At a glance
Roll-up of AdRoll spend on line items, audiences, or placements that produced zero attributed conversions over the 30-day window. The recoverable line in any AdRoll account, every dollar here is, by definition, available for reallocation if you remove the zero-converting source. Critical reading on retargeting accounts because ATT and Safari ITP have made some retargeting audiences mathematically incapable of producing attributable conversions; those line items should be paused, not “given more time”.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your AdRoll data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US apparel DTC brand running AdRoll for site retargeting and lookalike prospecting. Account currency USD. The 30-day window covers 02 Apr 26 to 01 May 26. Account total spend 2,140 (11.4% of total spend) as zero-conversion.
What a paid-acquisition lead does with this:
- **The 1,200 immediately (220). The Lookalike and contextual lines need a deeper decision; if the brand is in growth mode and intentionally accepting low retargeting yield in iOS-heavy markets, leaving them on with a daily cap of $20 can be defensible. If the brand is in profit mode, pause both.
- 11.4% wasted is on the higher end for AdRoll. Industry typical sits at 6 to 12% on retargeting-platform accounts. Below 5% suggests over-aggressive line-item pruning (you may be missing scaling opportunities); above 15% means the account needs a sweep.
- The Email-orchestration zero-conversion is not normal. AdRoll’s cart-abandoner email module typically delivers 8 to 15x ROAS within 7 days. A segment with $220 spent over 18 days and zero conversions is almost certainly a connector misconfiguration (audience definition wrong, email creative not approved, send schedule paused, or the trigger event not firing). Open the email module and audit the journey before pausing.
- The Lookalike 1% audience went from “best” to “worst” in 12 months. Pre-ATT, AdRoll’s purchaser lookalikes at 1% were typically the highest-ROAS prospecting segment. Post-ATT iOS opt-out shrunk the seed audience, the lookalike model is no longer reliable on small seeds. Expand to LAL 3 to 5% and re-evaluate at next cycle.
- The 90-day display remarketing audience is almost certainly saturated. Frequency cap data on this line item shows 8.4 average impressions per user across the 30-day window. Anyone who was going to convert from seeing your ad has already either converted or stopped responding. Refresh the creative (new visuals, different copy) or shrink the audience window to 30-day visitors.
- Wasted spend > 15% of total: account needs a line-item sweep. See Spend by Campaign.
- A single line item > $400 wasted: highest-priority single fix.
- Wasted spend rising while account ROAS holds: the Conversions API is healthy but specific line items have saturated audiences. Pause and redeploy.
- Wasted spend rising AND ROAS dropping: ATT / Safari ITP audience match rate is degrading. Switch heavier toward Conversions API server-side tracking and AdRoll Identity Graph.
- Wasted spend zero or near-zero on an account with 6+ line items: probably over-pruned; check whether the optimiser has any prospecting headroom left.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in AdRoll’s own dashboard:AdRoll Dashboard, Reporting, Performance Report. Filter to the same advertisable and date range used in this card. Sort byFor per-segment breakdowns: AdRoll Dashboard, Audiences shows segment-level spend and conversions. Combined with the Performance Report’s filter, the union of zero-conversion segments produces this card’s roll-up. Why our number may legitimately differ from the AdRoll dashboard:Costdescending and filterConversions = 0. The total at the foot of that view should match this card to within 1 to 2%.
Why the BUSINESS metric often differs (the important one):
The “wasted” label assumes AdRoll’s conversion attribution is the truth. In practice, a line item marked as zero-conversion may have:
- Driven a conversion the pixel missed. Tag-fire failures on specific landing pages cause pixel under-reporting. Cross-check against
shopify.total_revenueUTM-tagged for AdRoll. - Driven a multi-touch path where AdRoll was the first touch and got no last-click credit. Common on retargeting because the closing channel (Google Branded Search, direct, email) gets the conversion credit.
- Driven a conversion outside the attribution window. A high-consideration product (furniture, jewellery) may convert at day 35 and miss the 30-day window entirely.
