How to Audit your Facebook Ads

3 min readSep 26, 2021

If you run Facebook Ads, a regular audit is essential to assess the overall performance of your campaign. In this post, I am going to what’s included in a Facebook Ads audit and how to perform one.

What is a Facebook Ads Audit?

A Facebook Ads audit is a full in-depth review of everything that’s happening with your Facebook Ad campaign. I recommend conducting one weekly. If not weekly, then you could consider doing one at least:

At another set interval e.g. once a month to ensure everything is working properly.
If your campaign doesn’t seem to be working properly.
If you’re making a change to your campaign.

Without a thorough audit, it can be difficult to assess how your campaign is performing and what’s driving the results. Audits can help you spot trends and patterns, making it easier to create stronger campaigns in the future.

Also, since Facebook updates the platform regularly, an audit may help prevent you from missing a major change e.g. the recent(ish) iOS update.

Before you start your Facebook Ads Audit, you could open up a spreadsheet tool e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. Use this to record your data (there may be a lot of it!) and compare with future audits.

First Things First

Open your Ads Manager and check who has any access to your account. You can review who has access to which accounts and at what level under the “People” tab of Business Manager. It is good to get into the habit of reviewing this regularly if you have more than one person working on your ads as sometimes people leave the business and need to be removed.

Review the Metrics

Now it’s time to start number-crunching.

In Ads Manager, you can view the data available on your current campaign(s), and you have the option to add additional fields to the dashboard depending on what you’re specifically interested in. You can create custom reports, and view metrics at campaign, ad set, and ad level depending on how deep you want to go.

Make sure that your report covers the core metrics, such as:

Click Thru Rate (CTR)
Results (or number of actions taken)
Cost per action
Reach
Quality ranking
Clicks
Amount spent

Assess your Ads Performance

Now review your different ads. Look for trends into what’s working and what isn’t.

Break this down by objective, audience, and audience you’re targeting (cold, warm, or hot hot-hot!) Look for the following:

Which ads performed best during split testing (and if you’re not split testing you really should be — ask me about this if you need to!) Check the clicks and desired actions taken e.g. hitting the ‘submit’ button.
Which campaigns cost the most in terms of CPA (cost per action) — did they yield a higher overall result?
Look at the different stages of your sales funnel? Are you getting lots of initial interest which then tapers off? If so, then why aren’t people following through on this?
Lots of clicks but no conversions? Check your landing page!

Make notes of all of this on your spreadsheet — you’d be surprised how often you might find yourself referring back to them.

Now Review your Integrations

These are the tools that help you manage and run your ads e.g. your CRM such as Aweber or Mailchimp, your chatbots, your product catalogue if you’re e-commerce, lead forms, as well as the Facebook tracking pixel.

Check that the pixel is installed properly and has the right events set up.
Review your product catalogue — is this still up to date?
Check your custom audiences. Are these still up to date?
What about your lead forms? Do you need to ad or remove anything from these? Are they still fit for purpose?

Finally …

While a Facebook Ads audit can be time-consuming, it really is the only way to deep dive into your ads management. Without a thorough audit, you are working in the dark as while you may see numbers, it’s hard to know what’s actually driving them.