Steal My Meta Ads Audit Process

Tired of free Meta ads audits that leave you with more questions than answers? Steal my audit process to demystify your ads account.

This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 06.16.2024.

Hot take: a “free audit” is almost never worth your time, especially if the auditor is a marketing agency.

If the auditor isn’t digging into your holistic business situation they don’t have enough context to give you good advice.

I’m going to show you how I run an audit for a brand doing <$30M/year in eCom sales where Meta is the primary growth channel.

I start with business performance–are sales growing? Why or why not? Then I look at ad spend vs sales–do increases in ad budgets correlate with sales increases?

This critical context. You can’t “audit” a Meta Ads account if you don’t know if the current strategy is making sales go up. “Your clickthrough rate could be higher…”. Okay…but that doesn’t matter if new customer sales are up and CAC is down.

The audit below is a composite of 4-5 brands who signed up for my Meta Ads Tune-Up project. What I’m sharing here is an abbreviated version of what you’d get in a real project. All the numbers are made up; I drew the charts in Adobe Illustrator. There is no real brand data here.

Borrow this audit process if your brand feels “stuck”, or hire me to do it for you (more details on that at the bottom of the email).

Brand Context

Our made-up brand sells jewelry, sunglasses and belts designed for fashion-forward women. The styles are trend-driven with a feminine edge. The price point ranges from $125 to $350 at full price.

Colorful cocktail rings ($150) and embellished sunglasses ($270) are the hero products.

The brand runs two sales per year at the end of each “season”: one sale in June and one during Black Friday/Cyber Monday. In 2023 they added in two “flash sales” in the back half of the year to move inventory.

The brand did slightly more than $4 million in eCom sales last year, and it has been stuck in the $3-4M range since 2021. The brand launched in 2018 and had its first $1M year in 2020.

Wholesale revenues that are around 3.5x eCom. The brand is carried by major online wholesale players like Revolve.

The brand retains a traditional PR agency and gets sporadic coverage in print and digital media. Other than that, Meta Ads and Google Ads are the only marketing investment.

The brand is frustrated that sales have plateaued despite increased investment in Meta and Google. Wholesale is working so well, why isn’t eCom?

Business Health

The first thing I look at for any new brand is the rolling 12 month trend in new vs repeat customer sales (gross sales less promos) and new v repeat customer orders. I’ll also look at the trend in AOV & AUR if the brand is or has become highly promotional.

Let’s look at the R12M sales trend for this brand:

New customer sales spiked in late 2020, then leveled off by the end of 2021. There were some additional upticks around the bi-annual sale events, and in 2023 during the flash sales. But the general trend in new customer sales has been flat since mid-2022.

Repeat customer sales have been growing steadily along with new customer sales until Q2 2023, when sales started to plateau. Repeat customer sales spike a lot more during the bi-annual sales and recent flash sales.

This business is stuck at $3-4M in sales because new customer sales are flat. In eCommerce, you’re lucky to retain 30 of every 100 new customers you acquire. Most brands retain 23-27 of every 100 new customers. Customer acquisition is critical to growth.

Based on running this analysis for dozens of brands, I would guess that the macro shift to online shopping that took place during Covid enabled this brand’s growth.

When those behaviors “regressed to the mean” at the end of 2021, growth stalled out. By the time we reached 2023, the follow-on growth in repeat customer sales had also stalled out.

My working hypothesis here is that the brand’s Meta and Google strategies are not driving new customer acquisition at the scale required to grow. So they’re either spending too little relative to their goals, or the spend is inefficient (or both).

Ad Spend vs Sales

The next thing I look at is the rolling 30 day trend in ad spend vs sales over the past 12-18 months. I want to answer a few questions:

For this brand, I’ll look at the time period of Jan 2023 through April 2024. I’ll create a copy of my tracker spreadsheet and fill it out with daily data for that time period.

It looks like this brand is currently spending around $1,500/day on Google and $2,500/day on Meta, and doing around $8,000/day in total sales. On average, $5,500 of that is new customer sales. This pattern held for most of 2024.

