At a glance
Total spend on campaigns (entire campaign, not individual placements) that have been live more than 7 days and produced zero conversions in the last 30 days. The campaign-level cousin of Wasted Spend. When a whole campaign converts at zero, the cause is rarely “bad inventory”, it’s almost always creative-disapproval, broken landing page, broken pixel, or a fundamentally mis-targeted audience.
| What it counts | SUM(spend) FROM campaigns WHERE conversions_30d == 0 AND days_active > 7. The 7-day age threshold prevents new campaigns being flagged before they’ve had time to gather conversion data given Outbrain’s 24-72 hour attribution lag. |
| Currency | Account currency. Multi-account merchants get FX-converted aggregate. |
| Why this is a hero card | Zero-conversion at the campaign level (not section level) is almost always a fixable problem rather than an inevitable inventory tax. Pixel breakage, broken landing page, disapproved creative, or mis-mapped conversion event will turn a campaign black; surfacing it instantly saves the merchant from continued bleed. |
| What “zero conversions” actually means | The campaign produced zero post-click conversions_value events in the 30-day attribution window. View-through conversions are not counted (industry-conservative default). A campaign with 100 view-conversions and 0 click-conversions counts as zero on this card. |
| Common root causes | (1) Conversion pixel broke on the landing page after a code deploy. (2) Conversion event mis-mapped in Outbrain settings (e.g. configured to fire on “Begin Checkout” instead of “Purchase”). (3) Landing page broken (404, slow load, broken CTA). (4) Creative disapproved in Outbrain mid-flight, ad served once and stopped, leaving spend orphaned. (5) Audience mis-targeted (e.g. retargeting list mistakenly pointed at “all visitors” includes bots and bouncers). |
| Distinct from Wasted Spend | Wasted Spend is placement-level zero-conversion (publisher-section). This card is campaign-level. A campaign can be section-clean but pixel-broken, and vice versa. Both cards are needed to cover both failure modes. |
| Refresh cadence | Daily, recomputed at 02:00 UTC. |
| Time window | 30D (rolling 30 days). |
| Alert trigger | >$0 on any campaign >7D old. Any non-zero reading is treated as critical because zero-conversion campaign-level problems usually have a fixable root cause and the longer they run, the more spend leaks. |
| 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. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 28 Mar 26. The card displays:Zero-conversion campaign spend (30 days): £820 (1 campaign flagged)
| Campaign | Status | Days active | Spend (30d) | Clicks | Conversions | Likely cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engage, “Spring Edit Lookbook” | Live | 14 | £820 | 1,624 | 0 | Landing-page pixel removed in 14 Mar deploy |
- One campaign, £820 wasted, single root cause. The Spring Edit Lookbook campaign launched 14 Mar 26 and has spent £820 over 14 days on 1,624 clicks with zero conversions. This pattern (decent click volume, zero conversions) is overwhelmingly pixel breakage, not creative or audience failure.
- The diagnostic. Open the landing page (
/spring-edit-lookbooktypically) in incognito. Add an item to cart and complete a test purchase using a discount code. View source on the order-confirmation page; look for_obctxand a Vortex IQ pixel. If_obctxis missing, the 14 Mar deploy removed the Outbrain conversion tag from the order-confirmation template. This is the cause 90 percent of the time when a single campaign goes black after a deploy. - The fix. Restore the pixel via the merchant’s GTM or template, deploy. Within 24 to 48 hours conversions should start firing; within 30 days the campaign’s historical spend rolls off the window and the card returns to zero (assuming no new campaigns light up).
- The bleed cost. £820 over 14 days is £58/day of pure waste. At the brand’s typical 2.34× ROAS on healthy campaigns, that £820 redirected would have produced £1,920 of attributed revenue, the cost of the broken pixel is £820 spent + £1,920 revenue forgone = roughly £2,740 in 14 days. Catching this on the card the day after the deploy would have prevented the bleed entirely.
