amekala Cutting waste and pacing budget
Follow adspirer-mcp before any tool call. Load the platform skill for field rules. This skill
proposes changes and applies them only after the user agrees to that specific change.
Find the waste
| Platform | Tool (through its router unless noted) |
|---|---|
analyze_wasted_spend, then analyze_search_terms |
|
| Meta | analyze_meta_wasted_spend |
| TikTok | analyze_tiktok_wasted_spend |
analyze_linkedin_wasted_spend |
|
| Amazon | analyze_amazon_wasted_spend, then get_amazon_search_terms |
Waste has a few shapes and they need different fixes:
- Spend with zero conversions. The obvious one. But check the volume first — an ad group with $40 spend and no conversions may simply not have had a chance yet at a $60 CPA.
- Spend converting far above target. Worse than zero, because it looks like it's working.
- Search terms you never intended to buy. On Google and Amazon this is where the money leaks: broad match matching "free", "jobs", "diy", a competitor's brand, or a wildly adjacent product.
- Placements and audiences that never convert. Display and TikTok especially.
Before you cut anything
Check the tracking first. Run audit_conversion_tracking. A campaign that looks like it
converts nothing very often converts fine and reports nothing. Pausing it would destroy a working
campaign — this mistake is common and expensive.
Check the volume. Ten clicks and no conversions is not evidence. Roughly, you want at least 3× the target CPA in spend, or ~100 clicks, before you call something a loser.
Check the assist. The campaign with no last-click conversions may be the one introducing people to the brand. Look at view-through and assisted conversions before killing an upper-funnel campaign.
Fix it, in this order
- Negatives before pauses. Adding negative keywords is precise, reversible, and keeps the
campaign learning.
add_negative_keywords(Google), the equivalent on Amazon. Pausing a whole ad group to stop one bad search term is a blunt instrument. - Exclude placements and audiences that spend without converting.
- Pause the ad, ad group, or campaign — the narrowest thing that solves the problem.
- Reallocate what you freed up.
Never delete when pausing will do. Removing keywords, deleting creatives, archiving campaigns — these lose history and some cannot be undone. Say what will be lost and get an explicit yes.
Reallocating budget
optimize_budget_allocation (Google) and its per-platform equivalents recommend a split. They
recommend; they don't apply.
Move money toward proven CPA, not toward the highest volume. Move in steps — a campaign whose budget doubles overnight re-enters the learning phase and gets worse before it gets better. 20–30% at a time, then wait a week.
Show the arithmetic: "Move $30/day from Campaign A ($140 CPA, target $50) to Campaign B ($38 CPA). Same total spend. If B holds, that's roughly 12 more leads a month."
Pacing
Compare spend so far against elapsed days in the period.
- Underpacing usually means the budget is capped, bids are too low for the auction, the target CPA is set below what the account can achieve, or the audience is too narrow. Check impression share before raising the budget — if the campaign isn't budget-limited, more budget changes nothing.
- Overpacing means the month runs out early. Cut the daily budget or fix what's expensive; don't just let it stop mid-month.
Google can overspend the daily budget by up to 2× on any given day, and settles over the month. A single-day overspend is not a bug — say so before someone panics.
Then verify
After every change, read the object back and confirm it took. Report what actually happened, not what you asked for. Tell the user what to expect: a learning period, a dip, a delay before the data means anything.
Don't promise to keep watching — schedule it
Pacing drifts, CPAs creep, and a campaign that was fine on Monday is over budget by Friday. Saying "I'll keep an eye on it" is a promise you cannot keep; the conversation ends when the user closes it.
Offer to schedule the check on this host. They can create one just by asking, and it lands with a notification wherever they already are.
In Cowork, a scheduled task (/schedule) — it runs remotely. In Claude Code, a remote
routine, not a local Desktop task: a local one is skipped whenever the machine is asleep, and the
overspend you're watching for does not wait for the laptop to open.
Each run costs tool calls against their quota. Mid-month and month-end beats daily for pacing; daily is for accounts where a day of overspend is real money.
If the host has no scheduler, or the user wants the alert to keep firing after they stop using this
assistant, Adspirer's monitoring_and_reporting router runs server-side threshold monitors on ROAS,
CPA, and spend. test_monitor proves one fires before they trust it, and it's free.
For the reallocation itself, an artifact makes the trade legible: current split beside proposed split, CPA per campaign, and the projected change. Easier to approve, and easier to refuse.