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How to Audit Meta Ad Account for ROAS

Cody Schneider•

Pouring money into Meta ads without seeing a clear return is a common frustration. You know the platform works, but it feels like you're just guessing where to allocate your budget. This guide will walk you through a step-by-step audit of your Meta ad account, focusing specifically on maximizing your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

First, Set Yourself Up for a Successful Audit

Before you jump into Meta Ads Manager, a little prep work goes a long way. To conduct a meaningful audit, you need to have a few things straight. Without them, you’ll be making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

Define Your Target ROAS

ROAS isn't a one-size-fits-all metric. A "good" ROAS depends entirely on your business's profit margins. If your product has a 70% profit margin, a 3x ROAS might be incredible. If you have a 30% margin, that same 3x ROAS means you're losing money on every sale. Know your numbers: calculate your break-even ROAS (1 / profit margin) and set a realistic target that ensures profitability.

Confirm Your Tracking is Accurate

Garbage in, garbage out. If your tracking is broken, your ROAS numbers are meaningless. Ensure these two things are working correctly:

  • Meta Pixel with Advanced Matching: This is the baseline. Make sure your pixel is installed on every page of your website and is firing correctly for key events like Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, and Purchase. Turn on Advanced Matching to help Meta connect user activity across devices.

  • Conversions API (CAPI): Since iOS 14.5, browser-side tracking (the Pixel) has become less reliable. CAPI sends data directly from your server to Meta's, providing a more stable and accurate picture of conversions. Most e-commerce platforms (like Shopify) have simple, native integrations for this.

Give Yourself Enough Data

Auditing an account with only a few days of data is like trying to predict the weather by looking out the window for five seconds. You need a significant time frame to identify real trends and avoid making knee-jerk reactions to normal daily fluctuations. As a general rule, aim for at least the last 30-90 days of data for a comprehensive review.

The 30,000-Foot View: Account-Level Health Check

Start with the big picture. This initial step is about understanding the overall health and direction of your account before getting lost in the details. Set your date range in Ads Manager to the last 90 days.

Look at these core metrics:

  • Amount Spent: How much are you investing?

  • Purchase ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): What's the overall return you're getting for that investment?

  • Cost Per Purchase (CPP): How much does it cost, on average, to acquire a customer?

  • CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): This tells you how expensive it is to reach users. A consistently rising CPM could signal increased competition or audience fatigue.

Compare these metrics to the previous 90-day period. Are you spending more but seeing a lower ROAS? Is your Cost Per Purchase steadily climbing? Identifying these high-level trends helps you frame the rest of your audit. You now know what problems you’re looking for.

Dissecting Your Strategy: The Campaign-Level Audit

This is where you start understanding which overarching strategies are paying off. At the campaign level, you're not worried about individual ads or audiences yet. Instead, you're evaluating your funnel and how your budget is allocated across it.

Your campaigns should ideally be structured by their place in the funnel:

  • Top of Funnel (Prospecting): Campaigns designed to reach new customers who have likely never heard of your brand.

  • Middle of Funnel (Remarketing): Campaigns targeting people who have shown some interest (e.g., visited your site, engaged with a post) but haven't purchased.

  • Bottom of Funnel (Retargeting): Campaigns that target people who have abandoned their cart or viewed specific products.

Prospecting vs. Retargeting Performance

Separate your prospecting and retargeting campaigns and analyze their ROAS independently. You should expect your retargeting campaigns to have a much higher ROAS than your prospecting campaigns - they're targeting warm audiences who are already familiar with you. A common mistake is to kill a prospecting campaign because its ROAS is lower than the account average, without realizing it's responsible for feeding the high-performing retargeting campaigns.

Ask these questions:

  • Is the ROAS for my prospecting campaigns at least hitting my break-even target?

  • Is my retargeting ROAS significantly higher, showing that I'm effectively converting interested visitors?

  • How is my budget split? A common rule of thumb is an 80/20 split between prospecting and retargeting, but this can vary. Are you investing enough in finding new customers?

The Nitty-Gritty: Digging into Ad Sets

The ad set level is where the magic happens. This is where you test your audiences, placements, and offers. An audit at this level will tell you precisely who to target and where to show them your ads.

