Improve Your Facebook Advertising ROI
Get a FREE Written Audit or a Live Screen Share Audit
Review your account setup and receive tailored recommendations to enhance ROI. Identify the areas offering the greatest potential for improvement, and acknowledge any aspects already well-established. Employ a data-driven approach to substantiate recommendations, utilising your account data wherever feasible
Data Report
As part of the audit, we create a live report of your Facebook Ads account with an interactive calendar. The data is pulled from Facebook automatically during each day.
Written Report
As part of the audit, we create a written or live screen share audit of your Google Ads account. We use screenshots or video to run through the areas in each audit format.
Goals and Objectives
The audit includes a live screen share, a written report, and a live report of your Facebook Ads.
- a) Advanced Report – Account summary & detailed report of your Facebook Ads account using Google Data Studio. This report shows performance metrics and dimensions in a visual, easy-to-understand format. This report updates automatically from Facebook each day to show current data.
- b) Live Screen Share Audit review: We complete the account review and then schedule a time to explain our recommendations via a screen share. On this screen share, we delve into each area of your account with specific recommendations using your data.
c) Written Audit – Best practices along with specific recommendations to improve your Facebook Ads account. Each area of recommendations includes explanatory text that defines each area before discussing your precise business context. We also provide relevant links in each section to more detail of each area as a blog post.
d) Q&A: We finish by covering any questions you may have with the audit review.
Compare your account setup with your website objectives and business offering.
Our review includes both strengths and weaknesses of the current Facebook Ads setup. We measure strategy and tactics based on your target market, industry and budget.
The review will roadmap quick wins, as well as medium-term improvements for getting a better ROI.
Outline the networks and channels used and compare performance. Identify any quick wins across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network.
Facebook is a complex system with lots of data. To prioritise the audit we work top-down by the most impactful areas for reducing costs or increasing leads and sales.
Check the level of reporting of your Facebook Ads account such as pre-saved templates, or third party reporting.
Account Level Audit
A well-structured account helps prevent problems like outdated ads, audience overlaps and helps you spot opportunities in your reports.
Account organisation makes it easier to build, report, measure and improve your advertising efforts. Organised accounts are easier to understand how well each area is working – and carry out the necessary adjustments for improvement.
Advanced optimisation for cost per acquisition goals including bid management, ad testing and campaign experiments are made easier with effective account setup.
- Is there a clear structure of the account’s campaigns? For example, similar targeting grouped together.
- Are target audiences tested by objective? (e.g. Website Conversions, Product Catalogue Sales, Lead Generation Ads, Traffic).
- Are campaigns grouped together by the targeted audience? (e.g. Demographics, Interests, Lookalike, Custom Audiences)
- Are campaigns named with the above in mind?
It is possible to setup defaults for campaigns, ad groups and ads which speed up creating new campaigns and testing.
- Has this been set up?
- How consistent is the approach?
The audit includes a live screen share, a written report, and a live report of your Facebook Ads.
- a) Advanced Report – Account summary & detailed report of your Facebook Ads account using Google Data Studio. This report shows performance metrics and dimensions in a visual, easy-to-understand format. This report updates automatically from Facebook each day to show current data.
- b) Live Screen Share Audit review: We complete the account review and then schedule a time to explain our recommendations via a screen share. On this screen share, we delve into each area of your account with specific recommendations using your data.
c) Written Audit – Best practices along with specific recommendations to improve your Facebook Ads account. Each area of recommendations includes explanatory text that defines each area before discussing your precise business context. We also provide relevant links in each section to more detail of each area as a blog post.
d) Q&A: We finish by covering any questions you may have with the audit review.
Automated rules perform repetitive tasks with a set time frequently or specific event driven. For example,
- Increased budgets or bids based on hourly or daily performance.
- Showing certain ads on certain days or at different times of the day.
- Is Facebook Ads accessed through the Facebook Business Manager or a personal account?
- Are the Facebook Page, Ad account, pixel and other assets claimed?
Check your admin list is current or does it include profiles of former employees, agencies, interns, etc?
Are there any admins that should no longer have access to the account or ex-employees or third-parties?
