That moment I figured out programmatic ads were burning my budget

I was running retargeting campaigns for about 6 months at my SaaS company in Austin, spending around $3,800 a month on display ads. My boss kept saying the clicks looked good but leads were flat. Then our analytics guy showed me that 80% of my traffic was coming from bots hitting our pixel through low-quality ad networks. I called our rep and they finally admitted the default settings push you toward cheap placements. Has anyone else dug into their placement reports and found garbage? What did you switch to?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna_craig5814h ago

I read that LinkedIn did a whole audit of their own programmatic stuff and found like 30% of their clicks were non-human. Made me think about retargeting differently honestly.

kelly.dylan13h ago

@luna_craig58 that stat is wild but makes total sense when you think about how much automated junk is out there. It's like those weird bot comments on Instagram posts that just say "nice" with a random link. Retargeting feels so sketchy now when you realize half the "interest" is just machines talking to machines.