Facebook Ads Audit: A Comprehensive Guide to Analysing Your Ad Performance

Without measuring success, identifying opportunities, and implementing new strategies, you’ll find your digital marketing strategy will hit a wall sooner rather than later. This is a particularly important process to undertake for channels that can monopolise a lot of time and budget if set up inefficiently, such as Facebook advertising.

Completing a Facebook Ads audit will put the power back in your hands, equipping you with insights that can then be applied to optimise your campaign performance and improve your return on ad spend (ROAS). Every business should be conducting Facebook Ads audits regularly, as without them, you’re essentially doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. 

Ready to level up your ads strategy using owned insights? Here’s my step-by-step guide to successfully completing your first Facebook Ads audit. 

What is a Facebook Ads audit?

A Facebook Ads audit is a systematic review of your Facebook advertising campaigns to help you assess performance, identify areas for improvement, and ensure your ad strategy aligns with your bigger business goals. It involves a deep dive into your campaign structure, targeting, creatives, and metrics to help you pinpoint what’s working well and what could be adjusted for optimal performance. 

Why conduct regular Facebook Ads audits? 

As is the case for any good digital marketing strategy, evaluating the performance of your Facebook ads is critical. This practice puts you in a great position to make informed choices, rather than flying blind. When you audit your Facebook Ads, you’ll consider each and every decision you’ve made about your campaigns individually, and implement positive changes and small tweaks to collectively accelerate your performance.

The benefits of a Facebook Ads audit

Reviewing your ads regularly can help you align with best practices and optimise your ad performance. Throughout this process, you will: 

• Identify inefficiencies: Detect overlapping audiences, redundant ads, and underperforming creatives, and use this information to make impactful changes.

• Optimise spending: Allocate your budgets more effectively by focusing on high-performing segments. 
• Enhance return on ad spend (ROAS): Improve your ROAS by refining targeting, messaging, and placements. 
• Learn what resonates: Collect more information about your target audience by understanding which ads they respond to and which ones they don’t. 
• Stay current: Adapt to Meta’s latest updates and any shifts in best practice to ensure your ads remain competitive. 

Current Facebook Ads trends: From hyper-targeted to a broad, consolidated approach

Historically, Facebook advertising best practice has hinged on ultra-specific audience segmentation, but emerging trends suggest this is no longer the only approach. 

There’s been a recent shift towards broader targeting and campaign consolidation driven by Facebook’s evolving algorithms, which now favour larger, more diverse audience sets for better learning and ad delivery optimisation. Broad targeting means Facebook’s machine learning can identify the best audience segments within your ad set and use these to improve performance. 

Because Facebook’s algorithms and user behaviour are so dynamic, continuous auditing is an important tool to stay ahead of the curve. Use it to ensure your strategy evolves in line with industry trends, best practices, and platform changes. 

How often should you conduct a Facebook Ads audit?

How regularly you audit your Facebook Ads strategy will depend on your goals, budgets, and the time you have to dedicate to monitoring performance. I suggest conducting a major audit like this one every few months – once per quarter is plenty. However, if you have the time and resources, it will benefit your business to do mini audits on a monthly basis so you can continually adjust your strategy in line with changes in performance. 

Understanding Facebook Ads Manager

Before you jump straight into your audit, it’s important to have a strong foundational understanding of Facebook Ads Manager so you can use it to your advantage during the review process. 

What is Facebook Ads Manager?

Facebook Ads Manager is a central hub for creating, managing, and analysing your Facebook advertising campaigns. It offers a comprehensive view of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, along with detailed performance metrics and audience insights.

Key metrics and analytics in Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager offers a variety of metrics that provide insight into your ad performance. They include:

• Impressions and reach: How many people have seen your ads and how often they’ve been served with them. 
• Engagement metrics: Likes, comments, shares, and clicks on your ads, and how likely users are to perform one or more of these actions. 
• Conversion metrics: Actions taken by users, such as purchases, sign-ups, or other desired actions. 
• Cost metrics: Cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and cost per result (CPR) to help you calculate your return on investment (ROI). 

Navigating reports and dashboards in Facebook Ads Manager

Ads Manager’s reporting tools are pretty flexible, allowing you to customise dashboards, track your KPIs, and generate detailed reports, amongst other features. I recommend setting up personalised dashboards in Ads Manager that align with your business objectives before you begin the audit process so you can quickly and easily access relevant data throughout. 

How to conduct a Facebook Ads audit

Even if you have some experience managing and optimising Facebook Ads, initiating an audit can be daunting, especially without a structure or guide to follow. Like many things in life, your audit will be ten times better if you go in with a plan, which is why I’ve put together my essential 8-step guide to conducting a Facebook Ads audit. 