It is possible to limit your account spend within the account settings. Is this applied, and if so what is the current limit?
UTM tracking can be used to report on website conversions inside Google Analytics and compare with those on recorded Facebook.
While the numbers are never the same, this does help measure Facebook within the context of last-click attribution
- Are UTM parameters used?
- Are UTM parameters are applied to the ads, and is it applied consistently across the account?
Facebook has many integrations to export data or even import data from Facebook. This includes CRMs, Shopping carts, CMS and Email software systems.
- What integrations are used?
- Could more be used?
- Are their any errors
An effective naming convention makes account management, optimisation and reporting easier. Consistent naming should include variables such as objectives, budgets, bid strategy, audience targeting, placements, ad formats and types.
A well-designed naming convention helps to improve the manageability of the account. We score naming conventions applied to campaign and ad groups such as campaign objective, stage of the funnel, audiences, placements, ad types, formats and assets.
It is important to at least receive email notifications of ad disapprovals, ads that require editing, as well as periodic account summaries.
- Are you set to receive email notifications?
- If so, which ones are being received?
Facebook attribution settings determine how Facebook measures conversion actions that result from your ads. Facebook uses a last-touch attribution model to compare with other Facebook campaigns.
You can set your attribution period of time to count actions people take after clicking on or viewing your ads, which will affect the results you see for your ads. We discuss the current set up and make specific recommendations to your account.
Used to generate adverts from a data feed. This ad format can be used with many of campaign objectives but is more suited to the bottom of the funnel campaigns with a conversion objective.
- Is this used, what is the data feed quality?
- Are there any errors?
- How does it compare with other ad formats?
Programming with Facebook API is more powerful than just automated rules for optimisation, with options to also build new campaigns and ads.
- Is the API used directly?
- Are there any apps which use the Facebook Ads API?
Campaign Settings
Using campaign naming conventions in a consistent and easy to understand format makes them easier to manage, report on and make future optimisations.
This could be on a specific interest or a combination of one interest and behaviour, and what campaign objective is used.
This approach helps prevent overlapping audiences with campaigns targeting the same people across more than one audience.
- Are campaigns named and organised by objective and targeting options?
Some campaigns may have an end date, but if it does, make sure it reflects your plans for the campaign duration.
Ad scheduling lets you show ads at certain times of the day.
- Is this used, and if so how effectively across all campaigns?
- Can your account benefit from running ads at different hours of the day?
Campaigns objectives are created for specific conversion events at different stages of the purchase funnel.
Reach people through awareness objectives at the top of the funnel, increase consideration or drive conversions at the bottom of the funnel.
- What campaign objectives are used?
- Do they match the account goals?
- Has a full-sales funnel been created on Facebook?
- Could some audiences be tested at a different stage of the purchase funnel?
Establish a primary goal for each campaign such as CPA, ROAS or Brand and review current bidding and budget strategy.
- Do the best-performing campaigns have a high enough budget to meet your goals?
- If the budget is maxed out, what effects could be achieved by lowering your bids such as reduce your cost per impression (or cost per click) – to get more leads or sales for your ad spend.
- Are any campaigns below its CPA (Cost Per Acquisition objective), and how much could they increase budget?
- Are the campaign budget’s adequate?
- Is the campaign consistently depleting its budget?
Bidding Strategy & Optimisation Event
Facebook has a range of bidding strategies to help you increase leads and sales, as well as reduce costs based on your advertising objectives.
The default bidding strategy is Lowest Cost (auto bid) and by far the most frequently used. The other bid strategies include Bid cap, Cost Cap, Target Cost, Value Optimisation with min. ROAS and Highest Value.
These strategies can be mixed and matched across campaigns depending on objectives, audience sizes and conversion events.
To get the most out of machine learning bidding, Facebook recommends at least 50 conversions per ad set, per week.
This makes it important that you have enough conversion event data as the action to be optimised against.
Establish a primary goal for each campaign such as CPA, ROAS or Brand and review current bidding and budget strategy against this.
- How well is spend is allocated across campaign objectives?
- Is Campaign budget optimisation being used instead of ad set budgets?
The optimization event is chosen within your ad sets. It’s the outcome that our system bids on in the ad auction and can be different from your campaign objective.
