> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Wasted Spend, Outbrain > Wasted Spend for Outbrain stores. Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Ad Platform](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) ## 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". | | | | ----------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **What it counts** | `SUM(spend) FROM placements WHERE conversions == 0 AND impressions > minimum_threshold AND days_active >= 7`. Excludes placements with insufficient data (recently launched, very low impression volume) so a brand-new placement isn't flagged just because it hasn't had time to convert. | | **Why minimum-threshold gates** | A publisher section that produced 50 impressions and 0 conversions is statistical noise; the card requires roughly 1,000 impressions or 7-day age before counting toward "wasted". The thresholds are tuned per Outbrain account against typical CPC and conversion rate. | | **Currency** | Account currency. Multi-account merchants get FX-converted aggregate. | | **Conversion attribution model** | Last-click within the configured window (default 30-day click + 1-day view). | | **What "wasted" means in the Outbrain context** | Outbrain serves ads on a network of publisher sites; some publisher sections (a recipe blog, a sports forum, a celebrity-news widget) attract clicks but not buyers. Wasted spend lives almost entirely at the publisher-section level, not at the campaign or creative level. The action is *Section Block* in Outbrain's UI. | | **What "wasted" does NOT mean** | Spend that has *low* ROAS but non-zero conversions is not wasted; it's underperforming. The card is binary: zero conversions or some. The peer card [Zero-Conversion Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/zero-conversion-spend) handles the campaign-level zero-conv variant. | | **Refresh cadence** | Daily, recomputed at 02:00 UTC against the 30-day rolling window. | | **Time window** | `30D` (rolling 30 days). | | **Alert trigger** | `>$0 (any zero-conversion placement spending above threshold)`. The reasonable expectation is that some wasted spend exists in any sufficiently complex Outbrain account; the card's job is to size it and surface the worst placements for blocking. | | **Roles** | owner, marketing, finance | ## 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: | Publisher section | Spend (30d) | Clicks | Conversions | CTR | | ----------------------------------- | ----------- | ------ | ----------- | ----- | | `recipes-section.foodandwine.co.uk` | £620 | 1,440 | 0 | 0.18% | | `celebrity-gossip.dailystar.co.uk` | £410 | 980 | 0 | 0.21% | | `sports-fixtures.skysports.com` | £350 | 720 | 0 | 0.15% | | `weather-widget.metofficeapp.co.uk` | £290 | 540 | 0 | 0.09% | | `dating-advice.match.com` | £220 | 480 | 0 | 0.11% | What this tells the merchant: 1. **£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. 2. **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. 3. **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. 4. **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. 5. **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.** 6. **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 | Card | Why pair it with Wasted Spend | What the combination tells you | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [Zero-Conversion Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/zero-conversion-spend) | The campaign-level cousin (vs section-level here). | Both above zero equals zero-conversion problem at multiple levels; campaign-level is broader, section-level is more granular. | | [ROAS](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/roas) | Headline efficiency. | Wasted spend high + ROAS low equals direct causation; wasted spend high + ROAS healthy equals tax-on-success worth trimming. | | [Total Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/total-spend) | Denominator for the wasted-spend ratio. | 13 percent of total is normal; 25 percent is symptom of poor targeting; 5 percent is well-tuned account. | | [CPA Trend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/cpa-trend) | Cost per conversion. | After a section-block, expect CPA to fall and CR to rise within 14 days as wasted budget redirects. | | [Top Campaigns](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/top-performing-campaigns) | Which campaigns are running zero-conv inventory. | The wasted-spend usually concentrates on 1 or 2 campaigns; trim there first. | | [CPC by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/cpc-by-campaign) | CPC context for blocking decisions. | High-CPC zero-conv inventory is the worst kind; low-CPC zero-conv is annoying but cheap. | | [Search Terms / Section Report](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/search-terms-report) | Inventory-level breakdown. | The granular view of what's wasted; this card is the summary, that one is the action list. | | Cross-connector: [Google Ads Wasted Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/google-ads/wasted-spend) | Same metric, different platform shape. | Search uses negative keywords; Outbrain uses section blocks. Both are tax-on-account-quality. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in Outbrain's own dashboard:** > [Outbrain Amplify](https://my.outbrain.com/amplify/site/reports) → **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:** | Reason | Direction | Why | | -------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Minimum-impression threshold** | Ours lower | The card excludes placements with \<1,000 impressions or \<7 days age; Outbrain's raw report includes them. The card is more conservative on what counts as "wasted". | | **Time zone** | Boundary days off | Outbrain UI uses marketer-account TZ; card uses UTC. | | **Conversion attribution lag** | Ours overstated for "today" | A section that has zero conversions today may have settling conversions over the next 24 to 72 hours. The card uses the data available at compute time; recompute at next 02:00 UTC if conversions arrive. | | **Section-block backfill** | Ours overstated immediately after blocking | After the merchant blocks a section, the historical spend on that section still shows as wasted in the 30-day window. After 30 days the section's contribution rolls off. | | **Currency conversion** | Either, multi-currency | Multi-account merchants get FX-converted aggregate; per-account UI shows native. | | **Section-level granularity** | Either | Outbrain's UI sometimes aggregates similar sections (e.g. multiple subdomains of the same publisher); the card uses the finest granularity the API exposes. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** | Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [`google_ads.gads_wasted_spend`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/google-ads/wasted-spend) | Same wasted-spend pattern, different platform mechanism. | Search uses negative keywords; Outbrain uses section blocks. Different absolute levels are normal. | | [`facebook.fb_wasted_spend`](/nerve-centre/facebook/fb_wasted_spend) | Meta's audience-saturation analogue. | Different attribution window and audience model; not directly comparable. | | [`shopify.total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/total-revenue) | The truth-side check. | Reducing wasted spend should produce a measurable conversion-rate lift on the remaining spend; if it doesn't, the wasted-spend hypothesis was wrong (the section was actually serving as a discovery seed feeding direct/branded conversions). | ## 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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/google-ads/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). *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Wasted Spend* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Outbrain and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. 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