How to audit your own Meta Ads account in an afternoon
The short version
Check tracking first, because nothing else matters if purchases aren't recorded properly. Then look at structure, where the money goes, creative fatigue and audiences. Finish by comparing what Meta claims with what the business actually made, and write down three actions.
You don't need an agency or a consultant to get a decent read on your Meta Ads account. You need an afternoon, Ads Manager, Events Manager and your shop's sales report.
This is roughly the order I go in when I audit an account. Times are a guide for a typical account.
1. Tracking (30 minutes)
Start here. If tracking is wrong, every number after it is wrong too.
In Events Manager, check your Purchase event is firing and that the recent activity looks like your real order volume.
If you use the Pixel and the Conversions API together, check deduplication is working, so each order is counted once.
Look at the event match quality score for purchases. Low scores mean Meta struggles to connect purchases to the people who saw your ads.
Pick one week and compare the number of purchases Meta recorded with your actual orders. You're looking for big gaps, not an exact match.
2. Structure (30 minutes)
Count how many campaigns and ad sets are actually spending. A common problem is budget spread across too many ad sets, none of which get enough conversions for Meta's algorithm to learn.
Meta's own guidance is that an ad set needs roughly 50 optimisation events a week to get out of the learning phase. If most of yours show "Learning limited", you probably need fewer, bigger ad sets.
Also check for audiences that overlap and ad sets competing with each other for the same people.
3. Where the money goes (30 minutes)
Set the date range to the last 90 days and sort campaigns by amount spent. Then ask:
What share of spend goes to prospecting (new people) versus retargeting (people who already know you)?
Which campaigns take the most money, and are they the ones getting the best results?
Is anything spending steadily that nobody has looked at in months?
Heavy retargeting often looks great in Meta's numbers, because those people were close to buying anyway. It rarely grows the business on its own.
4. Creative (45 minutes)
This is usually where the biggest wins are.
Sort ads by spend. How old are your top five? If the same ads have carried the account for months, they're probably getting tired.
Check frequency. If the same people are seeing the same ads many times a week, costs tend to rise.
Count your genuinely different concepts, not versions. Five videos with different captions is one concept.
For each top ad, ask what question it answers for the customer. If the answer is "none, it's just a discount", there's room to improve. I wrote about that in creative for premium products.
5. Audiences and exclusions (20 minutes)
Are existing customers excluded from campaigns meant to find new ones?
If you use Advantage+ campaigns, do you know how much of the spend is reaching existing customers? Check the settings and any customer reporting available to you.
Are any old interest or lookalike audiences still running out of habit?
6. The business view (30 minutes)
Now step outside Meta.
From your shop, take total revenue and new customers for each of the last three months.
Add up your total marketing spend for the same months.
Work out your MER (total revenue ÷ total marketing spend) and your cost per new customer.
Compare those trends with what Meta's own ROAS says over the same period.
If Meta's ROAS is going up while your MER and new customer cost are getting worse, Meta is probably taking credit for sales it didn't really drive. More on MER and ROAS here.
7. Write down three actions (15 minutes)
Not twenty. Three. Usually one about tracking, one about structure or budget, and one about creative. Do those properly before looking for the next three.
If you get halfway through and want a second pair of eyes, that's what my paid media audit is for.