1. Review conversion tracking: Verify your conversion tracking is set up correctly, and captures the actions that matter most to your business. 
2. Analyse campaign structure: Ensure each campaign has a clear, specific objective that aligns with your business goals, and that there are no overlaps, duplicates, or redundancies. 
3. Evaluate audience targeting: Assess the relevance and size of your audiences and look for overlaps or gaps to guide changes to your segmentation.
4. Analyse your ad creative and copy: Review the performance of your images, videos, and ad copy to identify what resonates best with your audience. 
5. Review your ad placements: Select between automatic or manual placements, and confirm your choices are aligned with both your broader business goals and your chosen creative. 
6. Assess budgeting strategies: Make sure you’re getting your money’s worth and are allocating your budget in a way that helps you achieve your goals. 
7. Analyse ad performance metrics: Identify the right KPIs and tracking metrics to help you measure short- and long-term success. 
8. Undertake competitor analysis: Finish the audit process by benchmarking yourself against your competitors and isolating any learnings that could be applied to your campaign strategy. 

Regular audits shouldn’t just highlight what’s wrong or underperforming with your ads – they should also identify opportunities for improvement. For instance, poorly-performing ad sets may benefit from revised targeting or fresh creatives, whereas high-performing campaigns could warrant an increase in ad spend to maximise returns. 

Your step-by-step guide to auditing Facebook ads

Ready to commence your Facebook Ads audit? Let’s break it down, one step at a time. 

Step 1: Review conversion tracking 

Think of the first component in your audit as a sense check. By reviewing the setup of your conversion tracking, you’re making sure that everything you glean in future steps is accurate and can be related back to your broader advertising goals. 

Set up and reviewing Facebook pixel and event tracking

Your Facebook pixel tracks user actions on your site and feeds this data back into your campaigns in Facebook Ads Manager, permitting detailed performance analysis and crucially, retargeting. Confirm all relevant pages on your website have pixel coverage and that it’s accurately tracking the right events. A straightforward way to do this is by navigating to your pixel in Facebook Events Manager and confirming it’s sending events and their information is accurate.

Analyse conversion events and custom conversions

Beyond basic pixel tracking, custom conversions let you define and track the actions that are most valuable to your business. During your audit, verify your conversions are set up correctly and are reflecting meaningful customer interactions, such as completed purchases or lead submissions. 

Common conversion tracking mistakes and fixes 

As part of this essential first step, you may encounter some issues where you notice your pixels or events aren’t performing correctly. Thankfully, this is common – and it’s the whole point of the audit process! 

Errors in conversion tracking can usually be related back to one of these things: 

• Misconfigured events: Events that aren’t firing correctly due to incorrect setup or a missing pixel code. 
• Untracked actions: Key actions that aren’t being captured, such as form submissions or clicks to specific buttons. 
• Data discrepancies: Differences between Facebook-reported conversions and your own internal data, which are often caused by tracking errors or in many cases, ad blockers. 

Need help to pinpoint errors in your conversion tracking and fix them quickly? As a Facebook Ads Specialist specialist, that’s what I’m here for! Get in touch and let’s resolve those errors ASAP. 

Step 2: Analyse campaign structure

Next, let’s look at the way your campaigns are set up, and identify any errors or inconsistencies that may be impacting your performance. 

Check for duplicate campaigns 

Multiple campaigns targeting the same audience or objective are not only a waste of money (as you may unknowingly be allocating double the budget to the same objective), but can also lead to cannibalisation and make your reporting process convoluted. Weed them out of your campaign structure as part of your audit to make way for increased efficiency. 

Ensure campaigns are aligned with your goals

Every ad campaign you run should have a distinct goal, whether that’s generating leads, driving sales, increasing brand awareness, or something else. Mixing objectives within a single campaign will dilute performance and makes it significantly more difficult to measure success (or failure). 

Maximise A/B testing opportunities 

A/B testing is an essential tool for discovering which ads perform and which don’t. During your audit, integrate or refine opportunities to A/B test elements of your campaigns, including: 

• Ad creatives: Testing different images, videos, and formats (e.g., image dimensions and layouts). 
• Ad copy: Try a range of headlines, descriptions, and calls to action to see what resonates best with your audience. 
• Audience segments: Experiment with different targeting options to pinpoint the most responsive audience groups. 

Step 3: Evaluate audience targeting 

Audience targeting makes up a sizable chunk of the Facebook advertising process, and it’s often the toughest part to perfect – which is why regular auditing is so important! 

What are Facebook’s audience targeting options? 

