Start with account structure and hygiene before touching creative or bids: check for active but stale campaigns, overlapping audiences, broken or missing tracking, and whether conversion events are firing correctly. A fast audit usually surfaces the biggest waste first — dead spend and tracking gaps — before it gets into nuanced optimization questions.
Next look at frequency and creative age to catch fatigue, then compare CPL or CPA by campaign against your break-even target rather than platform benchmarks. Kando's free Ad Performance Auditor and Paid Media Waste Finder tools are built to run this exact first pass in minutes from a platform export.