5 Important Audits To Improve Your Performance On Facebook Ads

Every advertiser on Facebook Ads constantly seeks to improve their campaigns’ performance. Advertisers use different methods to optimize and improve their results. Although every ad account is different and requires a unique strategy, there are some shared insights and audits that can be done to all ad accounts on Facebook Ads. These will help you better understand the details of your ad delivery and will break down the performance into the smallest details. It will allow you to understand where your ads are performing best and shift budgets to strategize accordingly. Let’s dig right into the five audits I normally do on every ad account I analyze.  

First

Evaluate your accounts on an overview level before jumping into the ad-level or campaign-level. When we optimize based on an account overview, the data from all our campaigns and ads are combined and summarized together. This means that we can analyze our strongest points and our weakest points without needing to look at each individual campaign while trying to make sense of all the pieces of data. 

For example, by looking at the account overview, we can see our overall cost per purchase or action, our overall click-through rate, our cost per click, and our overall return on ad spend. Why does it matter? For each good campaign, we will probably have a bad one. If we only look at partial data, we are not evaluating our data properly. It doesn’t matter if you have three great campaigns and 15 bad ones, what matters is your overall cost and results. 

Second

Breakdown by placement. Understand on which placement you are getting the best performance and most delivery. From there, you’ll better understand how to shift your budget and you’ll learn which creatives might be most effective in the best-performing placements. For example, if you are getting more delivery and better ROI on Instagram than on Facebook, perhaps it’s better to shift more budget towards Instagram by using dedicated campaigns strictly for Instagram. Or perhaps you might want to create ads that are more native to Instagram than Facebook. 

Third

Breakdown by age and gender. Like placements, it’s important to understand how your ads are performing across different ages and genders. See below –

Understanding how different age groups perform in your ads will give you insights on how to write copy that will perform better with that demographic. Remember that in some cases, your targeted demographics may not be your best-performing demographics. 

Fourth

Geo-targeting. This is especially important if you are running ads in more than one country. 

Find out in which countries your ads are performing best. Using that information will help you optimize your prices to fit the countries where they perform best. 

Fifth

Breakdown by product ID. If you are using a catalog in your ads and are running catalog ads or conversions ads, analyzing how your products perform on an individual basis is extremely helpful. Most e-commerce companies spend at least 50% of their daily budgets on dynamic ads. Whether it is for retargeting or prospecting, dynamic ads are very powerful. This can help you understand which products have great results, but limited spend, and which products have a lot of sales, but poor ROI.

See below – (Products were hidden to protect the innocents).

In Summary

Although each ad account is unique and requires a specific analysis, there are five points that I recommend to check to better understand and improve performance. Although Facebook automatically optimizes delivery towards the best targeting and placements, cross-campaign learning rarely exists and that’s why it’s important to measure how your ads are performing across different breakdowns. Checking the breakdown by placement, age and gender, geo locations and catalog, as well as analyzing your ads on an account overview level, allows you to make more educated optimizations and build a more effective strategy for your ads.