At a glance
Spend on whole AdRoll campaigns that produced zero attributed conversions over the 30-day window. Distinguished from adr_wasted_spend (line-item / segment / placement roll-up): this card surfaces account-wide campaign-level zeros, the cleanest “pause this entire campaign” recommendation. Critical reading on retargeting accounts because a campaign that has been at zero conversions for 14+ consecutive days is unlikely to recover without intervention.
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. Account total spend 1,540 (8.2% of total spend) on three campaigns that produced zero conversions.
What a paid-acquisition lead does with this:
- **The 720).
- **The 540).
- **The 280 of spend means the spend is platform-fee accrual, not media delivery. Audit the email module: no creative approved means no sends, but the campaign frame still accrues a daily orchestration fee. Either approve the creative or delete the campaign. Recoverable: 100% ($280).
- All three are fully recoverable, $1,540, in under 15 minutes of work. This is the highest-ROI 15 minutes you will spend this week. Redeploy to a healthy line item with proven ROAS.
- Compare against
adr_wasted_spendfor the line-item view. Some campaigns in the wasted-spend roll-up are line-item-level zeros within otherwise-converting campaigns; this card surfaces only campaign-wide zeros. Both are useful; this is the higher-priority pause list.
- Zero-conversion campaigns concentrated on iOS-only or Safari-only targeting: structural break, pause permanently.
- Zero-conversion campaign with zero impressions: setup error (creative not approved, audience empty, schedule paused). Audit before pausing.
- Zero-conversion campaign with high impressions and zero clicks: creative is invisible (mismatched audience, broken targeting, low-quality placement). Pause and re-launch with fresh creative.
- Zero-conversion campaign older than 30 days with healthy CTR: AdRoll’s pixel may be misfiring on the landing page. Audit the conversion event before pausing.
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, grouped by Campaign. Filter to the same date range used in this card. Sort byFor per-campaign drill-down: click into each zero-conversion campaign to see line items, segments, and placements; the zero-conversion roll-up at line-item level is whatCostdescending and filterConversions = 0. The total at the foot of that view should match this card’s roll-up to within 1 to 2%.
adr_wasted_spend surfaces.
Why our number may legitimately differ from the AdRoll dashboard:
Why the BUSINESS metric often differs (the important one):
The zero-conversion label assumes AdRoll’s attribution is the truth. In practice, a campaign marked zero may have:
- Driven a conversion the AdRoll pixel missed, especially on iOS or Safari. Cross-check
shopify.total_revenueUTM-tagged for AdRoll campaigns. - Driven a multi-touch path where AdRoll was the first or middle touch and got no last-click credit. The closing channel got the conversion.
- Driven a conversion outside the attribution window. High-consideration products may convert at day 35 and miss the 30-day window.
- Driven a brand-search lift that AdRoll cannot attribute (display campaigns drive branded queries that convert via Google Branded Search). Cross-check brand-search trends after pausing.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
A campaign launched 5 days ago is at zero conversions. Why isn’t it on this card? Intentional. Campaigns under 7 days old are excluded because AdRoll’s optimiser is still in learning phase and a 5-day zero is normal. The 7-day filter prevents false alarms on every new launch. If a campaign is at zero conversions at day 8+ with healthy spend, it joins the card. My zero-conversion campaign is targeting iOS only. Should I expect it to ever produce attributable conversions? No, not at the rate it would have pre-ATT. iOS users who declined the App Tracking Transparency prompt (60 to 75% in UK / US) cannot be matched between AdRoll’s pixel and the conversion event. The campaign may be producing real conversions; AdRoll just cannot attribute them. Two practical responses: (1) Switch the targeting to cross-platform so AdRoll has at least the non-iOS conversion signal to optimise against; (2) Enable Conversions API server-side tracking which recovers 40 to 60% of the lost iOS attribution. If neither is feasible, pause iOS-only campaigns; they are structurally broken on AdRoll today. A campaign with zero impressions and zero conversions is in