Generally the best way is to only do the thing that you think causes the leak, and, well, watch the memory only go up.
But of course, you need to test that doing "nothing" over that period of time, doesn't also cause memory to go up.
Because of this, and the generally confusing complicated nature of tracking down leaks (especially in 3rd party software) it can be pretty hard to write an automated test for it.
It depends on your environment, really. Perhaps it is possible to build an environment where you always start from scratch (i.e. a virtual machine) but it may not be possible.
Personally, I'd have a seperate, but still partially-automated, system for detecting the leaks, and run it "every so often". If it's 3rd party, you'll only need to do it when you add a new version of the software.