How to Audit Your Facebook Ad Account

Performing a Facebook ad account audit is the perfect way to understand your advertising performance-to-date better.

Whether you’ve just joined a company, brought on a new client, or feel like your own campaigns may be lacking something, a Facebook ad account audit is the perfect way to understand your advertising performance-to-date better–and make data-driven choices when optimizing future campaigns.

You can’t fix it unless you know what’s broken, right? During your account deep-dive, identify what’s worked well and what hasn’t really worked at all. Think of the entire account as a split-test to uncover the top performers.

So, where do you start?

How to (easily, quickly, and effectively) Audit Your Facebook Ad Account.

First, audit your Facebook Ads account by taking a deep-dive into your social media advertising performance-to-date.

1. Look at your platforms and placements.

Are the best platforms included in your paid social strategy? Maybe there’s an underperforming platform you can cut. Identify exactly where your ads are delivering and decide if these platforms and placements are doing the best job of achieving your overall social and business goals.

2. Check out your ad creative content and format.

Are photos, videos, and carousels being used? If so, what worked best? If not, what can you test in the future?

3. Figure out who you’ve been talking to.

Are your audience demographics consistent with industry research or proven performance data? How do they compare to Facebook Audience Insights for similar interests or competitors? Your ideal customer avatar?

Are you using a variety of audience types, including core, custom, and Lookalike? Is there a significant amount of audience overlap between similar segments? Are you using data to inform top-funnel targeting with Lookalikes or only relying on core, or saved audiences instead?

Speaking of saved audiences, how do your interest targets look? Have you considered adding in any competitors? Are there other categories that could help find your target audience?

Next, make a list of Action Items.

Your ad account audit is complete–woot!–and you have a pretty good understanding of the who, where, what, and how of your previous paid social campaign performance. As you review your notes, make a list of action items you need to complete before launching optimizations.

For example, do you need to create new or edit existing audiences? Should you develop new split-tests to improve performance? Can you work with your designer to mix up ad creative with new formats and designs? What do you need to create to get a more well-rounded creative bucket?

Finally, take a peek at the competition.

Even though you have a better overview of your own accounts, you shouldn’t stop here! Your next step is to look at what your competitors are doing; they may have a new (or *gasp* better) way of doing things. You won’t have transparent access to their ad content, audiences, or campaign performance like you do for your ad account, but you can still sleuth out a few things that probably work well for them.

Look through their brand pages to see what type of organic content is working well for them (and what isn’t). Don’t forget to scroll through their website and see how it compares to yours–believe it or not, having an optimized website, especially on mobile, can affect your campaigns’ effectiveness.

There is also a helpful tool called Facebook Ad Library, which will show you all active ads for any Facebook page–pay dirt! ? While it won’t provide a full breakdown of things like campaign objective, or audience targeting, Ad Library does give you enough information to understand what your competitors are doing with platforms, copy, creative, calls-to-action, ad format, and more.

From here, you’re ready to move forward by applying what you’ve learned from your audit and competitive analysis to produce the most effective social media advertising campaigns possible. Now, go forth and advertise!