this card. What is happening? Almost always a setup error. Either: (1) the audience is empty (definition produces zero matched users), (2) the creative was never approved (campaign frame accrues platform fees but never delivers), (3) the schedule is paused at the campaign level but daily orchestration fees still accrue, or (4) the line items inside the campaign are all paused. Audit the campaign in AdRoll’s dashboard before deciding to pause; the fix is usually trivial. My zero-conversion campaign has high CTR. Why pause it? High CTR with zero conversions over 30 days usually means one of three things. (1) Landing page broken: the click reaches a 404, a misconfigured product page, or an out-of-stock variant; check the landing page URL. (2) Pixel misfire: AdRoll’s conversion event is not firing on the thank-you page; check pixel diagnostics in AdRoll. (3) Audience-product mismatch: the audience is engaged enough to click but uninterested enough to bounce; refresh the offer or product mix. Don’t pause until you have ruled out 1 and 2; 3 is the only legitimate “pause” cause among the three. Should I pause every zero-conversion campaign immediately? No. Three filters before pausing. (1) Spend > $200 in the window (smaller campaigns are noise). (2) Live for at least 14 days (past learning phase plus reasonable conversion-cycle time). (3) Healthy CTR over the period (rules out broken creative; broken creative is a relaunch, not a pause). If all three hold, pause. Otherwise, fix the underlying issue first. Why is my Email-orchestration campaign in this card with zero impressions? Email orchestration campaigns accrue daily platform fees even when no creative is approved. A common pattern: someone sets up the campaign frame but the creative never gets approved (compliance review, missed handoff, agency lapse). The campaign sits at zero sends, zero impressions, zero conversions but accrues a small daily platform fee that adds up over weeks. Audit the email module weekly; catch these before they accumulate. My account has 8 zero-conversion campaigns. Is that bad? Depends on total campaign count. A 30-campaign account with 8 at zero (27%) is healthy if the team is aggressively testing. A 12-campaign account with 8 at zero (67%) is broken; the team launched campaigns without follow-through. The healthy reading is 10 to 25% of campaigns at zero in any given window; that range reflects a team running real experiments while pausing failed ones promptly. Does this card include Identity Graph-attributed conversions? By default, no. Turning on AdRoll Identity Graph at the connector level credits Identity Graph-attributed conversions to the underlying campaigns, which can pull campaigns out of the zero bucket. Identity Graph adoption typically reduces zero-conversion spend by 8 to 20% on iOS-heavy accounts. Enable in connector settings if you have not already. The zero-conversion bucket dropped sharply this week. Did I “fix” my account? Possibly, but check first. The most common cause of a sudden drop is a single high-spend campaign exiting learning phase and producing its first attributable conversion. That moves it out of zero but does not necessarily mean it is profitable; check ROAS on the same campaign before celebrating. Less common but plausible: someone enabled the Conversions API or Identity Graph (which retroactively attributes some prior conversions). Check connector audit log to see whether that happened. The campaign is at zero conversions but I see Shopify orders with the AdRoll UTM. Which view is right? Shopify is right. AdRoll’s pixel is misfiring. Almost always a thank-you-page tag issue (the conversion event is on a different page than AdRoll expects, the page URL pattern changed, or a JS error on the checkout flow blocks the pixel). Audit pixel diagnostics in AdRoll’s settings; usually a 5-minute fix. The Shopify UTM is the source of truth for “did the campaign drive revenue”; the AdRoll attribution is the source for “can we use this signal to optimise the bidder”. Why does the alert threshold start at>$0?
Aggressive by design. On AdRoll accounts a single zero-conversion campaign over 7 days old is rarely benign; it is typically a setup error, an iOS-only structural break, or an exhausted audience. Catching these quickly is high-leverage; the alert is a “look at this campaign in the next 24 hours” signal, not a panic alert. Override to >$200 per campaign in connector settings if you run many small experimental campaigns and want a higher signal-to-noise ratio.