Meta Ads Audit: How Our Free Account Check Works

A “free audit” sounds to many like bait: first the friendly look into the account, then the sales pitch. That is exactly why we lay open what actually happens in our account check – dimension by dimension. The short version: we analyse your Meta ad account in around 30 minutes along five audit dimensions and get back to you with three concrete quick wins you can implement straight away – free of charge and without obligation. This article shows what we look at in each dimension, which findings we encounter again and again, and what you need on your side.

Why we offer the check for free

The honest answer has two sides. First: you see how we work. An audit is the best work sample an agency can provide – instead of promises on slides, we show on your actual account how we think, prioritise and communicate as a Meta Ads agency. Second: we also see whether your account and our way of working fit together. Our active management usually starts from a monthly ad budget of around €10,000 – the check quickly shows both sides, without detours, whether a collaboration would make sense. There is a third, sober reason on top: an audit with a clear scope costs us little – and is more honest for both sides than any preliminary call full of assertions.

What the check is not: a disguised pitch. We present the evaluation in a 30-minute meet and openly explore whether working together has potential. The quick wins work regardless of whether we ever collaborate – you can implement them with your team or your existing agency. And if we see in the account that we cannot substantially help you, we will say that too.

Dimension 1: the tracking foundation

What we look at: Are the Pixel and the Conversions API running in parallel, so that events still arrive when browser tracking is blocked? Is event deduplication set up cleanly, so that identical events from both sources are merged rather than counted twice? How high is the Event Match Quality of the most important events – as a guideline it should be above 7? And is there a prioritised conversion event that the account consistently optimises towards?

Typical findings: Accounts where the Conversions API is simply missing and a share of purchases never reaches the system. Double-counted conversions, because browser and server events are not linked via a shared event_id. And low Event Match Quality, because hardly any user parameters are sent along – the system then often doesn’t know who just bought.

There is a reason we start here: every further observation hangs on this foundation. If the signals are patchy, Meta optimises against a distorted picture – and any analysis of structure or creatives would build on the same distorted numbers. What a clean setup looks like, we describe step by step in the article Setting up the Meta Pixel & Conversions API correctly.

Dimension 2: account and campaign structure

What we look at: How consolidated is the account – do few, well-supplied campaigns carry the revenue, or is the budget spread across many fragmented ones? How many campaigns and ad sets compete for the same users? And how many ad sets are permanently stuck in the learning phase because they never collect enough conversions?

Typical findings: Historically grown structures in which every promotion, every audience and every test was at some point given its own campaign. The result is many small ad sets, none of which learns reliably, parallel campaigns bidding against each other for the same users – and a change history showing that budgets and settings are adjusted almost daily. Each of these interventions throws the system a step back towards the start. The antidote is almost always consolidation: fewer campaigns that in return get enough budget and signals – and a fixed rhythm for changes instead of daily interventions.

Dimension 3: creatives

What we look at: Three things. Variety: are there substantively different angles and formats – or ten variants of the same motif? Wear: how long have the top ads been carrying most of the budget, and do rising frequency and rising cost per result point to fatigue? Testing rhythm: is there a fixed process that regularly produces and honestly evaluates new material – or do new creatives only appear when someone happens to have time?

Typical findings: Two or three old winning ads carry almost the entire spend and are visibly wearing out, while planned replenishment is missing. Tests run ad hoc, without clear criteria for when a creative counts as failed and when it gets scaled as a winner. Because Meta’s delivery today is strongly steered by the creative, this is not a cosmetic problem but a structural one. What a systematic process looks like is shown in our creative testing framework for Meta Ads.

Dimension 4: the measurement logic

What we look at: What is the account’s success measured by? Does the team steer by platform ROAS alone – or is there a holistic view that mirrors the platform’s self-reported figures against the real revenue in the shop backend? Is there a distinction between new and existing customers? And do the attribution settings match the actual buying cycles? For this we lay the platform reports next to the orders from the shop system – not accurate to the cent, but accurate enough to spot systematic gaps.

Typical findings: Accounts that look highly profitable on paper because campaigns attribute conversions to themselves generously – including many purchases by existing customers that would have happened without the ad. The platform figure shines, the overall calculation is considerably more sober. That is not fraud, it is attribution logic – but whoever steers by the flattered number alone allocates budget systematically wrongly.

Dimension 5: the budget logic

What we look at: Does the budget match the account’s ability to learn? As a rule of thumb, Meta cites around 50 conversions per week per ad set for delivery to learn reliably. We check whether budget, structure and cost per conversion even allow for that – and whether the split between new-customer acquisition and re-engagement fits the shop’s growth stage.

Typical findings: A solid total budget scattered across so many campaigns and ad sets that, mathematically, not a single one gets enough conversions for stable learning. Or the opposite: ambitious growth targets for which the budget is simply not enough – which later erupts in disappointed expectations instead of surfacing beforehand in an honest planning calculation. How to derive a realistic budget from your own figures, we explain in the article What do Meta Ads cost?

What you need to bring

The effort on your side is deliberately small. You fill in the form with a few key facts about your shop and ad account and grant us access to your Meta ad account – in the analyst role. That is read-only access: we can see campaigns, settings and reports, but we cannot change anything, spend any budget or access payment data. After the check you can revoke the access at any time.

Nothing more is needed. Helpful, but optional: a sentence about what concerns you most right now – stalling scaling, rising costs or distrust of your own numbers. We then weight the analysis accordingly.

What you get at the end

After the analysis we present your three quick wins in a 30-minute meet – we usually arrange the appointment within 24 hours on working days. Concrete means: related to your account, with clear instructions, and prioritised by the ratio of effort to impact. No generic checklist, no “post more, test more, spend more”. A quick win can be very small – a missing deduplication, an event that counts twice – or fundamental, such as a structure that gives the budget no chance to learn. What matters is that you can implement every point without us.

If you wish, we then walk through the points together in a short call. After that you decide at your own pace what to do with them: implement them yourself, discuss them with your existing agency – or keep talking to us. Each of these three options is a perfectly normal outcome of the check.

Conclusion

Five dimensions, around 30 minutes, three concrete quick wins: the account check is our work sample – and for you the fastest way to an honest outside view of your ad account. Tracking, structure, creatives, measurement logic and budget are the places where money is most frequently lost in Meta accounts; that is exactly why we look there first. And even if everything looks solid in the end, that too is a result: then you know your money is working in the right places. If you want to know where your account stands: here is the free account check – without obligation and without a sales pitch.