- Driven an iOS conversion that ATT made invisible. On iOS-heavy line items, 60 to 75% of conversions can be unattributable post-ATT. Cross-check iOS Match Rate.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My wasted spend jumped from 6% to 14% in one week. What changed? Three usual causes, in order of likelihood. (1) Conversions API broke or degraded. A CAPI failure means server-side conversions stop flowing; line items that depended on CAPI for attribution start showing zero. Check Conversions API Health first; this is the highest-likelihood cause and the cheapest fix. (2) A new line item launched and is in learning phase. Fresh line items typically need 7 to 14 days before producing attributable conversions; if launched in the last 2 weeks, give them more time before pausing. (3) Audience saturation on a long-running line item. Frequency over 7 in 30 days = audience exhausted; refresh creative or shrink the window. Should I just pause every line item with zero conversions? No. The 30-day window matters: a low-velocity prospecting audience may need 45 to 60 days to produce its first conversion. Use these filters before pausing. (1) Spend > $200 (smaller line items are noise). (2) Frequency > 5 (audience is saturated, not under-served). (3) Live for at least 21 days (past learning phase). (4) CTR has been flat or falling for 14 days (creative fatigue, not optimisation runway). If all four hold, pause. If only one or two hold, refresh creative and give it another cycle. My wasted spend looks low (under 4%) but my ROAS is also low. What is going on? This is the over-pruned account pattern. You have killed every line item that did not produce within its first 14 days, leaving only the saturated retargeting audiences. ROAS will be acceptable in absolute terms but absolute conversion volume is anaemic. Action: relaunch a prospecting line item with a 30-day patience window and explicitly tolerate higher initial wasted-spend; growth requires upstream investment that pays back later. Can the Email-orchestration module produce wasted spend? Yes, and it is one of the cleanest fixes when it does. Email line items at zero conversions for 14+ days are almost always a setup issue (audience definition wrong, creative not approved, send schedule paused, trigger not firing) rather than an audience-quality issue. Audit the journey in the AdRoll email module first; relaunch usually recovers the line item entirely. Why is my Display Remarketing 90-day audience always in the wasted bucket lately? Almost certainly audience saturation combined with iOS opt-out drift. Pre-ATT, 90-day visitor audiences were the workhorse of retargeting (large enough to optimise against, fresh enough to convert). Post-ATT and post-Safari ITP, the iOS visitor pool has collapsed to roughly 25 to 40% of pre-ATT levels, which makes 90-day visitor audiences too small for the optimiser. Two practical fixes: (1) shrink the audience to 30-day visitors (smaller but fresher); (2) expand to 180-day visitors (larger pool, lower-quality, requires creative refresh). Does the card include Identity Graph-attributed conversions? By default, no. Identity Graph is AdRoll’s post-cookie ID solution; turning it on at the connector level credits Identity Graph-attributed conversions to the underlying line items, which can pull line items out of the wasted bucket. Identity Graph adoption typically reduces wasted spend by 8 to 20% on iOS-heavy accounts. Enable it in connector settings if you have not already. My wasted spend is concentrated on contextual prospecting. Should I pause it? Depends on your phase. Contextual prospecting (long-tail exchange inventory) is the cheapest reach AdRoll offers but is mathematically unlikely to produce attributable conversions on a 30-day window at typical spend levels. If you are in profit mode, pause it. If you are in growth mode, treat the spend as brand-awareness spend and accept that AdRoll’s attribution model cannot value it; check brand-search lift in Google Ads Branded Search over the next quarter to see if the contextual layer is producing downstream branded demand. Does iOS 14.5+ ATT inflate this card artificially? Yes, and significantly. ATT-opt-out users (60 to 75% of iOS traffic in UK / US) cannot have their conversions attributed by AdRoll’s pixel post-click. On retargeting line items targeting iOS-heavy audiences, this can make the line item look like 100% wasted when in reality 30 to 50% of the spend is producing real conversions that AdRoll cannot attribute. Two mitigations: (1) Conversions API server-side tracking recovers 40 to 60% of the lost attribution; (2) AdRoll Identity Graph recovers another 10 to 25% on top. Without these two, iOS-heavy retargeting line items will always show inflated wasted-spend. The threshold is>$0. Is that not too aggressive?
Intentional. On AdRoll accounts the wasted-spend pattern is usually a single misconfigured line item rather than account-wide drift; an aggressive threshold catches the issue quickly. The 30-day window prevents over-flagging on low-velocity audiences. If your account runs many small experimental line items, override the threshold to >$200 per line item in connector settings.
Wasted spend dropped to zero. Should I be happy?
Not necessarily. Zero wasted spend on an account with 6+ line items usually means the optimiser is running every line item at saturation, which leaves no headroom for scaling. The healthy reading is 4 to 10% wasted; below that suggests the account has no exploration budget left.