Auditing the facebook account could be a herculean task especially if there are hundreds of audiences and campaigns running at the same time. Keeping a tab on the relationship among the audiences and campaigns could be another big task. If you are an agency which has been assigned a task to audit the Facebook Ads manager account of one of your prospective clients, there are a lot of things to look after.
Looking for Facebook Ad Account Audit: Connect to me by Sending an EMail.
But, here are a few things that if kept in mind can help you ease the labor. For this purpose, I have created a sample Facebook Ads Manager account audit report which you can download at the bottom of this post. This audit report might become obsolete after a year or two with the new features coming onto the Facebook paid platform.
Through this sample report, I have subdivided the account auditing work into three main sections and those are:
- Account audit
- Ad sets audit, and
- ad audit
Since Facebook is more about the visuals and creativity, this report only talks about the technicalities of the platform mostly in terms of audiences and targeting. However, if you want to know much about the landing page and ad sets cohesiveness or brand persona then you need another auditing. In simple words, this guide fits more with the person who is at the execution level not at the strategy level.
Page Contents
Account Level Audit
Account level audit basically addresses the high-level settings and those are below:
- Has there any A/B testing been done?
- There is no pixels duplication and pixel tracking views or events twice
- There is no anomaly in the tracked data
- Right pixels and events implemented on the right pages
- Are there any custom conversions?
- Are catalogs sorted by some logic as per targeting e.g. locations, category etc.?
- Are catalogs without any errors?
- Are business locations in places, if needed?
- Is there any block list maintained for the account?
- Is there any custom event?
- Is there any custom conversion for that event?
- Has the spillover of the audience been checked or utilized?
Ad Sets level audit
This audit is the critical section of the audit because it addresses most of the factors important to the Facebook platform such as custom audience, engaging audience, lookalike audience along with targeting.
- Is naming convention intuitive?
- Has the conversion event been set right?
- Is there any ad scheduling?
Custom Audience targeting Audit
- Custom audience targeting
- Custom audience based on the website traffic
- Custom audience based on the website remarketing audience
- Custom audience based on the website traffic targeted at different levels of funnels?
- Custom audience based on different URLs
- Custom audience based on frequency
- Custom audience based on device types
- Custom audience based on app events, if required
Engagement Audience Targeting Audit
- Engagement audience
- Custom audience based on video engagement
- Custom audience based on lead form engagement
- Custom audience based on canvas ads engagement
- Custom audience based on page and post engagement
- Custom audience based on Instagram profile, post & ad engagement
- Custom audience based on event engagement
- Custom audience based on the customer file
Other Targeting Audits
- Are lookalike audience created?
- Are audiences excluded properly?
- Is age targeting appropriate?
- Is gender targeting appropriate?
- Is language targeting appropriate?
- Is demographics targeting appropriate in detailed targeting?
- Are interests targeting appropriate in detailed targeting?
- Is interests behavior appropriate in detailed targeting?
- Has any kind of connections type been used?
- Is placement properly utilized based on past performance?
- Right optimization method selected as per the business objective?
- Have a lookalike audience with LTV been configured to create the custom audience?
- Has customers’ information been added to create the custom audience?
If you ask me personally, then I would say that having a look at the custom audience creation as well as the lookalike audience creation along with the audience exclusion will give you a fair idea of the whole ads manager account. If these elements have been set up properly, then there is nothing much left on Facebook ads manager account to audit.
Ad Settings Audit
Unlike search engines such as Google or Bing, Facebook takes a completely different approach to the audience targeting and creativity. On the search engines, a part of the creativity has to come in the ad texts and the keywords but on Facebook, it is solely about the look, feel, and communication.
- Ads settings
- Ad text matches with the ad creatives and business objectives
- Display link looks natural and contains the advertised product in the URL
- Headline focusses on the uniqueness of the ad
- Call to action justifies the campaign objective
- View tags are being tracked for impression-based conversions
- Url parameters have been automated
- Image Ad is aligned with the landing page content and business goal
- Different kinds of ads tried as per the campaign objectives
- Are you using UTM tags for retargeting?
If you really want to analyze the ad part of the audit and analysis, look at the ad creatives, headlines, and the landing page. Some of the pointers for these items that you can view into are:
- Thematic posts which are boosted
- The color palette of the ads which should also speak the language of the brand
- Types of ads which have been run and tried as per the campaign objective. For example, for a major announcement, “Showcase Your Business” Facebook Canvas template works better than other templates such as lifestyle layout or grid layout.
- Another thing you can check is the creativity in the carousel ads. You search the internet and there are a plethora of carousel ads with different formats are there. So, you can also look after that.
Here is the link to download sample facebook ads manager audit report. Looking for Facebook Ad Account Audit: Connect to me by Sending an EMail.