Whether you plan on auditing your own work on Facebook ads, or you’re auditing on behalf of a client, there are several necessary items for a proper auditing checklist. 
 
Although maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves: Why do we audit in the first place? 
 
Well, we do it to make sure no stone is left unturned, to ensure all elements of your account are working together as well as they can, and to generally confirm optimal performance. 
 
For the purpose of this blog, we’re focusing on Meta — AKA Facebook and Instagram — but this could apply to the most part to, for example, LinkedIn as well. Let’s dive into it! 

Your ad account 

How far back you should look in an audit depends on how much data is in your ad account. Ideally, you’ll be able to get a 12-month lookback — but in general, the more data the better so you can see if seasonality and other timeline factors seem to come into play. 

Within the account, we’ll do audits at the campaign, ad set, and ad levels, plus further, more granular audits of different facets within these levels. 

The campaign-level audit 

First, we’ll break down how often you use different campaign objectives — for example, 20% awareness, 30% traffic, and 50% conversion. We want to make sure these align with where you’re at as a business and go further down the rabbit hole for each to see if any of these objectives are standing out particularly — in good or bad ways. 

We’ll also do metrics reviews for all campaigns within the same objective. Here, we’ll track the monthly trends for their respective KPIs — i.e., if it’s a traffic campaign, we’ll see how click-through rates and costs-per-click change over time. For this step, we’re only measuring campaigns against others within their same objective because otherwise we’d have multiple uncontrolled variables plus the relevant responding variables would be different. As we all remember from junior high science class, that’s a no go! 

For reference as to which KPIs are relevant as metrics of success for different objectives, we have an older blog post diving into that here. 

The ad set audit 

First, we make sure the tracking is set up to the correct pixel and check if there are any frequency caps set to make sure your ads aren’t being disproportionately served to the same people too often. 

We’ll also check the date ranges for tests — were the ads running long enough to be statistically significant? Alternatively, were they running too long without any adjustments being made? Were they always on — evergreen — or turned on and off and on? 

Other questions we’ll look at: 

• Was the budget set for lifetime or daily? 
• If lifetime, were there days of the week or any seasonality involved? 
• How many ad sets were running? 
• Were any ad sets duplicating audiences? 

In the case of ad sets duplicating audiences, if the answer is “yes,” that can be bad because we don’t want the same person to be targeted by two separated ad sets, thus making the testing invalid. 

We’ll also check on the audiences here. For example: 

• What custom audiences are used? At a minimum, are we retargeting site visitors, engaged Facebook users, and engaged Instagram users? 
• What lookalike audiences are used? 
• What about detailed targeting — interests, behaviors, job titles, etc.? 
• Are age and/or gender parameters set? 
• Are geos set? 
• How large is the estimated audience size? 

For the latter, we don’t have a rule on ideal audience size because of how much that can vary depending on context. A more niche target audience will often have a smaller audience size — even as small as, say, 20,000 people — but more often we like to see a larger audience range; one to two million is, more often than not, the range we like to live in. 

Again though, there are many factors that could make your ideal audience size smaller or larger, including your budget. 

Lastly within ad sets, a placement audit. 

We’ll check a few things. First, were one, some, or all placements selected? Do all placements make sense for the creative? (More on that in a second.) For example, if the available creative only comes in landscape size, then a reels or story placement wouldn’t make sense. 

We also always want to disable audience network and messenger, so will check to see if those were enabled. 

Lastly, we’ll check to see if Advantage+ audiences or placements were used — and if they were, we’ll check if they always were used or if the account was using manual options too. If so to the latter, we’ll compare results between manual audiences and placements versus Advantage+ audiences and placements. 

The ad audit 

Within ads themselves, we have (yet another!) checklist of questions to look at. A few of these might seem terribly obvious — but it’s always important to double-check! 

For example: 

• Is the ad coming from the correct Facebook or Instagram account? This might seem like one of the aforementioned obvious things, but we’ve seen some horror stories. 
• What ad types are we using? For example, static versus carousel versus video — what are the performance trends on these different types? 
• What’s the copy on the ad? Does it have a clear call to action? Is it too long or short? Are there themes around features, benefits, offers, etc.? 
• What about the headline? Are we getting the most out of our headline space? Or are they getting cut off? 
• And the call-to-action? Are we testing a variety of CTAs? Are they appropriate and compelling? 
• What’s the land page? Are users being directed to an appropriate landing page? Is there any variation on the location of the landing page? 
• Lastly, UTMs — are there UTMs set up? Is each part of the UTM either dynamic or appropriately matching the campaign, ad set, or ad naming conventions? 

Checklist 

Just so it’s all in one place, here’s a checklist from the campaign, ad set, and ad levels to guide your audit: 

Campaign 

• Campaign objectives 
• Campaign objective KPI trends 
• Funnel review 

Ad set 

• Pixel connection 
• Frequency caps 
• Budget analysis 
• Duration analysis 
• Audience analysis — custom audiences, lookalike audiences, detailed targeting, Advantage+ 
• Placement analysis 

Ad 

• Confirm correct Facebook or Instagram account! 
• Ad type review 
• Ad copy audit 
• Headline audit 
• CTA audit 
• Landing page analysis 
• UTMs 

After doing an audit following this checklist, you should have a good idea for the strengths of your ad account, plus the opportunities for where you could improve. 

We’ll have more coming in the second part of this comprehensive audit series — but even with just following this checklist alone, you’ll put yourself in a really good position to continue what’s working well and, on top of that, plan an upgraded, even better paid social media strategy.