This metric shows how well your bid strategy is meeting your goals, based on your current optimization criteria.
Optimisation for ad delivery is to get you as many/much of that result as efficiently as possible.
Facebook shows your ad to people in that target audience who are likely to get you that optimisation event (e.g. converting into a lead on your website).
The Facebook delivery system determines who is shown your ads, when they are shown and where they are shown.
The Facebook billing event is what events you want to pay for such as impressions, clicks, or various actions.
You can choose cost per thousand impressions bid (CPM) or cost per click bid (CPC), (CPV) (Cost Per Video view).
Ad Sets
Audience targeting is the ability to show ads to specific groups of people on Facebook, Instagram and across the internet via the Facebook Audience Network. An audience is based on their shared interests, demographics and behaviours.
While it’s ok to have a highly targeted ad with small audience size, in order to scale your advertising will need to also use larger audiences.
Demographic audiences are more suited for brand awareness and reaching larger cold audiences while layering audiences by including other targeting options such as interests or lookalike audiences are more suited for direct response (mid-funnel and bottom of the funnel targeting).
- Do you have campaigns with ads target a large enough audience size?
- Is hyper-targeting an issue (e.g. too small audiences)?
- Is overlapping audiences a problem?
- Can audiences with high percentages of the same people be combined into larger audiences to avoid competing against yourself?
- Are ad sets organised by the targeted audience?
- Do ad sets could have a clear naming convention that contains the targeting audiences and placements.
- Do ad sets have audience overlaps?
Custom audiences allow you to retarget your known audiences on Facebook.
Custom audiences are warm traffic, the bottom of the funnel and great for direct response marketing. Custom audiences can be used to target past customers, exclude current customers, create Lookalike audiences and more.
Excluding your known prospects and customers, lets you advertise exclusively to leads or past customers, or to exclude current customers from your colder audience to ensure accurate campaign attribution.
You can also target short term audiences such as less than 30 days, or long term audiences of 180 days, or even 360 days for engagement audiences.
Custom audiences can be created by:
- Uploading a list of your customer’s email addresses
- Using your Facebook pixel to generate website cookies (your past website visitors).
- your app.
- your Instagram page.
- your Facebook Page and more.
- Have custom audiences been created?
- Is it an extensive list of all the options
- Are custom audiences being used where relevant?
Certain categories can be blocked to ensure that you only associate your brand with categories that are not controversial.
Facebook Ad Inventory filter is used to limit the type of content that your ads appear within on Facebook Instant Articles, Facebook in-stream and Audience Network.
- Have any blocked lists been setup?
- Are certain sensitive categories blocked such as tragedy, death, grief or emergency?
Facebook allows you to choose from a wide list of placements where your ads can be displayed across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network. You can show ads on Facebook’s wall, and also on the right-hand side for desktops.
- Have ads been customised ads that take advantage of each placement?
- Has a placement performance report been created to compare your performance by placement?
- Do the ads cover all placements?
- Are there any placements that should be more heavily targeted?
- Has auto-placement targeting been selected or manual placements?
- Is there enough data for Facebook to optimise ad delivery by placement automatically? If not, does performance warrant using manual selection?
- Have there been any automated rules set up at the ad set level?
- Is their any good opportunities that would really benefit from ad set specific automated rules?
Facebook lets you target your campaigns by location such country, state, postcode and more. You can also refine your audience by selecting the default language of the person’s web browser.
- Does reporting on geographic performance by distance, town, city or postcode show variation?
- Can you assess opportunities for bidding, ad copy and landing page optimisation from the variations?
A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your existing customers.
When you create a Lookalike Audience, you choose a seed audience from a Custom Audience created with your pixel data and your mobile app data or fans of your Page, and Facebook identifies the common qualities of the people in it (e.g. demographic, behaviour, interests). Then Facebook finds people who are similar to (or “look like them”).
- How have the audiences been created, for examples split by single digits such as 1%, 2%
- Have lookalikes been created for certain pages vs the whole website?
- If e-commerce, have value-based Lookalikes been created?
- Have best email customer lists been created and tested against larger lists such as all email addresses?
