Case Study
Positive Returns by Default—Reclaiming 15% of Social Spend Before It’s Gone
The Logical Default: Protection that Pays for Itself
In social media advertising, a tool that costs less than the money it rescues is not an “add-on”—it is a strategic requirement. Because Walled Gardens like Meta and TikTok do not issue retroactive refunds for invalid traffic (IVT), once your budget is spent on a fake account or a bot, it is gone forever.
By using Real Impression’s Verified Devices to filter audiences before they are uploaded, you are making the only logical decision for your budget: stopping the loss before it happens.
The Simple Math of Budget Recovery
Real Impression costs just $0.32 per thousand impressions. When you look at that cost against a $9.00 Social CPM and a 15% fraud rate, you are spending 32 cents to keep $1.35 in your pocket. In a no-refund environment, verifying your audience isn’t an expense—it’s a mathematical certainty:
• The Cost: You pay $0.32 to verify 1,000 impressions.
• The Loss: Without verification, $1.35 of every 1,000 impressions (15% of your $9.00 CPM) is lost to fraud.
• The Net Gain: You spend $0.32 to “buy back” $1.35 of working media.
The Bottom Line: As long as your Media CPM is higher than $2.13, you are saving more money than you are spending. At a $9.00 CPM, you are realizing over a 300% ROI on the cost of the tool. Of course you are going to do this—it’s the equivalent of spending 32 cents to keep $1.35 in your pocket.
Scaling the Savings: It Works at Every Budget
Because the protection is priced per-impression, the efficiency is just as powerful for a small tester as it is for a national brand.
Monthly Social Budget
Monthly Tool Cost
Annual Rescued Cash (Net)
$1,000
$35
$1,380
$10,000
$355
$13,740
$100,000
$3,555
$137,340
Example: The $1,000 Monthly Budget
Even at a $1,000 monthly budget, teh math makes the decision for you. Spending roughly $35 a month to protect your spend recuses $1,380 in annual cash that would have otherwise vanished. It’s the simplest way to instantly expand a small budget’s reach without increasing the media investment by a single cent.
Why Upfront Verification is the New Standard
Waiting for a refund that will never come is a losing strategy. Advertisers are moving to upfront filtering as a standard operating procedure for three simple reasons:
1. Stop the “Algorithm Death Spiral”: Social platforms optimize for engagement. If a bot clicks your ad, the platform spends the rest of your budget looking for more bots. Real Impression ensures the algorithm only learns from real human behavior.
2. Pristine Lookalikes: When you build a Lookalike Audience from a verified seed list, you are modeling your growth on real customers, not the fake profiles that plague unmanaged audiences.
3. No-Refund Security: Since you can’t get your money back from Meta or TikTok after the fact, the only way to protect your cash is to ensure the bot never sees the ad in the first place.
The Conclusion
At a $9.00 CPM, Real Impression pays for itself four times over. It is the simplest way to instantly increase the efficiency of any social budget, regardless of size. The math is simple: Stop donating your budget to fraud and start investing it in people.