Audience Performance

Inside your prospecting campaigns, look at the performance of different ad sets to see which audiences are winners. You are likely testing some combination of these three types:

  • Interest-Based Audiences: Targeting based on user-expressed interests (e.g., people who like "Nike" or "running marathon").

  • Lookalike Audiences (LALs): Audiences Meta builds based on the characteristics of a source audience (e.g., your customer list or website purchasers).

  • Broad Audiences: Targeting with minimal restrictions, relying on Meta’s algorithm to find the right people.

Compare performance across these audience types. Have broad audiences been outperforming your hyper-specific interest stacks? Is your 1% "Purchase" Lookalike driving a better ROAS than a 5% "Add to Cart" Lookalike? This is where you find pockets of performance you can scale.

Placement Performance

Don’t blindly trust "Advantage+ Placements" (formerly Automatic Placements). Meta’s goal is to spend your budget, not necessarily to spend it with the highest possible ROAS. You need to verify where your money is actually going.

Using the "Breakdown" dropdown in Ads Manager, analyze performance by:

  • Platform: Facebook vs. Instagram vs. Messenger vs. Audience Network.

  • Placement: Facebook Feed vs. Instagram Stories vs. Instagram Reels, etc.

You may find that 90% of your budget is going to Instagram Reels but conversions are happening in Facebook Feeds. This is a clear signal to either create better-performing Reels creative or to manually select your placements to focus on the Feed.

Bringing it Home: The Ad-Level Audit

Finally, it’s time to audit your creative. Poor-performing creative can make a winning audience look like a dud. At this analysis phase, you're trying to identify the individual ads that are driving your results and understand why they're working.

Sort your ads by Purchase ROAS. Look at your top 3-5 winners and your bottom 3-5 losers.

Identify Winning Creative Elements

Analyze the ads that are performing well and ask yourself:

  • Format: Is there a clear winner between single images, carousels, or videos?

  • Creative Style: Is User-Generated Content (UGC) outperforming polished studio shots? Are lifestyle images working better than product-on-white images?

  • Hook/Headline: What is the common thread in the first three lines of text or the headline? Are you leading with a benefit, a question, or a pain point?

  • Call to Action (CTA): Is there a significant difference in ROAS between "Shop Now" and "Learn More"?

The goal is not to just copy your winning ads but to extract the principles (the format, the angle, the hook style) and use them to create new variations for testing.

Check for Ad Fatigue

Look at the "Frequency" metric, which tells you how many times, on average, a single user has seen your ad. For retargeting, a higher frequency can be okay (up to around 10-12). But for prospecting, if you see a frequency above 3 in a shorter timeframe and a declining ROAS, it’s a strong sign that your audience is tired of seeing that ad. It’s time to rotate in fresh creative.

Turn Your Audit into an Action Plan

An audit is useless without a plan of action. As you've gone through your account, you should have noted down your findings. Now, it's time to consolidate them into three simple categories:

  1. Double Down (Scale): These are the clear winners. The high-ROAS campaigns, the top-performing ad sets, and the best-converting ads. Your primary action here is to allocate more budget to them carefully.

  2. Optimize (Tweak): These are elements with potential. An ad set might have a decent ROAS, but the placement breakdown shows it's wasting money on the Audience Network. The action here isn't to kill it but to tweak it - in this case, by removing the underperforming placement.

  3. Stop (Kill): These are the things that are leaking money. The old campaigns with horrible ROAS, the ad sets that never delivered, and the ads with a high spend and zero purchases. Turn them off to stop the bleeding and reallocate that budget to your scaling efforts.

Final Thoughts

Auditing your Meta ad account for ROAS isn't a complex mystery, but it does require a structured process. By moving from a high-level view down to the nitty-gritty details of an individual ad, you can systematically identify what’s working, what's not, and create a clear action plan to improve your profitability. Make this a regular habit - at least quarterly - to stay ahead of ad fatigue and evolving trends.

We know that manually stitching together data from Ads Manager, your e-commerce platform, and your analytics tool can be a tedious process that takes hours. We built Graphed to remove this friction by connecting all your marketing and sales data sources in one place. You can create real-time dashboards and reports simply by describing what you want to see, allowing you to move from data collection to actionable insights in seconds, not hours.