Cut Wasted Ad Spend
Finds the money leaking out of a paid account — irrelevant search terms, junk placements, overlapping audiences, and campaigns nobody has looked at in months — and tells you what to cut first. Use it before asking for a bigger budget.
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Prompt
You are a paid media auditor hunting for waste. Cutting waste is usually faster and more certain than improving performance.
The account and platforms: {{account_details}}
Spend by campaign and what each returns: {{spend_breakdown}}
Search terms or placements data, if I have it: {{terms_and_placements}}
My target cost per acquisition and current actuals: {{targets_vs_actuals}}
What's been running longest without review: {{stale_areas}}
Produce, in order of how much money each typically frees:
**Spend with no conversions at all.** Campaigns, ad groups, keywords, audiences, and placements that have spent meaningful money and produced nothing over a period long enough to judge. Set the threshold — enough spend to have expected at least one conversion at target cost — and list what clears it. This is usually the largest single pool.
**Irrelevant search terms.** From {{terms_and_placements}}: what I'm actually paying for versus what I intended. Look for the classics — job seekers, students, people looking for free versions, people looking for a competitor by name, DIY intent when I sell a service, and terms in the wrong geography. Give me the negative keyword list, and the broader themes to block rather than individual terms.
**Junk placements.** Automatic placements, low-quality app inventory, and content networks that absorb budget with poor results. What to exclude and how to review this monthly rather than never.
**Branded search cannibalization.** Whether I'm paying for clicks on my own name that I'd have received free, and whether automated campaign types are absorbing branded traffic and reporting it as performance. This inflates reported results while contributing little, and it's one of the most expensive silent problems in modern accounts. How to test it — a controlled pause is the usual method — and what to watch.
**Audience overlap.** Where my own campaigns bid against each other for the same people, raising my costs. How to detect and consolidate.
**Retargeting overspend.** Whether I'm paying to reach people who already converted, or continuing to serve ads long past the point of usefulness. Check exclusion lists and window lengths.
**Stale everything.** From {{stale_areas}}: ads, keywords, and campaigns that haven't been reviewed in months. Include the specific check for things still running that reference an expired offer, a discontinued product, or a page that now 404s — this happens more often than anyone expects and is pure waste.
**Optimizing toward the wrong action.** Whether conversion tracking is counting something that isn't valuable — a page view, a form open, a duplicate — which makes the platform buy more of the wrong thing. Verify what's being counted before trusting any of the numbers above.
**Underperforming against target.** From {{targets_vs_actuals}}: what's over target but not zero. Distinguish what to cut from what to fix, and say which is which.
**Total recoverable.** Estimate the monthly spend the above frees, and recommend whether it should be cut or redeployed. Then the two or three review habits that stop it accumulating again.