Facebook provides a few options for audience targeting to be aware of: 

• Saved audiences: Audiences built using demographic data, interests, and behaviours 
• Custom audiences: Audiences that are unique to your account, based on your existing customer data, such as email lists or website visitors. 
• Lookalike audiences: New audiences that include people who resemble your ideal customers.

Assess the size of your targeted audiences

An effective audience will be both relevant to your product and of an optimal size – not so broad that it dilutes your message or denies your target audience entirely, but not so narrow that it limits your potential reach. 

When adjusting your audiences, keep in mind recent changes to Facebook’s recommended targeting approach, which advises against over-segmentation and instead, suggests a broader approach. As a rule, it makes sense to begin as broadly as possible whilst still operating within the reasonable confines of your brand – for instance, if your product or service is targeted entirely at women, there’s no point in including men in your audience, even when aiming broad.

From here, Facebook will identify high-performing segments within your broader audience groups and use these to continually improve campaign performance.

Review ad set competition and manage overlap with exclusions

It’s important to evaluate your ad sets to ensure they’re not competing against each other for the same audience, as this will drive up costs and reduce the efficacy of your ads. Dig into your current campaign structures and audience groups using Audience Manager, then address overlapping ad sets with one or a few of the following tactics: 

• Utilise exclusions: Excluding specific profiles or attributes from your ad sets will help prevent overlap between audiences and ensure your ads reach your intended audience without redundancies. For example, excluding recent purchasers from a prospecting campaign will save budget and reduce ad fatigue. 
• Consolidate audiences into one ad set: If you’ve got multiple ads running with the same or similar audiences, consider rolling them all into the one ad set to streamline your setup and improve reporting. 
• Adjust your targeting criteria: Avoid cannibalisation by tweaking your targeting criteria so no two ad sets are exactly the same. 

Adjust targeting strategies for better reach and engagement

You should regularly refine your targeting based on performance data. Use insights from your ads to adjust your selected demographics, interests, and behaviours, ensuring your ads are always reaching high-quality leads. 

Step 4: Analyse your ad creative and copy 

In 2024, your Facebook ad creative is arguably the most important component of a successful campaign – after all, the words and visuals you use form the ‘face’ of your brand. While Facebook’s algorithm does the heavy lifting to help you find your ideal audience, it’s your ad’s job to engage your audience and entice them to convert with good creative. 

Enhance creatives based on audience feedback

Utilise a broad range of metrics, including comments, shares, engagement rate, and reach, to inform which creatives you keep in rotation and which ones you adjust or remove. Positive engagement can signal your messaging is successful, whereas negative feedback may indicate areas for adjustment. 

These days, consumers can be extremely honest online – so don’t underestimate the power of combining your quantitative measurements from Facebook Ads with direct, qualitative user feedback from the comments sections of your ads. 

Determine the essence of your ad copy 

At its core, your ad copy should be clear, compelling, and aligned with your desired action (such as clicking a link, watching a video, or making a purchase). Evaluate your headlines, body text, and CTAs with this in mind, and make adjustments to remove anything that doesn’t represent your brand or help you achieve your goals.

Employ best practices for creative testing

Good digital marketers understand the value of testing. To get the most out of your ads, you should continuously be testing new creatives to keep your ads fresh and engaging. Use split testing to compare different versions of a similar style, and build your understanding of what resonates with your audience. 

Step 5: Review your ad placements

Where your ad is shown and how it appears to users can make or break its success, which is why it’s important to consider your ad placements and their setup. 

Select from automatic vs manual ad placements

Facebook offers multiple placement options to advertisers, from feed and Stories to in-stream videos, Reels, Marketplace, and Audience Network. When you create an ad campaign, you’ll select between automated placements – allowing Facebook to optimise where it shows your ad for the best performance – and manual placements, which give you the power over where your ads appear. 

While automated placements can help you maximise reach at a lower cost and with less effort, there are also some downsides to be aware of, including placements in less desirable locations (e.g., components of the site that receive lower traffic or have poorer inherent engagement rates). The automated placements you have access to will also be limited by your ad creative – for instance, Facebook won’t show a square ad across a vertical placement like Reels or Stories. 

Assess placement performance across devices

Check how your ads are faring across mobile, desktop, and tablet for a full picture of their performance. Then, optimise for the best-performing placements by adjusting your creative formats, such as using vertical videos for Stories and Reels. 

Optimise placements for the best ROI

Certain placements drive better return on investment than others: namely Stories, Reels, and feed ads. So, it’s important to make sure that the content you’re using across these placements is refined and aligned with best practice. For example, using video content in Stories and Reels will boost engagement and completion rates when compared to static images. 