- The “more than one campaign goes black at once” debug case. If 3 or 4 campaigns light up simultaneously, the cause is almost certainly site-wide (pixel removed from the universal template, or a pixel-management tool like GTM was published with a broken version), not per-campaign. Check GA4 Property Health for a parallel signal, broken Outbrain pixel and broken GA4 tagging often share root cause.
- The “campaign aged into zero-conv” pattern. If a campaign was producing conversions and then went to zero, the pattern is more likely creative-disapproval (Outbrain rejected the ad post-launch) or landing-page break than original mis-configuration. Check Outbrain → Notifications for disapproval messages.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Zero-Conversion Spend | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Wasted Spend | Section-level cousin (vs campaign-level here). | Both above zero equals problem at multiple levels; campaign-level usually a fixable bug. |
| Worst Campaigns | Low-but-nonzero ROAS list. | Together cover the full “underperforming” spectrum. |
| Conversion Drop | Real-time conversion-collapse alert. | Drop fires before this card’s 7-day threshold; treat as 24-hour leading indicator. |
| ROAS | Headline efficiency. | Zero-conv campaign drags blended ROAS proportional to its share of spend. |
| CTR Decline | Engagement-side parallel. | CTR holding while conversions zero equals pixel break (clicks happen, conversions don’t fire); CTR falling AND conversions zero equals creative or audience problem. |
| Spend by Campaign | Per-campaign spend distribution. | Identifies which campaigns are the zero-conv lights. |
| Cross-connector: GA4 Property Health | Independent pixel-health signal. | Both red equals site-wide pixel issue (GTM, template); one red equals connector-specific. |
| Cross-connector: Shopify Total Revenue and platform peers | Truth-side: did the merchant actually receive orders during this window? | If commerce platform shows orders but Outbrain shows zero conversions on a high-spend campaign, pixel is the cause; orders happened but Outbrain didn’t see them. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Outbrain’s own dashboard:
Outbrain Amplify → Campaigns, sort by Spend descending, filter Conversions = 0 over the 30-day window.
The card’s headline figure should match the sum of zero-conversion campaigns’ spend on Outbrain’s view to within 1 to 2 percent.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Outbrain’s report:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 7-day age threshold | Ours lower | The card excludes campaigns less than 7 days old; Outbrain’s raw view includes them. |
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Outbrain UI uses marketer-account TZ; card uses UTC. |
| Conversion ingestion lag | Ours overstated for “today” | A campaign showing zero conversions today may have settling conversions over the next 24 to 72 hours. |
| Currency conversion | Either, multi-currency | Multi-account merchants get FX-converted aggregate. |
| View vs click conversions | Ours flags more campaigns | Outbrain’s dashboard can be toggled to “All conversions” (includes view-through). The card uses primary (click-only) conversions, which is more conservative; campaigns with view-only conversions are flagged here as zero-conv but may show conversions in Outbrain’s UI. |
| Recently-paused campaigns | Either | Paused campaigns appear in the 30-day window if they spent during it. The card flags them; if the merchant has resumed them, the cause analysis is “was paused” not “is broken”. |
| Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
google_ads.gads_zero_conversion_spend | Same pattern, different platform. | Search has fewer creative-disapproval failure modes; Outbrain has more (richer creative review). |
facebook.fb_zero_conversion_spend | Same pattern, different platform. | Meta’s iOS 14.5 attribution complications mean false-positive “zero-conv” reads are more common on Meta than Outbrain. |
shopify.total_revenue and platform peers | Truth-side reconciliation. | If commerce platform shows orders during the window and Outbrain campaign shows zero, the pixel-break hypothesis is confirmed; if commerce platform also shows zero, it’s a true campaign failure. |
google_analytics.ga_revenue_by_channel | Independent attribution check on UTM-tagged Outbrain traffic. | GA4 sees session-level data; if GA4 sees Outbrain-source sessions converting but Outbrain doesn’t, it’s a pixel issue. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My campaign is flagged but it’s a brand-awareness campaign that’s not supposed to convert. Is that wrong? Partially. Awareness campaigns intentionally don’t optimise for last-click conversion; their value is brand-discovery for future direct/branded traffic. The card flags them because the metric is binary. Three options: (1) Add the campaign to the manifest’spure_awareness_campaigns list to suppress flagging; (2) Move the campaign to a separate marketer account configured for non-revenue measurement; (3) Accept the flag as a reminder that this campaign is not directly profitable and pair with a quarterly lift study. Most merchants choose option 1.
