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Meta Ads audit
Meta rewards accounts that consolidate and punishes accounts that fragment, and most accounts fragment slowly without anyone deciding to. This audit finds where yours has, what it costs you, and which ad sets are bidding against each other.
Meta accounts fail in a specific, repetitive way. Someone launches a campaign for a product push. It works, so it stays. Six months later there are fourteen ad sets, half of them targeting overlapping audiences, all of them competing in the same auction, and the account's blended CPM has climbed 40% with nobody able to say why.
Then Advantage+ arrives and absorbs the budget, and the controls you'd use to diagnose any of this disappear from the interface.
What the audit covers
1. Audience overlap and self-competition
Every active ad set checked against every other one for overlap. When two ad sets target the same people, you're bidding against yourself: CPMs rise, and the delivery algorithm loses the concentrated signal it needs to learn. This is the most common structural fault in Meta accounts and the cheapest to fix.
2. Frequency, by campaign and by audience
Frequency above 4 exposures per week per user on a retargeting campaign is the point where you stop advertising and start annoying. In smaller addressable markets, audiences exhaust fast and frequency climbs without anyone raising budgets. The audit reports frequency per campaign, not the blended account average that hides it.
3. What Advantage+ is actually buying
Placement delivery, the existing-customer budget cap, and whether Advantage+ is cannibalising your manual prospecting rather than adding to it. Meta has spent the last two years removing placement and targeting exclusions, so the audit works from the levers that remain and tells you plainly which ones you've lost.
4. Creative fatigue and diversity
Performance by creative, by format, and by age, looking for the point where a winning asset stopped winning and nobody retired it. Also whether you have enough creative variety for the delivery system to have anything to optimise between.
5. Whether the conversions are real
Pixel and Conversions API setup, event deduplication, attribution window settings, and the gap between what Meta reports and what your GA4 or back end says. Then the harder question: what share of reported conversions came from people who had already decided to buy.
“Most of the people in your retargeting pool were going to convert anyway.”
That's the sentence that makes a strong Meta account look different once you test it. I wrote about why the problem is sharper in smaller markets in why MENA brands over-invest in retargeting.
The 10-point checklist covers what you can check in 30 minutes with analyst access, including the thresholds.
The thresholds I check against
| What gets measured | Flagged when | Where you can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly frequency, retargeting campaigns | Above 4× | Ads Manager, Delivery column, 7 day window |
| Audience overlap between active ad sets | Above 20 to 30% | Audiences, overlap tool |
| Budget in retargeting or conversion campaigns | Above 50% | Campaigns, segmented by objective |
| Purchasers still in retargeting pools | Any, within 30 days | Ad set exclusions |
| Ad sets below the learning threshold | Under 50 events per week | Ad set delivery status |
| Event deduplication, pixel against CAPI | Any mismatch | Events Manager, event overlap |
| Top creative share of impressions | Above 70% | Ads, by impressions |
Where your business has a good reason to breach one of these, the report says so. A considered-purchase brand with a small customer base will sit above the frequency line by design. The judgement about which breaches matter is the deliverable.
What you receive
- One channel audited in depth
- Structure, targeting, and ad set logic
- Spend efficiency: CPA, ROAS, and frequency
- 10 to 15 page report, prioritised
- 30 minute debrief call
- Delivered in 5 business days
- Up to 3 channels
- Full funnel, prospecting to CRM audiences
- Creative breakdown by format and audience
- Attribution review: pixels, GA4, and events
- Competitor benchmarking via ad library
- 20 to 25 page report and action matrix
- 60 minute call, 2 week email follow-up
Both tiers are payable 30% upfront and 70% on delivery.
Who this is for
A good fit if
- You spend €5K or more a month on Meta
- CPMs have climbed and nobody can explain why
- Retargeting ROAS looks excellent and new customers have flattened
- Advantage+ took over and visibility dropped
- You're renewing a retainer or running a pitch
Not a good fit if
- You spend under €3K a month, where the checklist will serve you better
- You want someone to run the account, not review it
- You need the audit to justify a decision already made
- You can't grant analyst access to Business Manager
Common questions
What access do you need?
Analyst access in Meta Business Manager, which is read-only. It shows campaign delivery, audience definitions, creative performance, and Events Manager, with no ability to change anything live. You can revoke it the day the report lands.
Can you audit Advantage+ campaigns?
Yes. Advantage+ removes most of the controls an auditor would normally inspect, so the audit works from what remains: placement delivery, the existing-customer budget cap, creative-level performance, and whether the campaign is cannibalising your manual prospecting rather than adding to it.
How do you measure audience overlap?
With the overlap tool in Ads Manager across all active ad sets, plus delivery data showing whether ad sets are competing in the same auctions. Above 20 to 30% overlap gets flagged. In fragmented accounts I commonly find 40 to 60%.
Is this worth it if my ROAS already looks good?
Often that's exactly when it's worth it. A strong reported ROAS on a retargeting-heavy account usually means the platform is claiming credit for purchases that were going to happen anyway. The audit separates what your advertising caused from what it merely recorded.
See what is actually in your Meta account
A free 30 minute call, no report and no obligation. Bring your last monthly report and I'll tell you what's missing from it.
Book a free discovery call Or email e.iek@mediaaudit.digital