Ad Badger Skills · Wasted spend
The Most Comprehensive Look at Your Amazon Wasted Spend
Ask your AI where your ad money is leaking. The Wasted spend skill reads every search term in your account and shows you, from every angle, how much is wasted, why, when a term should become a negative, and what your account looks like with that money moved onto searches that sell.
Join the newsletter to get on the waitlistFree for Ad Badger customers, with a limited free plan for everyone else.
Runs in Claude, ChatGPT or Hermes, on your Ad Badger connection or any bulk file.
Half
Half of the average audited Amazon account's search-term spend never makes a sale.
Median across 76 Amazon ad accounts audited in Badger Sheets, May to October 2026. In 85% of them, at least 30% went nowhere.
Every click costs the same whether it sells or not. Auto campaigns, broad match and product targeting find new shoppers, and they also find the searches that will never buy from you. Those searches keep charging you every day until something stops them. Most sellers know it's happening. Very few can see how much, where it's coming from, and what to do about each one.
Every angle on your wasted spend, in one report
Most tools hand you a list of search terms. This skill gives you the numbers and the reasons, side by side.
The numbers
How much went nowhere. Spend on search terms with no orders, against everything your search terms spent, beside your ACOS.
ACOS power ratio. Your total search-term spend divided by the spend on terms that sold: how much harder your ACOS has to work because of the waste.
What cutting it would do. Your ACOS if you cut a quarter of the waste, half of it, or all of it.
The reasons
Spend by order count. How much went to terms with no orders, one order, two, and more.
Spend by ACOS band. Where the money sits, from profitable to no sales at all.
Where the waste is coming from. Exact, phrase, broad or product targeting: the level you restructure at.
Big Game Hunter. Every costly term, biggest first, with its fix: negate it, pause it, or leave it to you.
Already buried. Terms your existing negatives now block, and what they cost before the block.
Screenshots of the real report, run on an invented example account.
Your negative keyword cut-off, worked out for you
Ten clicks? Twenty? Every rule of thumb belongs to somebody else's account. The skill works out yours from your own numbers: a click rule (no orders after three orders' worth of clicks) and a spend rule (no orders after one order's worth of spend at your target ACOS). It sets them separately for each campaign type, so your manual and automatic campaigns each get the line that fits them, then shows you the terms each rule would catch tonight.
In this example account: negate after 18 clicks with no order, or after $8.75 with no order.
What your account looks like with the waste moved onto searches that sell
The Wasted Ad Spend Switcheroo keeps your budget exactly the same and moves the wasted dollars onto search terms that already convert. Then it shows the sales and ACOS you'd have had, even if that money only ever sold at break-even. Wasted spend has no ACOS at all, because you can't divide by nothing. That's why moving it beats almost anything else you could do with it.
Cutting-edge skills that work with any tool
The skill runs on your Ad Badger connection or any Amazon bulk file. Every seller can download a bulk file, so it works whatever tools you already use.
In your AI. Claude, ChatGPT or Hermes. Connect your account with Ad Badger's AI connection for Amazon PPC and ask in plain English.
No connection? Use a bulk file. Attach it to the chat: the same report from the same math.
Make the changes your way. Tick the fixes you want and take them away as instructions for your AI, a CSV, an Amazon bulk file or a checklist for your team. Nothing changes in your account until you make the change.
Professionally managed. Part of the Badger Vault: one connector gives your AI every Badger skill, and improvements arrive on their own.
Every angle, over time
With the Word patterns skill. The n-gram view: which words keep bringing the wrong shoppers, across every search term.
Kept in your Badger Vault. Every report is saved to your own vault, so you can watch wasted spend fall from run to run. You can switch saving off.
Beside your Ad Badger dashboard. The Non-Converting Spend Dashboard shows the leak every day. The skill explains it and tells you what to do about each term.
On a schedule. Connected to Ad Badger, it can run every week and send you the report.
Want other ways to cut wasted spend, from free to fully automatic? See every way to cut wasted spend
How to get the Wasted spend skill
With your Ad Badger account connected:
Or attach a bulk file and paste:
It asks you two things: what people call your brand, so your own name is never marked as waste, and your target ACOS (25% unless you say).
Built by people who have tracked wasted spend for over a decade
Ad Badger has been finding wasted spend in Amazon accounts for more than ten years. This skill is that experience turned into math you run on your own account. And this year's audits say it's needed: in the median account audited in Badger Sheets, half the search-term budget went to searches that never sold.
Questions
Does it change my account?
No. It's a report. It tells you what to fix and gives you the list; nothing in your account changes until you make the change, yourself or through your AI.
What data does it need?
Your Ad Badger connection, or an Amazon bulk file you download from the ad console. On a bulk file it asks which account it came from.
Which AI does it work in?
Claude, ChatGPT or Hermes.
What does it cost?
Free for Ad Badger customers. Anyone else can use it on a limited free plan, or get full use as a paid Badger Vault member.
Where does my report go?
To your own Badger Vault, so you can track your wasted spend over time. You can switch saving off.
How is it different from the Non-Converting Spend Dashboard?
The dashboard in Ad Badger shows the leak every day. The skill is the full analysis: why it's happening, your cut-offs, the fix for each term, and what moving the money would do.
Can it run on a schedule?
Yes, when your account is connected to Ad Badger. The report gives you a prompt that sets it up in your AI.
Is the vault open?
Not yet. Join the Ad Badger newsletter to get on the waitlist, and we'll email you when your spot opens.
See every angle of your own wasted spend
Join the newsletter to get on the waitlistFree for Ad Badger customers, with a limited free plan for everyone else.