One campaign is flagged with £820 zero-conversion spend. What’s the playbook?
Five-minute triage. (1) Check the conversion pixel. Open the order-confirmation page in incognito after a test purchase, look for _obctx. Missing tag is the cause 90 percent of the time. (2) Check Outbrain → Notifications for creative-disapproval messages. (3) Check the campaign’s landing page. 404, slow load, or broken CTA can produce zero conversions despite click volume. (4) Check the conversion event mapping in Outbrain → Conversions; ensure the right event (Purchase, not Begin Checkout) is the optimisation target. (5) Check audience targeting for misconfiguration (e.g. retargeting list pointed at the wrong segment).
Why is the threshold “7 days” and not 14 or 30?
Calibrated against Outbrain’s typical conversion-lag tail. Conversions take 24 to 72 hours to settle; 7 days gives 4 to 6 days of settled conversion data, statistically robust. 14 days is too patient (you bleed for 14 days before the card alerts); 30 days is far too patient. 7 days is the sweet spot between false-positive (flagging new campaigns prematurely) and false-negative (missing a broken pixel that’s costing real money).
Multiple campaigns lit up at once. Did everything break?
Almost certainly yes, and the cause is site-wide rather than per-campaign. Most common: (1) GTM published with a broken version, breaking the pixel everywhere; (2) Universal template (Shopify theme, BigCommerce theme) updated and removed the Outbrain tag; (3) Consent-management platform updated and started blocking the Outbrain pixel by default. Check parallel signals on GA4 Property Health, if GA4 is also dark, the issue is universal-tagging, not Outbrain-specific.
Is zero-conversion always bad?
On a campaign-level over 7+ days, yes. On a section-level (publisher inventory), no, that’s normal noise that Wasted Spend handles. The campaign-level signal is binary because campaigns are merchant-controlled units; sections are not.
The campaign is flagged but I just launched it. Why?
The card’s 7-day age threshold should exclude new campaigns. If a campaign less than 7 days old is showing on the card, check the campaign’s created_at in Outbrain; the card uses Outbrain’s reported created date. If the campaign was reactivated after a long pause, Outbrain may carry over the original created date, leading to incorrect age. In that case, manually exclude the campaign in Vortex IQ → Settings → Connectors → Outbrain → Card Filters.
My campaign has 50 view-conversions but zero click-conversions. Should it count as zero?
Yes, by industry-conservative default. View-through claim is the easiest for any ad platform to inflate; the card uses click-attribution only. If you want to credit view-through (rare for cold-prospecting Outbrain), toggle in Settings → Connectors → Outbrain → Conversion Attribution to include view-through; the card recomputes accordingly.
I paused a campaign 3 days ago. Why is it still on the card?
Because the 30-day window includes the spent days while it was active. After 30 days the paused campaign’s contribution rolls off the window and the card returns to zero (assuming no other zero-conv campaigns light up). To fully clear, delete the campaign rather than pause; deleted campaigns drop out of the 30-day window immediately.
Can I disable this card?
Yes, in Settings → Dashboards → Outbrain → Card Visibility. But it’s one of the highest-leverage diagnostic signals on the connector; recommend keeping it visible. Most merchants who disable later re-enable after the first time it catches a pixel-break that would have cost £1k+ in undetected bleed.
Why is this a hero card and Wasted Spend also a hero card?
They cover different failure modes. Wasted Spend is structural (publisher inventory will always have some zero-conv long-tail); this card is anomalous (a whole campaign converting at zero is almost always a fixable bug). Both are zero-conversion-themed but their merchant-action playbooks are different: Wasted Spend → block sections; this card → fix the pixel/landing/creative/targeting.