Setting up campaigns in Ads Manager is not complicated in itself. Plus, you will find plenty of manuals on this topic. But how to understand whether your advertising is really working effectively is a completely different question, which an advertising account audit will help to solve.
What is an advertising account audit and why should you conduct it?
Ineffective advertising campaigns are not always the result of unattractive creatives, unsuccessful ad texts or small budgets. In most cases, the reason lies in the wrong approach to working with Facebook Ads. A number of errors can remain unnoticed and lead to the absence of the desired result, even if you trusted the agency or targetologist. An audit of the Facebook advertising account helps to find and eliminate these errors.
A Facebook Ads account audit is an in-depth examination of your ad account that will help you:
- check if everything is set up correctly;
- evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns;
- understand how to improve current results;
- find new growth points.
That is, Ads Manager audit is needed by absolutely everyone who works with advertising in Meta, for self-checking or control of contractors. Without this, you simply cannot be sure of the correctness of such promotion.
You can order an audit service from an advertising agency, but of course it won’t be free. Or you can do it yourself thanks to our article.🙂
When to audit your advertising account?
A red flag that indicates the need for an audit is ineffective advertising. For example, if campaigns do not generate conversions or generate spam leads, and advertising in general does not pay off. Or if you are not sure that you did everything correctly or something makes you doubt the expertise of your contractors.
How to Audit a Facebook Account: 6 Steps
Step 1: Checking Pixel Performance and Event Tracking
Every time a Pixel loads, it automatically fires the standard PageView event.
Go to the Event Manager section.
This is a standard event that should be triggered automatically when the Pixel is loaded. That is, it should be triggered on all pages where the pixel itself is installed.
Go to the “Event Testing” section, enter the website address and see if the corresponding event is triggered in real time.
You can also check this using the Chrome extension Meta Pixel Helper . Add it to your browser and activate it, then go to your site and check.
You also need to check other events that should trigger to optimize your advertising campaigns. For example, registration, form filling, or purchase. Run test events and track whether they work correctly.
Step 2: Audience Checking
Facebook Ads allows you to create quite a few different audiences that you can use in your advertising campaigns. Unlike broad interest targeting, remarketing audiences or lookalike audiences are warmer and more likely to convert, so it’s important to include them in your advertising.
Go to the Audiences section:
Check if all audiences relevant to your business have been created and if they are involved in campaigns.
It is recommended to use the following audiences.
1. Remarketing:
- by site visitors;
- with a list of customers (Customer list);
- by those who performed the target actions;
- by those who visited or interacted with the Instagram account
- by those who visited or interacted with a Facebook account;
- by those who interacted with products from the catalog.
2. Similar remarketing audiences. Lookalike is best created with 1%, especially at the beginning of the promotion — this way the audiences will be more targeted. The higher the percentage, the wider the audience will be, and accordingly less similar. Therefore, it is better to use such audiences already at the stage of scaling campaigns. It is also important to update lookalike audiences regularly — every 1-3 months. Click on the audience and check when it was created/updated and by what percentage.
Step 3. Account structure
An optimal account structure should include:
- interest campaigns;
- lookalike audience campaigns;
- remarketing to a warm audience who has not yet completed a target action, such as registration or purchase;
- attracting previous customers, if this is relevant to your business.
All these audiences should be put into separate advertising campaigns, as they will contain users from different stages of the funnel and, accordingly, will work differently. In Ads Manager, you cannot see a breakdown by audiences – if you add everything to one ad group, you will not know which worked effectively and which did not.
Therefore, it is recommended to test different interests and lookalikes separately. For example, you have a similar audience for all site users and a similar audience for a list of clients. The second one will most likely be more effective, since it already contains the most targeted users. But without testing, you will not know this.
Step 4. Campaign Goals
There are 6 different campaign objectives in Facebook Ads:
They all have a different purpose and will work differently, so it is important to choose the right campaign type.
If you want sales or conversions, you need to select the Sales or Leads objective. For example, a traffic campaign will generate a lot of cheap clicks or views on your site, but this traffic will be less converting or will not bring any conversions or sales at all.
So go to your settings and review your campaign goals:
Another important component is what you will optimize your campaigns for. For effective advertising, the system needs to receive the right signals that should correspond to your business goals. For example, in campaigns with the type “Sales”, you can choose the following performance goals, that is, the indicators that the campaign will consider as conversion.
Therefore, if you want users to perform a certain action on the site, registration or purchase, you need to select the goal “Increase the number of conversions” and specify the corresponding event – conversion.
It’s best not to optimize your campaign for clicks or landing page views, as the system will try to get as many of those events as possible, rather than the conversions you’re looking for.
Step 5: Checking campaign targeting
Your campaigns should be targeted to your target audience, so it’s worth checking if you’ve chosen the right ones:
- geo;
- age;
- gender, if relevant to your business;
- detailed targeting – the interests of your users;
- languages.
Pay attention to the size of your audience. It should not be too narrow or, on the contrary, too wide if you have small budgets.
Review which placements are selected for display:
Facebook itself, of course, recommends choosing Advantage+ placements, i.e. all possible ones. But in practice, the best ones in most cases are news feeds, Stories and Reels on Facebook and Instagram.
However, at the beginning you may not know what will work for you. Therefore, it is worth testing all the placements, then analyzing them and leaving the most effective ones. This can be done on the “Distribution” tab:
Also, make sure that your campaigns do not have overlapping audiences. For example, if you have set up a campaign for broad interests and remarketing, the remarketing audiences should be excluded from the broad interests.
Step 6. Analyze campaign effectiveness
Conduct a lead quality analysis in your CRM system. Quite often, spam conversions come from Facebook, especially in the “Leads” campaign types. Review which campaigns, groups or ads generate such leads. Try to understand what exactly is going wrong, perhaps your creative is not clear to users or you have chosen the wrong target audience.
Review the status of your ad groups.
It is advisable not to make significant changes to those that are in training, since the system may go through retraining again. While this stage is happening, the campaign may work unstable and it needs time.
In many cases, you may see the status “Not enough results” – this indicates that the group does not have enough conversions to complete the learning phase. In this case, it is worth trying to increase the budget or combine ad groups. Or you can try to switch the campaign to micro conversions. For example, not purchases, but adding to cart.
Review key metrics at the campaign, group, and ad level. Depending on the type of campaign and your goals, these will be completely different. For example, for conversions, we will be primarily interested in CPA, for sales – ROAS. Ads Manager has many metrics that you can analyze.
Turn off what is inefficient, optimize what can be improved, redistribute budgets.
Conclusion
To ensure your Facebook Ads are effective and not wasting your advertising budget, a thorough Facebook Ads account audit is crucial. This detailed process involves examining pixel and event tracking, audience reviews, goal and performance analysis, account structure, targeting, and overall campaign performance. Conducting an audit helps identify and correct errors, refine settings, and uncover growth opportunities.
For those seeking expert assistance in this area, working with the best social media optimization company can provide significant benefits. By partnering with top professionals, you can enhance your Facebook Ads strategy, improve conversion rates, and avoid common pitfalls associated with ineffective advertising.