Looking back at 2023, there were two major changes in paid media investment:

  • In Q2, the brand increased Google spend to around $3,500/day.
  • In September 2023, the brand increased Meta spend from $500/day up to $1,500/day, and then finally up to $2,500/day around holiday.

Neither of those spend increases correlated with an increase in the total sales trend:

This is further evidence that the brand’s media strategy isn’t driving incremental new customer sales. Next, I’ll chart total ad spend against CAC:AOV:

CAC:AOV has been hovering around 70-80% for most of 2024. That’s too high for this brand, which aims to be profitable on their first order. They should aim for a CAC:AOV of 30-40% given their unit economics.

When the brand increased spend as described above, CAC:AOV scaled up along with spend. More evidence that the spend increases did not drive incremental new customer orders.

Before I’ve logged in to an ad account, I can tell that something has to change. The brand’s current media strategies aren’t converting new customers profitably. Before they can scale acquisition, they need to retool their approach.

Google Account Structure

The brand is running three campaigns with their $1,500/day budget:

  1. A PMax campaign with no brand term exclusions, not prioritizing new customer acquisition. It’s running with a target ROAS of 1.25x. ($1,000/day)
  2. An SEM campaign targeting KWs that align with products the brand carries ex “cocktail rings”, “turquoise necklace”, set to target ROAS of 1.5x. ($300/day)
  3. A Youtube campaign featuring two 30s videos from the brand’s most recent campaign shoot with a views/impressions goal. ($200/day)

Given the brand’s product category and the fact that our CAC is too high, I would make the following changes:

Turn off the SEM and Youtube campaigns for now.

Add brand term exclusions to the PMax campaign, target new customers only, increase the ROAS target to 2.5x, and reduce budget to $200-300/day.

These campaigns aren’t set up to go after new customers, which is what we desperately need to grow. The brand can optimize PMax further and scale up the budget after they have Meta figured out.

I’m choosing to focus on Meta instead of Google for two reasons: the brand’s product category and what I found in their Meta account (see below).

When I run this project for clients, the focus is Meta account optimization. My Google recs are focused on reaching the brand’s profitability goals and reducing wasted spend vs scaling Google as a standalone acquisition channel.

Meta Account Structure

The brand is running 13 campaigns (!!) with a TOF/MOF/BOF structure:

  • 1 MOF conversion campaign at an average 1.8x ROAS
  • 3 MOF conversion campaigns at <1x ROAS
  • 4 MOF conversion campaigns not driving conversions consistently
  • 2 TOF traffic campaigns, one pageview and one impressions
  • 3 BOF conversion campaigns targeting different pixel-based audiences (add to cart, viewed product, etc)

The MOF campaign with the 1.8x ROAS has a daily budget of $500. It’s an ABO campaign with three ad sets. One ad set has a daily budget of $200/day, a ROAS of 2.1x, and contains three ads featuring best selling products. Each ad set is targeting a different interest stack and there are no exclusions.

The rest of the MOF campaigns are targeting different combinations of interests and pixel-based audiences. They are all ABO campaigns, and no single ad set has a daily budget over $100. Ads have been copied across ad sets without using Post IDs.

The BOF campaigns have ROAS between 1.9-2.5x. The TOF campaigns haven’t driven any attributed conversions in the past 30 days.

The TOF/MOF/BOF strategy isn’t necessary at this level of spend. The brand should pause the TOF and BOF campaigns for now and concentrate on optimizing its MOF strategy.

The initial goal is to get one MOF campaign running at $1k/day with a ROAS of 2.3-2.5x, then scale it up from there. If this brand can profitably scale ad spend against conversion campaigns, new customer sales will increase and topline sales will start to grow.

To accomplish this, I recommend that the brand take the following actions:

First: pause all of the MOF campaigns except for the campaign with the 1.8x ROAS. Pause all the ad sets in this campaign except for the one with the 2.1x ROAS. Scale up the budget of that ad set by 20% and see if it maintains its ROAS. This is “what’s working” in the account.

Exclude existing customers from this campaign using both a pixel-based audience and a list upload. That will give us a true read on its efficacy as a prospecting campaign.

