South African ecommerce is booming, but much of that growth hides a painful truth: a huge share of digital ad budgets is being wasted. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently reported that wasted programmatic ad spend in the US surged 34% in just two years, hitting US$26.8 billion. Less than half of every dollar actually reaches a human audience.
If that’s the situation in mature markets, imagine how much invisible waste happens in South Africa, where transparency and verification tools are often less developed. Every cent lost to fake clicks, bad placements, or irrelevant impressions drains profit that could have funded better creative, smarter targeting, or faster checkout experiences.
The promise of digital was precision. The reality is clutter, bots, and dashboards full of empty metrics.
Why ad waste keeps rising
Programmatic advertising was supposed to make marketing efficient, automating how brands reach the right person at the right time. But automation has a dark side: when it runs unchecked, it floods the internet with low-quality impressions and questionable inventory.
According to ANA’s findings, billions in programmatic budgets vanish into “unrealised value,” often on made-for-advertising sites designed purely to capture ad revenue rather than serve real audiences. These MFA sites now account for roughly 15% of all digital ad spend, reveals a recent Scope3 study.
Fraud compounds the problem. Invalid traffic and bot clicks continue to siphon off budgets, inflating engagement metrics that look good on paper but lead nowhere in sales. Without human oversight, brands end up funding a shadow economy of fake engagement while believing their campaigns are working.
Cheap reach is the other culprit. When budgets are tight, the temptation is to chase the lowest cost per impression. But cheap inventory rarely means good inventory. As Decentriq points out, “cheap reach may look efficient on paper, but it rarely translates into meaningful returns.” The illusion of volume replaces real performance, and marketers mistake activity for impact.
The illusion of scale
Many ecommerce marketers equate reach with success. The more eyeballs, the better. But the open web is fragmented, cookies are disappearing, and ad frequency control is weak. That means the same people often see the same ad repeatedly while the rest of the target market never sees it at all.
In theory, walled gardens like Meta, Google, and TikTok offer refuge, with vast audiences and advanced targeting, but they come at a price. Media costs are high, measurement is opaque, and duplicated reach across platforms burns through budgets fast. You might reach the same consumer five times, but you’ll pay for each impression.
Add to that the environmental cost of unnecessary impressions (MFA sites have among the highest carbon emissions per ad served) and it’s clear that waste is more than financial. It’s ethical, environmental, and strategic.
How South African brands can break the cycle
Digital clutter is not inevitable. The solution isn’t spending more; it’s spending smarter. Local ecommerce brands have an opportunity to leapfrog legacy inefficiencies by focusing on quality, transparency, and data they can trust.
1. Re-evaluate programmatic partners
Start with your supply- and demand-side platforms (SSPs and DSPs). Ask hard questions about where your ads appear and who verifies that traffic. The ANA recommends working only with partners that provide third-party verification and granular reporting. In practice, that means insisting on full transparency around inventory sources, bid data, and fees.
Brands should also layer in independent fraud detection tools rather than relying solely on vendor reporting. Human checkpoints matter too; automation performs best when paired with oversight from marketers who know what “brand-safe” truly means.
2. Ditch cheap reach, chase real attention
Impressions alone mean nothing if no one remembers them. Instead of measuring cost per thousand, measure cost per second of real attention or cost per meaningful action. Choose placements where people are actually engaged like YouTube’s non-skippable formats, TikTok’s native storytelling, or premium publisher environments where content quality lifts ad impact.
Cheap reach is seductive because dashboards light up with numbers, but active attention is what drives sales. Ecommerce thrives on relevance, not repetition.
3. Activate first-party data
Every ecommerce business already holds a goldmine of customer data like purchase histories, browsing behaviour, and loyalty interactions. First-party data, used responsibly, can reduce wasted ad spend by focusing efforts on audiences most likely to convert.
One effective approach is to build look-alike audiences based on your best customers, then use privacy-preserving tools like data clean rooms to match this data with publishers’ audiences without sharing personal information. According to Decentriq, data clean rooms can significantly cut waste by enabling “high-quality targeting without sacrificing privacy.”
In South Africa, where data-protection compliance under POPIA is essential, privacy-safe collaboration isn’t just good practice, it’s non-negotiable.
4. Bring context back into targeting
As third-party cookies disappear, contextual targeting is making a comeback. Instead of tracking individuals, this method places ads next to relevant content, like running outdoor-gear ads on travel blogs or kitchenware ads in food sections.
It’s not perfect (scale can be limited) but it’s privacy-friendly, brand-safe, and effective for intent-based engagement. Remember, contextual campaigns through local publishers can combine cultural relevance with cost-efficiency, delivering better resonance than broad buys.
5. Measure what matters
Metrics drive behaviour. If your team is rewarded for impressions and clicks, they’ll chase those numbers even when they don’t correlate with sales. Shift your KPIs to reflect genuine performance: return on ad spend (ROAS), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and lifetime value (LTV).
Advanced analytics tools can track how each campaign contributes to incremental revenue, not just traffic. A smaller, data-driven campaign that converts is worth infinitely more than millions of impressions that fade into digital noise.
6. Simplify your ecosystem
Fragmentation breeds waste. Too many agencies, tools, and intermediaries create reporting gaps and duplicated spend. Consolidating your media buying under fewer, trusted partners increases visibility and control.
If you’re managing multiple channels (search, social, affiliate, and display) centralising analytics can reveal which touchpoints truly influence purchase decisions. Once you know that, you can trim the rest.
Seizing the opportunity
Smaller ecommerce advertisers often assume they’re too small to demand transparency or negotiate better data practices. The opposite is true. With fewer legacy systems and smaller teams, local brands can move faster, implement cleaner data infrastructure, and adopt privacy-first strategies that global brands are still struggling to implement.
South Africa’s growing ecommerce market, which is forecast to exceed R130 billion by 2028, according to Statista, gives marketers a chance to build sustainable practices from the ground up. Efficiency and accountability now will pay off in lower acquisition costs and stronger brand trust later.
Rethinking value
The paradox of digital advertising is that the cheapest reach often turns out to be the most expensive. Every wasted impression drains potential growth, erodes brand equity, and pollutes both the digital and environmental landscape.
Real value comes from precision, privacy, and purpose by spending where attention is earned, not bought. Cheap advertising shouldn’t mean racing to the lowest cost per click. It should mean achieving the highest value per outcome.
So, the next time you plan your media spend, ask yourself a simple question: are you chasing cheap reach, or building real return? In a market where attention is scarce and budgets are tight, the most sustainable advantage isn’t volume, it’s clarity.