How I put a price on a leak

The most useful thing I do is not finding problems — any checklist finds problems. It is pricing them, because a founder with eleven findings and no prices cannot prioritise, while a founder with three findings worth ₹52,000, ₹31,000 and ₹9,000 a month knows exactly what to approve first. Here is the arithmetic, shown in full so you can check my work.

The general form

Every leak price is the same shape: (spend exposed to the problem) × (the efficiency lost because of it), measured against the account’s own baseline — never an industry average. The baseline is what makes the number honest: the question is always "what did this money earn, versus what money like it earns elsewhere in this account?"

Worked example: creative fatigue

A creative spent ₹2,00,000 last month. Its click-through over its first three weeks averaged 1.8%; over the last two weeks it has run at 1.1% with CPMs steady. The decayed fraction is roughly (1.8 − 1.1) ÷ 1.8 ≈ 39% of its former efficiency, applied to whatever it spends now. If it keeps spending ₹1,50,000 a month in this state, the leak is about ₹58,000 a month against its own demonstrated capability. Not a guess — its history is the proof of what the audience used to do.

Worked example: audience overlap

Two ad sets bid into auctions where 40% of their audiences are the same people. The cost is not 40% of spend — that is the exaggeration version. The real cost is the CPM inflation from bidding against yourself plus the duplicated frequency, which typically prices out to a single-digit percentage of the overlapping spend. Smaller number, but real, recurring, and fixable in an afternoon with exclusions.

Why I round down

• Every estimate uses the conservative end of its range — an audit that overpromises gets one approval, then loses trust forever.
• Fixes interact: pausing a fatigued creative changes the overlap math. I re-price after every executed change rather than summing a static list.
• Some losses are unknowable: what the budget would have earned in the best alternative placement is an estimate, and I label it as one.

What a priced audit changes

Prioritisation stops being a debate. The ₹52,000 leak gets fixed before the ₹9,000 one regardless of which is more interesting to argue about, and the approval decision becomes arithmetic: a fix that recovers more in its first month than the tool costs in a year is not a difficult call. That is the entire reason I refuse to ship a finding without a price tag — an unpriced finding is an opinion wearing a clipboard.