How to audit your ad accounts in 30 minutes (and find the waste)

Most ad accounts leak 15–30% of their budget to waste — campaigns that looked good when launched but quietly drifted into inefficiency. Here's a 30-minute audit framework that finds the waste and the quick wins, across every platform.

Minute 0–5: Pull everything into one view

Open every platform — Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Set the date range to the last 30 days. If you're using a unified dashboard like AdPulse, this is one screen. If not, you'll spend 5 minutes just opening tabs and setting date ranges. The goal: see spend, ROAS, CPA and conversions for every campaign on every platform, side by side.

Minute 5–15: Find the bottom 20%

Sort every platform's campaigns by ROAS (or CPA if you don't track ROAS). The bottom 20% of campaigns by ROAS typically account for 50–60% of wasted spend. For each one, ask: is the ROAS below your profitability threshold? Has it been declining for 2+ weeks? Is the spend disproportionate to results? If yes to any, pause it. Don't 'optimise' it — pausing is faster and you can revisit later.

Minute 15–20: Check your audience exclusions

This is the most common waste source. Are you showing ads to existing customers? To people who already converted? To employees? On Meta, check your audience exclusions on every active campaign. On Google, review your negative keyword list — add 'free', 'cheap', 'jobs', 'review', 'alternative' if they're not there. On TikTok, check you're excluding past purchasers. Fixing exclusions typically saves 10–15% of budget instantly.

Minute 20–25: Check frequency and fatigue

On Meta, check frequency per ad set. Anything above 3 in a 7-day window is entering fatigue territory. On TikTok, check how long your top creative has been running — if it's been 5+ days on the same audience, CTR is likely declining. On Google Display, check frequency caps. If your best creative is fatigued, it's not just underperforming — it's actively dragging down your account-level CTR, which raises CPCs on everything else.

Minute 25–30: Identify the quick wins

Look for: campaigns with high CTR but low conversion rate (landing page problem, not ad problem — fix the page), campaigns with good ROAS but tiny budget (scale by 20%), and platforms where CPA is significantly lower than others (reallocate budget toward them). Write down 3 actions: one campaign to pause, one creative to refresh, one budget shift to make. Do them today, not next week.

Make it a habit

A 30-minute audit every week catches waste before it compounds. The brands that win aren't the ones with the best strategy — they're the ones that react fastest to what the data shows. AdPulse automates most of this: it surfaces underperformers, tracks frequency, and flags budget shifts — so your weekly audit takes 10 minutes instead of 30. Start free.