Ad operations · Wasted spend
The Ad Account Leak Check
A guide tells you what’s possible. It won’t tell you where your budget leaked this week. So here’s the operator’s version: a weekly check that reads your accounts and points at the waste. You decide what to cut.
Where budget quietly dies
Most accounts bleed 20–30% on things the dashboard doesn’t put in front of you. Search terms that convert nobody. Audiences bidding against each other. A creative that fatigued three weeks ago. None of it is hidden. It’s just spread across Meta, Google and GA4, so you never see it in one glance.
A bigger budget doesn’t fix that. It just funds it at scale. The edge isn’t more money. It’s a faster, cleaner read of where the current money is going.
How the check works
- 1. Read. The AI goes through Meta and Google together, every account, once a week. It analyses. Nothing changes in a campaign without your approval.
- 2. Flag. It surfaces the leaks and what changed. When a source has no data, it says so instead of inventing a number.
- 3. Decide. You get a short list. Cut, keep, or test. The call is yours, because the client context lives in your head.
The 7 places budget leaks most
- Search terms converting nobody
- Audiences overlapping and bidding against each other
- Creative fatigue before it tanks the account
- Budget pacing off the goal
- Placements quietly eating spend
- Missing or thin negatives
- Conversion tracking that drifted
Questions people actually ask
Twenty to thirty per cent sounds high.
It is the range we see, not a prediction about your account. If yours is cleaner than that, the check costs you an hour and tells you so - which is worth knowing before you go and argue for a bigger budget.
My dashboard already shows me this.
It shows you what you asked it. The items on this list are the ones that do not surface unless you go looking. Search terms converting nobody. Audiences bidding against each other. A creative that fatigued three weeks ago and is still running.
Does it change anything in my accounts?
No. It reads, it flags, and where a source has no data it says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. Cut, keep or test is your call every time.
Can I run it without your tools?
Yes, and most people should start that way. The check is written out step by step and works from exports. We are happy to run it with you, but the page is not bait for that.
Related reading. 12 Ad-Ops Skills for Claude. The Weekly Ads Prompt Pack. The Weekly Ads Decision System.
Want us to run this on your accounts?
We set up the weekly leak check around your accounts: the read, the flags, the cut/keep/test format. You keep every decision. No pitch. Tell us how many accounts you run.