What it is
The kill list is a standing weekly document. It names, in plain language: the keywords, ads, and pages we stopped because they spent without producing; the ones we scaled because they're putting jobs on the calendar; and exactly where the freed-up budget went. Nothing buried in a dashboard — a written verdict you can read in two minutes.
It's named the way it is on purpose. Managing ad spend well is mostly the discipline of stopping things — turning off the search term that drains money, pausing the ad that doesn't convert, cutting the page that leaks. The wins compound quietly; the waste is what you have to go hunting for, every single week.
Why it matters
The reason advertising budgets bleed isn't usually one big mistake — it's a hundred small leaks left running because nobody reviewed them. Broad-match keywords drift onto irrelevant searches. A winning ad fatigues. A landing page quietly stops converting after a change. Each one is small; together they're the difference between a channel that prints money and one that loses it. A weekly cadence catches them while they're cheap. A quarterly review catches them after they've cost you a season.
It matters just as much for what it does to the relationship. The standard agency report is a wall of vanity metrics — impressions up, clicks up, "great month!" — engineered so you can't tell whether your money worked. The kill list is the opposite: it volunteers the bad news, names what got cut and why, and ties every move to booked jobs. That's harder to write and impossible to hide behind, which is exactly why it builds the trust a dashboard never will. Knowing what to stop doing is worth more than knowing what to start — and putting it in writing every week is how the whole system stays honest.
How we install it
The kill list is the operating rhythm of the Acquisition surface. It begins in the Amplify phase of the 5A protocol — once four weeks of real data exist — and then never stops; it carries straight into the ongoing operating cadence. It's only possible because tracking and attribution shipped first: the memo is built on booked-job data, not clicks. Each week we read the numbers across Search, LSAs, and Meta, make the cuts and the moves, and write it down. "The kill list is published" is a signed clause in every engagement.
What it costs
The weekly kill list is included on every managed-acquisition engagement — it's the cadence, not an add-on. See where those tiers sit on the pricing ladder, or book a call and we'll walk you through a real one.