A Facebook ads audit is a one-off review of your Facebook and Instagram ad account by someone with no stake in how it was built. I read the tracking, the campaign settings, the audiences, the ads and the pages they send people to, then give you a written list of fixes ranked by how much each problem is likely to be costing you. You decide who does the work: your own team, your current agency or me.
What an audit fixes, and what changes afterwards
Most accounts that need an audit are not broken in an obvious way. Ads are live, money is leaving the business and Ads Manager reports results, yet the owner cannot say whether those results are real or whether the spend pays for itself. The audit answers that first, because every other decision rests on it.
When it is done you should know whether the conversions Meta reports match the enquiries and sales you actually received, which parts of the account are wasting budget, and the order to fix them in. The order matters more than it sounds. A list of forty issues with no priority tends to sit unread in a shared drive; a list where the top three are worth doing this week tends to get acted on.
Who it suits, and who it does not
- UK businesses spending on Meta ads every month whose cost per enquiry or sale has crept up with no obvious cause.
- Owners paying an agency or freelancer who want an independent second opinion before renewing the contract.
- In-house marketers who built the account themselves and want it checked before increasing the budget.
- Anyone inheriting an account from a colleague or supplier who has left without handover notes.
It is the wrong purchase if you have not launched yet, because there is nothing to review. It is also more than you need if you spend a small amount on one campaign: working through the Facebook and Instagram ads checklist yourself will catch most of what I would find.
What the audit covers
Tracking and data quality
I start here, because a wrong number at the top makes every later judgement wrong. I check which events the pixel sends and when they fire, whether the Conversions API is set up and deduplicated against the pixel, how strong the event match quality is, and whether each lead or purchase is counted once. Then I compare Meta’s figures with your CRM, shop orders or inbox for the same weeks.
On UK sites I also test the cookie banner. Under PECR the pixel should wait for consent. A banner that ignores the visitor’s choice is a compliance risk, while one that is set up clumsily can hide genuine conversions and make the ads look worse than they are.
Objectives and optimisation events
Every campaign tells Meta what to find more of. A lead campaign optimising for link clicks, or a shop optimising for add-to-basket when it has enough sales to optimise for purchases, will be served to people who click cheaply rather than people who buy. I check each campaign’s objective and optimisation event against what the business actually needs from it.
Structure, budget and the learning phase
Too many campaigns and ad sets split the budget so thinly that none of them gathers enough conversions to leave the learning phase. I look at how spend is divided, whether ad sets are bidding against each other for the same people, how often edits restart learning, and whether bid caps or cost goals are choking delivery. If you run Advantage+ campaigns, I check they are judged on conversions you can verify rather than on Meta’s reporting alone.
Audiences and exclusions
I review targeting, the location settings, the exclusions that keep existing customers out of prospecting campaigns, and the custom audiences behind any retargeting: their size, where they come from and whether they still refresh. If you advertise housing, jobs, credit or other financial products, I check the campaigns are declared under the right special ad category, because the targeting options narrow and Meta can reject or restrict ads that should have been declared.
Creative and copy
I read frequency and results over time for each ad to spot creative fatigue, check that each placement gets a version built for it, and count how many genuinely different ideas are being tested rather than small variations of one. I also flag copy likely to cause trouble under the ASA’s CAP Code, such as price claims missing their conditions or before-and-after images that overstate what a treatment can do.
Landing pages and forms
An ad can do its job and still lose the sale on the page. I check how fast the page loads on a phone, whether it keeps the promise the ad made, how many fields the form asks for and, for instant forms, whether the questions filter out people who were never going to buy. Where the page is the weak point, a landing page designed for paid traffic usually does more than extra ad spend would.
Account health, access and ownership
I check who owns the ad account, the business portfolio and the pixel, who holds admin rights, whether the account currency and time zone suit a UK business, any rejected ads or restrictions, and whether your domain is verified. An ad account owned by an agency rather than by you goes to the top of the report, because it decides what you keep if the relationship ends.
How I run the audit
- A short call. We talk about what you sell, your margins, what a good enquiry or sale is worth to you and what has changed recently in the account.
- Read-only access. You add me as a partner with view-only permissions on the ad account in your business portfolio, plus view access to GA4 and, ideally, an export of leads or orders for the period. I change nothing in the account during the audit.
- The review. I work through the areas above, usually looking back three to six months so that a seasonal dip or a one-off promotion does not distort the findings.
- The written report. Each finding sets out the evidence, why it matters and the fix, ranked by likely impact and the effort involved.
- The walkthrough. We go through the report on a call, so you can question anything before deciding who carries out the work.
The time from access to report depends on the size of the account, and it is agreed before work starts.
Problems that turn up often in UK accounts
- Leads in Ads Manager that never arrive in the inbox, because the conversion fires when a page loads rather than when a form is completed, or fires twice.
- An ad account created in US dollars or on a US time zone, which makes daily figures and invoices hard to reconcile with your own records.
- A location radius drawn far wider than the area the business serves.
- Success judged on Meta’s attribution alone, with no check against GA4 or the till. I have written about why GA4 and Facebook conversion numbers do not match; the audit reconciles the two for your account.
- Boosted posts running beside proper campaigns and reaching the same people, with no exclusions between them.
- A cookie banner that loads the pixel before anyone has clicked accept.
What you receive
- A written report with each finding, the evidence behind it and the recommended fix.
- A ranked action list split into what to do this week, this month and what can wait.
- A comparison of the conversions Meta reported with your own records for the period reviewed.
- A walkthrough call to go through the findings and answer your questions.
Price
Each audit is quoted after a free first call, in GBP, and the fee is agreed in writing before I ask for access. It is separate from your ad spend, which Meta continues to bill to your own account.
After the audit
The report is written to be useful whoever acts on it. You can hand it to an in-house marketer or to your current agency. If you would rather someone took the work on, my Facebook ads management service starts from the action list, so nothing is reviewed twice. To begin, send me your website and roughly what you spend on Meta each month, and I will tell you whether an audit is the right next step.