Finding wasted ad spend: the audit that pays for itself
Most accounts leak in the same places: search terms, placements, overlapping audiences, forgotten campaigns. Reclaim it systematically.
Before asking for more budget, find the budget you're already burning. Nearly every account that's run for a year without a systematic audit leaks in predictable places — not through one dramatic mistake but through dozens of small, compounding ones. The audit below routinely funds its own cost out of reclaimed spend.
Read what you actually paid for
The search terms and placement reports show the queries and sites that triggered your ads — not the ones you targeted, the ones you got. Job seekers, students, competitors' brand variants you can't win, apps nobody meant to advertise in. Harvest negatives and exclusions monthly; this single habit is the cheapest optimisation in paid media and the foundation of a sound account structure.
Find the audiences fighting themselves
Overlapping ad sets bid against each other; retargeting pools that never exclude converters pay to chase the already-caught, the failure mode covered here. Map exclusions explicitly — every audience should have a job and a boundary.
Sunset the zombies
Old campaigns left “just in case”, experiments nobody concluded, a legacy branded campaign eating budget the organic listing would catch anyway — every account accumulates them. If a campaign has no owner and no hypothesis, it's a subscription you forgot to cancel.
Check the settings that default against you
Auto-applied recommendations, broad-match expansions you didn't choose, display network opt-ins on search campaigns, placement defaults — platforms optimise for spend, and their defaults lean their way. Review settings deliberately after every platform update; “recommended” is not the same as “recommended for you.”
Verify the tracking before trusting any of it
Wasted-spend analysis assumes the conversion data is right. Duplicate conversions, broken tags after a site change, or missing offline uploads distort every efficiency number downstream. Trace one conversion end-to-end as step zero of the audit.
Want a leak-finding audit on your accounts? It's how our paid ads management engagements begin — request one.
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