How to spot ad waste in 60 seconds (without any tools)
Four checks any Google Ads or Meta Ads operator can do in under a minute to find the biggest leaks in any account. No software needed — just the platform's own UI.
Before you pay for any ad-audit tool — including ours — you can find 70% of the leakage in any ad account with four checks that take 60 seconds total. Open your Google Ads or Meta Ads UI in another tab and follow along.
1. Sort campaigns by spend, then look at the bottom
Open the campaigns view. Sort descending by 30-day spend. Scroll to the bottom and look for campaigns spending $50+/month with zero conversions. Every single one is a leak. The fact that they haven't been auto-paused is almost always because nobody set a target CPA, or because the campaign is in 'Maximize Clicks' mode (which doesn't optimize for conversions at all).
Action: pause anything with 30+ days of $0 ROAS and >$25 spent.
2. Sort ad sets / ad groups by CPC, look at the top
Drop one level into your worst-performing campaign. Sort ad groups (Google) or ad sets (Meta) by average CPC, descending. The top one is usually paying 3-10x what the others pay because it's stuck competing for one over-targeted keyword or one tiny audience.
Action: either narrow the bidding strategy (target ROAS instead of max conversions) or pause that single ad group.
3. Look at the search-terms report (Google)
In Google Ads, open the search-terms report for your last 30 days. Sort by spend, descending. The terms that match your business get a check mark. Everything else is a negative keyword waiting to happen. Most accounts we audit have $200-2000/month of irrelevant search-term spend going to broad-match terms nobody curated.
Action: add the top 10 irrelevant terms as exact-match negatives. That alone saves most accounts more than our $19/month Starter plan costs.
4. Check creative fatigue (Meta)
In Meta Ads Manager, switch the date range to last 7 days and compare to the 7 days before. Look for ads where CTR has dropped 20%+ week-over-week. That's creative fatigue. The fix is new creative, not a budget change. Throwing more money at fatigued creative is the single most expensive mistake we see.
Action: pull the top fatigued ads from rotation and queue 2-3 new variants (different hook, same offer).
When you'd use a tool instead
These four checks catch most of the waste, but they're 100% manual. If you're running >$1k/month in spend, doing this weekly is roughly an hour. That hour is worth it the first month — and worth automating after that. That's the gap we built FixAdSpend for: same checks (plus a dozen more), runs nightly, surfaces only what changed.
If you'd rather do it manually forever, that's also a great answer. The point isn't to sell you software. The point is to stop the leak.