Second: build out a CBO campaign based on all of the most promising elements in the account. Create two ad sets in the account: one targeting a 10% LAL of the brand’s repeat customers (based on an email list upload), and one targeting all the interests in the 1.8x ROAS campaign.

Exclude existing customers from the campaign using both a pixel-based audience and a list upload. Start this campaign with a budget of $500/day.

For creative, develop new ads utilizing the 2-4 best-performing images/videos in the account. Link to the best sellers category (create this if it doesn’t exist) and sort the product featured in the ads to the top. Use Post IDs to copy these ads into both ad sets in the CBO.

Third: Build out an advantage plus shopping campaign featuring the brand’s full product catalog, targeting all US women with no age parameters. Set the “targeting existing customers” percentage to zero. Start with a budget of $300/day.

Run each of these campaigns for 5-7 days and see where the brand is able to achieve an in-platform ROAS of at least 2.2x. Continue to update the daily tracker and determine how business-level CAC:AOV and new customer revenue have changed during the seven day period.

This brand should also launch new creative into the ABO and CBO based on the recommendations in the next section.

Meta Creative Strategy

The creative in this brand’s account:

  • Is 100% “polished” campaign photo and video, all from the same seasonal campaign shoot
  • Features the brand’s logo on every asset
  • Is sometimes unclear on which product is being featured (i.e. the most-eye catching thing in the ad is the model’s dress, which the brand doesn’t even sell)
  • Features a random selection of products from the brand’s catalog

There are two “quick win” strategies for this brand re:ad creative:

First: find every asset from the shoot featuring one of its top 2-5 sellers by unit volume. Remove the brand’s logo from these assets and crop into the product. Launch these updated creatives linking to the brand’s best sellers page.

Second: shoot some “lo-fi”, UGC-inspired iPhone photos and videos featuring the top 2-5 sellers by unit volume. The brand can shoot these in the office or showroom. Again, link these creatives to the brand’s best sellers campaign.

Bonus: the brand should review its Instagram posts, reels and stories for the content that received the most engagement, and then test these posts as ads (again, linking to best sellers).

In the future, the brand should follow these guidelines when it shoots assets:

80% of photos/videos should feature core products, best sellers and “scroll-stopping” products. 20% can feature other products from the collection.

Photos and videos should answer questions like “what will this look like on me?”, “how will the material and color look IRL?”, “how will it fit?”, etc.

Borrow aesthetic conventions from popular organic content on the platform.

Don’t include the brand’s logo on photos, or in the first 5 seconds of video.

The brand should aim to develop enough assets to test 5-10 new ad concepts per week. This may require the brand to schedule multiple content shoots each season.

Executive Summary

I put this at the start of the writeup for my audit clients, but I’m not going to spoil my own email.

This brand is not growing because sales from new customers are not growing. The current media strategy is not acquiring new customers profitably, but performance indicates that the brand has untapped potential.

This brand can achieve profitable new customer acquisition by focusing on the following:

  • Reducing Google Ads spend, especially spend against existing customers.
  • Turning off TOF and BOF Meta campaigns and focusing on developing profitable new customer conversion campaigns.
  • Consolidating Meta campaign structure so that each campaign’s daily budget is 1.5-2x the brand’s AOV minimum.
  • Focusing ad creative on the brand’s best-selling styles and developing new creative versions that mirror popular organic social creative.

The brand can test into these strategies, determine which strategies produce the best in-platform ROAS, and then scale spend against the top performing campaigns while monitoring business level CAC:AOV.

If You Made It All The Way Down Here…

This post is a condensed version of my Meta Ads Tune-Up project. The price of a Tune-Up is $1,499. Every brand I’ve worked with says the value far exceeds the price.

Here is what you get as a part of the project:

  • A 6-10 page writeup/recommendation like this one, filled with even more actionable detail than I gave here
  • Your own copy of the tracker spreadsheet, filled out for the last 6-12 months
  • A one hour call with me to review the writeup and rec

This project is the most valuable for brands doing <$30M in revenue where Meta is your primary marketing channel.

Email me at greifelda [at] gmail [dot] com if you’re interested in a Tune-Up, and include a link to your website, your ballpark annual revenue and a list of paid channels your brand is running.