Budget leaks: when a fading ad gets a raise
The most expensive ads in your account usually aren’t the bad ones — those get noticed and killed. The expensive ones are the formerly great: still wearing last month’s numbers, quietly getting a raise while their performance falls.
Anatomy of a budget leak
An ad wins for three weeks. The algorithm rewards it, and so do you: budgets go up. Then the audience saturates — frequency creeps past 4, the same people see the same video again — and CTR starts sliding. But the ad’s period average still looks fine, because three good weeks outvote one bad one. So spend keeps climbing on an ad that’s already fading. That combination — CTR falling while spend rises — is what we flag as a budget leak, and it’s the single most common finding on accounts we audit.
The related trap: scaling too fast
The mirror image: an ad shows promise, and budget triples within days. Delivery systems re-enter learning, costs spike, CTR drops — and a genuinely good creative gets judged on its worst week. If spend tripled from one half of the period to the other while CTR fell, the report warns you: raising budgets too fast resets learning.
What to check weekly
- Split your reporting period in half. Compare each ad’s CTR in the first half versus the second — averages hide direction.
- Anything falling 30%+ while its spend grows is leaking. Cut or refresh before the average catches up with reality.
- Cap budget increases per step. Boring, but the learning phase doesn’t care about your enthusiasm.
ROASTED runs the half-versus-half comparison on every ad in every report, automatically — because “still looks fine on average” is exactly how leaks survive.