Step 6: Assess budgeting strategies

How you’re spending your money is a huge component of the Facebook advertising process. View this audit as an opportunity to inspect every element of your budget allocation, double down on what works, and reevaluate or ease off underperforming campaigns. 

Review your daily and lifetime budget allocations 

Your budgets should reflect each campaign’s goals and performance. As part of the audit process, review your daily or lifetime budgets to ensure they’re appropriately scaled to the ad’s objectives, and adjust as necessary based on results. I recommend allocating more budget to high-performing campaigns to accelerate success and reducing spend on ads that consistently underperform. When it comes to campaign type, employ a tiered approach, with the most spend given to top-of-funnel awareness campaigns, followed by consideration, and finally, conversion.

Choose between campaign vs ad set budgets

Deciding between campaign budget optimisation (CBO) and ad set-level budgeting can impact performance. Evaluate which approach works best for your strategy, considering factors like predictability, control, and performance outcomes.

Step 7: Analyse ad performance metrics

As you reach the last few steps of your audit, look carefully at the way you currently measure success, and determine whether there are any new strategies you could implement or metrics you could track to improve your learnings. 

Select your key performance indicators (KPIs)

You should always align the KPIs you’re tracking with broader business goals. Three of the most worthwhile KPIs to help you truly understand your campaign performance are: 

• Cost per result (CPR): How much you’re paying for each action. Measuring CPR helps you determine the ROI of your advertising. 
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. This indicates how engaging your ad is.
• Conversion rate (CR): The percentage of total clicks that result in a conversion. 

Deep dive into key metrics

During the audit process, it’ll pay off to analyse the above KPIs in a bit more detail to understand the cost-effectiveness and impact of your ads. For example, high CPR might indicate you need to refine your offer, landing page, targeting, or creatives, as something is not resonating with your target audience. Low CTR might suggest your ad isn’t compelling enough to drive clicks, and needs adjusting to better stand out amongst the noise. 

Define your return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is a critical metric for evaluating the overall profitability of your Facebook ads. Calculate your ROAS by dividing the revenue generated from your ads by the amount spent. Your ROAS should exceed your cost of goods sold and other expenses to indicate profitability. Once you have this information, you should be able to adjust other elements of your campaign to improve your ROAS, such as your budgets or the number of ads you have in market. 

Identify underperformers and make data-driven adjustments

Using the data gathered during the audit process, identify underperforming ads and make amendments  accordingly. Adjust targeting, placements, or creatives to improve your ads – or consider pausing them if you don’t see any change after a few days or weeks.

Step 8: Undertake competitor analysis for Facebook Ads

Lastly, it always pays to explore what your competitors are doing, and determine the reasons for their successes and failures. Here’s how to approach competitor analysis for Facebook Ads as part of your audit. 

Use Facebook Ads Library for competitor benchmarking 

Facebook Ads Library is an extremely valuable tool for competitor analysis, as it allows you to see everything your competitors currently have in circulation. Use this resource to benchmark your ads against others in your industry, noting which strategies appear to be working for them. 

As well as studying the overall approach of their campaigns, I suggest studying the creative elements of your competitors’ ads, including the visuals and messaging. Look for patterns of success and consider how you could adapt these strategies to your own brand and objectives. 

Identify gaps and future opportunities

While it’s beneficial to learn from your competitors, your ultimate goal should be differentiating your own ads so you stand out in market. As a final step, use your audit findings to identify gaps in the market that your competitors aren’t addressing, and turn these into future opportunities by developing aligned creative and messaging. 

Next steps after completing your Facebook Ads audit 

Conducting a thorough Facebook Ads audit involves reviewing every element of your campaign structure, targeting, creatives, placements, and performance metrics to identify inefficiencies, optimise ad spend, and find opportunities to improve performance. Once you’ve completed your audit, you should have acquired significant insights to help you tighten up your paid advertising strategy on Facebook. 

Now that you’re equipped with all this new information, here’s what comes next. 

• Implement changes: Apply the insights gained from your audit to your current campaigns to maximise your returns. 
• Test and reiterate: Continuously test new strategies, then re-test based on performance data. 
• Monitor your campaigns: Schedule regular audits to ensure your Facebook advertising strategy stays aligned with your business goals and any market trends. 
• Book a professional Facebook Ads audit: To guarantee your campaigns are performing at their best, it’s worth getting an expert opinion. Consider booking a Facebook Ads audit with me to leverage my professional guidance, maximise your advertising investment, and achieve your marketing objectives. 

If you need some support to conduct a Facebook Ads audit (or want to hand the entire process over to an expert), get in touch to see how we could work together. The powerful insights gleaned during an audit are an unmissable component of optimising your ads and campaign strategy.