their ad spend wastage!
When we dived deeper, we found something so shocking that we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it!
What did they mean by ad spend waste?
They have $1B+ in AUM and their total annual ad spend exceeds $15M.
Out of this, over 53% is spent on Google Search ads.
And things are great. Their conversion metrics are above industry average, their AOV and margins are healthy, and growth is steady.
So where’s the problem?
When we looked closely, we found a leaky bucket - one that was giving away 14%
Imagine - out of $8M spent, almost $1.1M is wasted.
So where is this money going?
$500K (45%): Irrelevant search terms
Search queries that show low intent OR is related to something they don’t offer.
$325K (30%): Missed high-intent terms
Search queries that show high intent but are not effectively captured by the current list.
$275K (25%): Unoptimized bids
Keywords where conversions are cheap but the impression share is low.
This was a shocking discovery for us.
We dropped everything and spent the entire weekend analysing the Search Ads accounts connected to GetCrux to figure out how others were performing.
The trend is clear - the wastage is nearly the same across the board.
Out of $72M in Google Search ad spend connected to GetCrux:
Almost $7.92M (11%) is getting wasted in a similar way.
That’s a wasted revenue opportunity of roughly $19.8M!
Why is this waste happening?
This seemed confusing.
Is this an awareness problem where people don’t know about the waste?
Or do they know but aren’t able to fix it?
When we spoke to all our users, it turns out it's a little bit of both.
While a lot of marketing teams already know about this wastage, there’s hardly anything they can do about it.
For eg.
An average ad account with $1M monthly spend gets about 10,000 search queries per month. Granted that 60-70% of spend comes from the top 5-10% of search queries.
But what about the rest?
There is a long tail of 9,000+ search queries which goes un-analysed.
Why? Because it can take forever to go through this list.
The cost of human-hours required to analyse and clean this waste might not make economical sense for a team.
What’s the way to optimize this?
Now with AI agents at our disposal, we can get them to do all the repetitive and manual tasks in seconds and in a much cost-effective way.
For example,
GetCrux’s AI agent can scan through millions of search queries at once, analyse them based on relevance, QS (quality score), impression share, cost of conversions and custom bottom funnel metrics and segregate them into certain buckets you want.
We did the same for our customer and came back with 3 takeaways:-
1. Irrelevant Searches
Search Terms Found: 4400
Includes low intent searches related to non offerings, out of service areas, and others.
Action Suggested: Add them to negations.
2. Missed High Intent
Search Terms Found: 670
Includes long tail of high intent searches with high volume that are overlooked.
Action Suggested: Add new ones to list and change match type of existing to ‘EXACT’.
3. Bid Changes
Lost Impression Share: 11%
Includes high intent / low cost conversion opportunities where we are losing impression share and should aim to bid higher.
Action Suggested: Specific bid suggested for each keyword.
The takeaway from this engagement is clear.
A huge chunk of spend is getting wasted and is getting ignored because it needs a long list of manual tasks that can now be simplified and automated with AI agents.
To find your ad spend waste and learn more about our agent, schedule a call and get an audit of your Google Search Ads.
