In a Rakuten Marketing survey, marketers estimated they waste 26% of budgets on ineffective channels. Here's why the loser campaigns stay invisible.

Teams waste about a quarter of their ad budget

Ask a marketer how much of their budget is wasted and most will guess low. The surveys say otherwise, and the gap between the guess and the number is the point.

In a survey of 1,000 marketers worldwide by Rakuten Marketing, respondents estimated they waste an average of 26% of their budgets on ineffective channels and strategies, and about half said they misspend at least 20%. Other industry estimates of digital ad waste run higher still, depending on how "waste" is defined, but the direction is consistent: roughly a quarter of ad budgets, self-reported, going to spend that is not earning its keep.

Notice that this is marketers estimating their own waste. It is not an outside audit catching careless teams. It is the people running the accounts admitting that a meaningful slice of the money is not working, and, crucially, they usually cannot point to exactly where.

That last part is the real problem. The waste is not one big obvious line you could cut in an afternoon. It hides in small losing campaigns, spread across three platforms, none of them big enough on its own to trip an alarm. Add them up and it is a quarter of the budget. Look at any one of them and it is a rounding error.

That is exactly the alarm nobody has. Individually, a losing campaign never crosses the threshold where you would notice — which is why, later this week, something quietly watches for it and says so:

Underperformer — Meta · "Lookalike 3%" real ROI 0.5× for 14 days (€120/mo)Sample data · below break-even · one of several across platforms

One line like that is easy to shrug off. The trouble is there are five of them, on three platforms, and no single dashboard ever puts them on the same screen.

The number is large, it is normal, and it is invisible without something that adds it up for you across every platform at once. Seeing your own share of it is most of the fix.

This is the week the product pays for itself. Tomorrow puts a euro figure on your own waste in The euros you're burning. The pillar is Find the money you're burning.

The 26% figure is from the Rakuten Marketing survey of 1,000 marketers, as reported by eMarketer ("Marketers Waste About One-Fourth of Their Budgets") and Warc. It is a self-reported industry estimate, not a precise measurement, and estimates of ad waste vary widely by method and definition.