Why Suppression Matters: Introducing WasteNot.io.

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Early in my career, I had a conversation that left a lasting impression:

Me: "Our client wastes $200M annually by serving ads to people they know they want to avoid, and they’re okay with that?"

Manager: "As long as we hit our ROAS goals and exhaust their budget by EOY, pretty much."

Client: "But wouldn’t avoiding that waste increase their ROAS by a ton and still let us hit spend goals?"

Manager: "Maybe. Doesn’t matter."

As a Junior Data and Insights Specialist at a large media agency, I managed suppression lists for two Fortune 100 accounts. This task, which required a 16-page Google Doc to document, involved compiling, merging, and uploading dozens of suppression lists to our client's multiple ad accounts and applying unique combinations of them to individual campaigns and ad groups. 

We did this monthly. Unless we got pulled onto something else. Or unless we didn’t have enough time. Or unless someone decided they didn’t want to do it cause it was tedious, boring, and often went unnoticed. In reality, we did it closer to quarterly. And the wasted ad spend piled up. 

After almost 15 years in digital media working for agencies, brands, networks, and SaaS platforms, one thing has remained obvious: wasted ad spend is a feature, not a bug in digital advertising. I’m not saying any platform, agency, or player explicitly aims to increase waste, but the industry collectively lacks incentives to minimize it for three reasons:

1. More wasted spend boosts demand in the ecosystem, leading to higher CPMs and fees for everyone involved.
2. Suppressing groups already likely to convert historically didn’t benefit agencies, DSPs, platforms or anyone judged on siloed performance. Everyone wants to attribute the easiest wins to their own platforms or services.
3. Suppression isn’t glamorous. Efficiency drivers rarely are in any industry. Flashy, buzzword-y solutions like “AI-driven machine learning targeting optimization algorithms” attract attention and win industry awards, but rarely deliver substantial improvements in businesses’ overall growth.

But the industry is shifting. With identity deprecation accelerating, performance declining, and budgets tightening, advertisers are being asked to do more with less and can no longer ignore the "spillage" in their media strategy. They need to cut the waste, and the first step to improving spend efficiency is effective audience suppression. For example, ensuring they’re not retargeting customers that just purchased an item with ads for that same item; or sending brand awareness ads to existing loyalty customers; or serving ads in markets where they don’t operate.

There are hundreds of these scenarios that, when put together, can waste 40% or more of total ad budgets. But a cohesive suppression strategy based on real-time, first party data can eliminate this waste and create the difference between an ad strategy that makes money and a strategy that loses it.

While so many of the buzzword-y solutions may increase the performance of individual channels, they rarely improve overall ROAS or reduce CAC, and instead just grab conversions from other channels (ie. organic and direct traffic). Effective suppression strategies, on the other hand, consistently increase top line revenues without additional media spend. Yet many teams struggle because ad exclusions are tedious, time-consuming, and less effective when managed manually. Managing them through broader solutions tends to be too technically complex and expensive for marketers to activate themselves.

This gap led us to create WasteNot. We aimed to make dynamic, real-time suppression strategies accessible to more marketers and brands by building our platform with the following mandates:

1. Enable marketers to define real-time user, keyword/topic, geo, and publisher suppression strategies at the platform, campaign or ad group level using first-party and ad account data.
2. Allow non-technical users to activate the tool without engineering or data science resources.
3. Create a platform that operates 24/7 with no ongoing maintenance or updates.
4. Clearly demonstrate value by measuring wasted ad spend saved, increase in overall ROAS, and reduction overall CAC.

WasteNot's beta is live, delivering the results we expected and more. And we’re just getting started. There’s a huge white space here and our mission is to help fill it with more than just real time suppression lists. We’re looking forward to collaborating with a community of like-minded marketers to help us define other strategies for eliminating wasted ad spend and to ensure every ad dollar adds value. If you’re interested in seeing how much you can save with WasteNot, sign up to join our beta here!