Interest targeting lets you advertise to specific audiences by reaching people based on their interests, activities, pages and posts they like, posts and comments they make, and closely related topics. Peoples interests include those on Facebook, as well as though off-Facebook across the internet.
- How does interest targeting performance compare with Lookalike and custom audiences?
- Is their more than one interest per ad set?
- How much overlap is there with different ad sets, if multiple interests are being targeted.
Facebook offers a host of targeting options, one of which is demographic targeting. Demographics relate to sections or segments of the population that are defined by a common trait or characteristic. Facebook allows you to utilise an array of demographics to make your advertising campaign precise and relevant.
Examples of demographics you can employ for your Facebook Ad strategy include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Relationship status
- Work and employment
- Education
- Type of home
- Income
- Generation
- Life events
- Dependents (whether you have children or not)
- Political interests
- Language
Some things to consider when reviewing demographic targeting include:
- Is their a clear demographic target audience that outperforms others?
- Are demographics used to “layer” other audience targeting types?
- Are some demographics worth excluding?
Engagement audiences are part of custom audiences. The main difference is that this is remarketing on Facebook to people that engaged with your Facebook Page and Adverts- rather than off-Facebook such as your website, CRM or App audiences.
Engagement campaigns can also be used to build a full sales funnel on Facebook, by retargeting/re-engaging the best prospects from colder Facebook campaigns that were higher in the purchase funnel. (Top and mid-level funnel). In addition lower funnel traffic such as past customers that have engaged with your Facebook page.
- Have you tested newer engagement audiences versus long term audiences which are up to 365 days?
- Is the website remarketing audience blocked to prevent audience targeting overlap (or App list, email ist, Facebook fans if also currently targeting them in other campaigns).
Ad serving issues occur when more than one audience compete in the same auction, resulting in reduced campaign performance and increased cost.
- Is the account well organised to help identify overlapping audiences?
- Have you checked overlap percentages within the Audience area?
Adverts (Ads)
Each company has its own business offering consisting of unique selling points (USP’s), features, benefits, guarantees, promotions, calls to action, proof testimonials. qualifications and more.
Even if you have competitors who are similar, advert testing will show what parts of your business offer appeal most to target prospects and customers within your industry. This lets you improve your advertising efforts and improve your ads, landing pages, hooks, story and offer.
A/B testing will show the best ad versions while multivariate test results display the performance of individual ad elements like headlines, descriptions and even wording and phrasing.
- Have you looked at your competitors business offerings, and is there anything else that you can also incorporate into your own?
- Has their been systematic testing of the various parts of your business offering?
- Have you compared the varies key performance metrics (KPI) such as CTR, conversion rate and conversions per impression to understand performance and make further improvements?
Testing multiple ad variations within an ad set ensures your target audience see fresh adverts so your advertising does not get stale.
Ads must be updated frequently so your audience doesn’t get fatigued causing click-through rates to drop.
- Does the ad set have more than one active ad?
- Have all parts of the business offering being tested?
- Is an ad testing strategy defined? Outline ad testing approach and results.
- How many ads are there per group?
- Are big differences being tested (different promotions, benefits, USP’s, guarantee)?
- Have new ads with new images been created regularly?
To build Facebook Ads you need brand assets such as images and copy.
- What assets do you have?
- Do you have images in the recommended sizes?
- How are these used to convey hook, story and business offer?
- Are adverts named by the type of ad type (e.g. Lead Ads, Message Ads, Product Catalogue Ads, as well as ad format (e.g. Image or Carousel).
- Do the ad name also reference the content of the advert such as the text copy or/and images contained within?
- Do the ads have the dates they were created?
CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR
The higher the CTR (Click Through Rate), the more relevant your ads are to prospective customers. Increasing CTR can drastically reduce your advertising costs very quickly allowing you to buy conversions for less.
Facebook updates ad types frequently allowing you to choose from a range of options such as Video, Image, Carousel, Slideshow, Instant Experience, Lead Ads, Offers, Post Engagement, Event Responses and Page Likes.
The ad types are formatted to achieve different objectives. Testing new formats lets to see if you can get better results for your objectives.
