Most ad accounts leak money in the same few places. The good news is that you do not need a full day to find the biggest problems. With a clear checklist and a stopwatch, you can surface the majority of wasted spend in about half an hour and leave with a short list of fixes worth acting on.
This is the exact order we work through when we open an account for the first time. It moves from the issues that quietly break everything, down to the smaller optimisations, so your time goes where the impact is.
1. Start with conversion tracking
If the numbers are wrong, every decision after them is wrong too. Before looking at anything else, confirm that conversions fire once per real action, that the values are set correctly, and that you are not counting the same lead twice. Check that primary conversions are separated from secondary ones, because an account optimising towards a soft signal like a page view will happily spend into the void.
A quick tell: if the conversion count is suspiciously round or wildly higher than the leads your sales team actually receives, tracking is the first thing to fix.
2. Read the search terms report
This is where wasted spend hides in plain sight. Sort by cost and look for irrelevant queries, branded terms you did not intend to pay for, and one-off searches that will never convert. Broad and phrase match keywords tend to drift over time, so this report almost always contains a few surprises.
Add the obvious offenders as negative keywords and you often cut cost per acquisition within days, without touching bids at all.
3. Check structure and match types
Group campaigns by intent and margin, not by convenience. A tidy account separates high-intent, high-margin searches from broad prospecting, so each can have its own budget and target. If everything sits in one campaign, the algorithm cannot tell your best traffic from your worst.
While you are here, note the mix of match types. An account that is entirely broad match with no negatives is usually paying to learn lessons it has already learned.
4. Compare budget against impression share
Look at impression share lost to budget. If your best campaign is capped by budget while weaker ones spend freely, you have found a reallocation that costs nothing to make. Money should follow the results, and it often does not by default.
5. Review ad copy and assets
Open your top ad groups and read the ads as a customer would. Are the headlines specific, do they match the search, and do the assets actually describe your offer? Thin or generic copy quietly lowers click-through rate and quality, which pushes your costs up across the board.
6. Follow the click to the landing page
Finally, click your own ads and land where your customers land. A strong campaign pointed at a slow or off-message page wastes every euro it spends. Message match between ad and page is one of the cheapest wins in paid search.
Turn findings into a plan
Write down what you find and rank it by effort against return. Fix tracking first, then trim waste, then reallocate budget and scale the winners. A short, honest audit that leads to three real changes beats a long report that nobody acts on.
If you would rather have a second pair of eyes, our paid media audit follows this same process in depth and hands you a prioritised roadmap. You can see the fixed price on our pricing page.