At a glance
Spend on Outbrain placements and content units that produced zero conversions in the analysis window. The “money set on fire” dial. On a content-discovery network, this is overwhelmingly publisher-section spend, dollars spent on inventory pages where readers click your ad but never convert. Different from a search platform’s “negative keyword” wasted-spend, the equivalent here is “publisher-section blocking”.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Outbrain data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
The same UK lifestyle brand. Total Outbrain spend £14,250 over 30 days. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 28 Mar 26. The card displays:Wasted spend (30 days): £1,890 (13.3 percent of total) Top 5 zero-conversion publisher sections:
What this tells the merchant:
- £1,890 of £14,250 is going to placements that produced zero conversions. That’s 13.3 percent of monthly Outbrain budget producing nothing. Block all five sections in Outbrain → Targeting → Section Blocks and that £1,890 redistributes to higher-converting inventory next cycle.
- The patterns are intuitive. Recipe and celebrity-gossip readers click out of curiosity, sports and weather readers are mid-task and not in shopping mode, dating-advice readers are demographically wrong for a homewares brand. The wasted spend is not random; it concentrates on inventory whose audience is structurally non-converting for this category.
- Don’t block based on a single zero-conversion period. The card requires 1,000 impressions and 7-day age before flagging; this prevents a brand-new placement that hasn’t had time to convert from being prematurely blocked. The five sections shown have all been running for 14+ days with 480 to 1,440 clicks, the zero-conversion verdict is statistically robust.
- The 13.3 percent figure is normal for cold-prospecting. Healthy DTC brands typically run 8 to 15 percent wasted spend on Outbrain (versus 3 to 6 percent on Google Search). The publisher-network model means broader inventory but more variability in audience quality. Quarterly section-block reviews keep this in band.
- The trim arithmetic. Blocking the five sections and redirecting £1,890 to the existing 2.34× ROAS inventory adds an estimated £4,420 of attributed revenue per 30 days (2.34 × 1,890), without raising budget. This is the highest-leverage action available on the card.
- The compounding effect. Outbrain’s bid algorithm learns from the section-block list. After 4 to 6 weeks of consistent blocking, the algorithm starts auto-down-weighting similar publisher categories, and wasted spend can drop to 5 to 8 percent without further intervention.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Outbrain’s own dashboard:
Outbrain Amplify → Reports → Section Performance (also called “Publisher Section Report”). Set the date range to 30 days, sort by Spend descending, and filter Conversions = 0.
The card’s wasted-spend total should match the sum of zero-conversion section spend on Outbrain’s report to within 1 to 3 percent. Larger gaps usually trace to the threshold differences below.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Outbrain’s report:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
What’s a healthy wasted-spend percentage on Outbrain? 8 to 15 percent of total spend is typical for cold-prospecting on a content-discovery network. The publisher-network model trades audience precision for reach; some inventory will inevitably be off-target. Below 8 percent is well-tuned (suggests aggressive section-blocking discipline); above 15 percent is symptom of poor targeting or stale block-list. Compare to Google Search’s 3 to 6 percent baseline; the higher Outbrain number is the price of native-discovery scale. Should I block every zero-conversion section? No, that’s too aggressive and can starve the bid algorithm of inventory variety. A balanced rule: block sections with spend >£100/month and zero conversions over 14+ days; ignore the long-tail noise below £100/month. The card’s threshold filtering already approximates this; the actionable list at the top is the priority. A blocked section had clicks but might have driven view-through conversions. Did I just turn off a working channel? Possible but unlikely on Outbrain. The card uses primary (last-click) conversions only; view-through is excluded by industry-conservative default. If you suspect view-through value (e.g. a high-traffic publisher that drove brand-awareness), you can verify by running a 14-day off-test on that section and measuring branded-search lift. In practice, sections with 0 last-click conversions and high view-counts are usually genuine wasted spend; their view-through “credit” is artefact, not lift. Can the bid algorithm itself fix this without me blocking? Partially. Outbrain’s “Conversions” bid model auto-down-weights low-converting inventory over time. But the algorithm’s learning is slower than your wallet, you’re paying for the experiment that teaches it. Manual section-blocks save the experiment cost. My wasted-spend percentage went up after I added new campaigns. Why? New campaigns explore inventory broadly during their first 7 to 14 days; many sections will get sampled and some will produce zero conversions during the learning window. The card’s 7-day age threshold accounts for this; recently-launched campaign spend is excluded from the headline figure. After 14 days the new campaign’s “exploration tax” rolls off. Should I re-test blocked sections later? Yes, every quarter. Publisher audiences shift, your creative changes, your offer changes. A section that produced zero conversions in Q1 may produce conversions in Q3 with refreshed creative or a different season. Maintain the block-list as a current state, not a permanent denylist. Most agencies rotate 10 to 20 percent of blocked sections back into rotation each quarter. Multi-account aggregation, does the card sum wasted spend across all my marketer accounts? Yes, FX-converted to display currency. Per-account drill-down shows native-currency figures. Different regions often have different wasted-spend shapes, EU accounts tend to over-spend on celebrity-news inventory; US accounts tend to over-spend on sports-fixtures inventory; UK accounts tend to over-spend on weather-widget inventory. The shape of wasted spend is itself a useful diagnostic. What’s the difference between “wasted” and “low-ROAS”? Wasted is binary, zero conversions. Low-ROAS is gradient, conversions exist but at uneconomic rates. The card focuses on the binary case because it’s the highest-leverage trim; once wasted spend is minimised, the next move is to raise the ROAS floor on the remaining inventory by tightening bids or refreshing creative. The card doesn’t update for 24 hours after I make changes. Is that normal? Yes. Wasted spend is computed nightly at 02:00 UTC against the trailing 30-day window. After a section-block, the historical spend on that section still appears in the window for up to 30 days; the card’s headline figure declines as the block-affected days roll off the window. Real-time effect on ROAS is faster (the redirect happens within a day) but the wasted-spend headline is a 30-day-trailing measurement. Why isn’t this card available on the Google Ads connector with the same threshold logic? It is.gads_wasted_spend implements the same logic against keyword-level zero-conversion inventory. The semantics are identical; the lever is different (negative keywords vs section blocks).