Case Study: How a DTC E-Commerce Brand Recovered $71K in Ad Spend Waste in 90 Days

The Challenge: Escalating Costs, No Audit Trail

A leading direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brand in home and apparel was scaling aggressively across Google Ads but began noticing rising CPAs and decreasing cost predictability. Despite solid engagement metrics, finance leaders couldn’t reconcile actual business results with marketing-reported performance.

Key questions remained unanswered:

• Was the brand being billed for invalid or non-compliant traffic?
• Were refunds or billing corrections possible?
• How much of the spend was unrecoverable due to lack of data?

With no systematic way to inspect what was being billed, let alone prevent it, the team lacked the tools needed to enforce spend integrity.

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The Solution: Vaudit’s Pre-Bill Charge Removal & Recovery Suite

To uncover and correct hidden waste, the brand implemented Vaudit’s Ad Billing Audit Platform, which included:

• Pre-bill traffic filtering to remove invalid clicks before they were invoiced
• Click-level audit trails verifying user quality, device, geography, and traffic legitimacy
• Refund automation tooling to submit and win credit disputes with Google
• Real-time enforcement tools to exclude invalid traffic across live campaigns

In less than 30 minutes, Vaudit was deployed across the brand’s ad stack, and audits began immediately.

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The Audit Results: Verified Waste, Measurable Recovery

Total Audited Spend: $1.4M
Invalid Traffic Identified: 7.4%
Billed Waste Detected: $104,000

This meant nearly 1 in every 13 dollars was being spent on traffic that didn’t meet compliance standards, conversion intent, or geographic targeting requirements.

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Removal + Recovery Impact

Vaudit’s proactive enforcement suite not only identified the waste, but helped prevent future spend on invalid traffic. Highlights:

• 20,296 invalid users automatically excluded from targeting
• $71,135 in net savings realized across 90 days
• 3× increase in credit adjustments from Google due to forensic refund reporting

This combination of pre-bill removal and post-bill recovery allowed the brand to recapture budget without reducing campaign volume or performance.

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Outcome: 5× ROI on Vaudit’s Monthly Fee

Within 3 months, the brand achieved:

• Accurate billing across all ad campaigns
• Full audit logs to support internal finance and refund workflows
• Ongoing campaign protection with real-time exclusion rules and bid tuning

Marketing kept their performance flexibility. Finance gained verifiable audit trails and hard cost savings. The result? Full billing visibility and accountability from impression to invoice.

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Ready to Reclaim Your Budget?

Most teams don’t know they’re losing 6–10% of ad spend to invalid traffic every month.
With Vaudit, you can:

• Remove invalid users before the bill
• Recover funds already lost with packaged, compliant refund requests
• Support finance teams with logs that meet compliance and audit standards‍

Start Auditing Your Ad Spend with Vaudit

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