Step 1: Freeze a baseline before you change anything
Pull 30 to 90 days of spend, delivery and outcomes per campaign, and write the numbers down. Without a frozen baseline, every later improvement is arguable, and seasonality will get credit for your work, or blame for it.
Step 2: Size each waste category
For each row below, pull the export, calculate the dollars, and record them. Do not fix anything yet; sizing first is what tells you where the week goes.
| Category | Export you need | How to size it |
|---|---|---|
| Bid-cycle mispricing | Spend split by hour and weekday, CPM/CPV per bucket | Spend above the median-hour price for identical placements |
| Supply-path duplication | Exchange and publisher report with fees | Fee delta between the cheapest and used path per publisher |
| Audience overlap | Line-item audience membership export | Spend where two of your line items bid on the same user |
| Frequency saturation | Impressions and conversions by frequency band | Spend above the band where conversion rate flattens |
| Completion-rate drop-off | Video completion/VTR report by placement | Spend on placements below your VTR floor |
| Low-quality inventory | Placement report with completion or viewability | Spend on placements below your viewability or completion floor |
| Geo and daypart mispricing | Spend and outcomes by geo and hour | Spend in buckets whose cost per outcome exceeds account average |
| Creative fatigue | Frequency, CTR and CPM over flight days | Spend after the day CTR drops and CPM rises together |
Step 3: Rank by dollars per hour of work
Frequency caps, overlap exclusions and query pruning are usually same-day fixes. Bid-cycle re-pricing and supply-path consolidation return more but need modeling and platform work. Do the cheap ones first so the account is clean before you model prices on it.
Step 4: Change one lever at a time, same-flight
Keep creative, budget and flight dates fixed. Change a single lever, run it long enough to clear the platform learning period, and compare against the frozen baseline. If two levers move at once, you will never know which one paid.
Step 5: Reconcile against billing, not the dashboard
Platform dashboards are estimates until they settle. A saving is only proven when it appears in the invoice for the period. Reconcile monthly, and keep a written record of the baseline, the change, and the delta.
What a finished audit looks like
- A dollar figure against each of the eight categories.
- A ranked fix list with owner and expected recovery.
- A frozen baseline document everyone has agreed to.
- A monthly reconciliation that ties back to platform billing.
This is the same structure Zensifi.AI's managed video AI runs, at a different scale and with modeled pricing on top. If you would rather not spend the week, we will run it on one video campaign for free.