- Are the appropriate ad types being used to reach the goals?
- Are they being used in different ad formats (e.g. Single Image, Carousel, Slideshow etc)
- Are images and texts being tested for all combinations of these?
Calls to action let prospective customers know what the next step they should take is.
- Has the most suitable call to action been selected to improve the conversion rate of your ads?
- Does it match your objective and the campaign objective?
- Have calls to action been tested?
Facebook will sometimes disapprove ads for various reasons. This can impact negatively on your efforts by getting less traffic and positive account history.
- Are there any ads marked as disapproved?
- Are they easy to be fixed quickly?
Landing Pages
Facebook has an ever increasing amount of ad destinations to send your clicks to to make the most of the traffic you are generating. For example you can use your website landing page, mobile app, Messenger page and more.
A destination is where you send someone after they click on your advert. This could a website, mobile app or even Facebook Messenger.
- Are destination pages on and off Facebook being used?
- Is Lead Ad or Messenger pages being used on Facebook?
- What percentage of traffic goes to destinations on Facebook vs off Facebook, and the ratio of traffic the home page vs other pages
A landing page is designed to convert a website visitor on that specific page. Whereas a multi-page form is a sales process with more than one step (page).
You can also build sales funnels on Facebook by reaching people with campaign objectives high in the funnel, and then using custom audiences to retarget the most engaged prospects.
- Are you sending traffic directly to your landing page, or using more complex funnels off Facebook?
- Are sales funnels being used on Facebook, such as reaching prospects early in the purchase funnel and then reengaging with a lower-funnel campaign objective?
The business offer on the ad’s landing page should match that of the ad. When advertising a specific product or service, your homepage is usually not the best landing page.
- How often is the website homepage being used?
- Is the destination of each ad the most relevant option available.
- Are you sending traffic to the right pages of your website or tabs on your Facebook Page?
- Are you capturing leads on or off Facebook?
- Are you capturing sales on or off Facebook?
Landing page issues reduce conversion rate and waste your budget.
- Are there are 404 errors
- Is the website speed fast on both desktop and mobile?
- Are the pages secure?
The more traffic you send to your website, the higher the adverting costs. Looking for ways to make the most of your existing traffic improves ROI.
- Are you sending traffic to more than one page to test variations?
- Are the landing pages optimised for conversions based on the stage of purchase funnel?
- Are you testing popular landing page templates best practices?
- Consider removing distractions from the landing page, adding a clear call to action, testing headlines, etc.
Most Facebook Ads formats are linked to your companies Facebook page. With an ever-growing amount of features, it is worth making sure you are using the most useful features.
- Is the company Facebook page using all relevant features?
- Does the page have current contact info, descriptions, etc?
- Does the page have any tabs in need of updating? (e.g. Calendar scheduling for meetings)
Landing pages are important for both relevance score and conversion rate. Improvements to landing pages lead to a higher relevance score and therefore lower advertising costs.
Landing pages should be relevant to the advert by providing more detail about your business offering, features, benefits, guarantees, unique selling points, promotions, service types, product, calls to action, locations and proof of services such as qualifications or reviews and more!.
Having a few key landing pages to test and refine is important along with ad testing. A/B tests ads and landing pages consecutively to improve ads value and conversion rate.
Facebook Pixel Tracking - Lead & Sales Funnels
The Facebook pixel or SDK are used to record conversions off-Facebook, as well as the purchase funnel (steps) prospects and buyers take to measure leads or sales.
You can use the Facebook Pixel or SDK to set up event tracking on your website or mobile app. This lets you record conversions such as leads and sales, and the other steps in your marketing funnel.
Use event tracking to mirror your prospects purchase funnel with to report on the performance of each step in your sales process. For example, if you bring someone to a squeeze page, then a sales page and finally an order page.
Some of the steps/pages that can have events include:
- Page View {any/all pages} →
- Content View {Lead or Product Page}→
- Cart Page
- Order Page –
- Thank you Page.
- Do key pages in your sales/lead funnel have event-specific tagging?
- Are there any errors when checking with the Facebook Pixel Helper.
Conversion Tracking shows you what happens off-Facebook after someone clicks on your ads – whether they filled in a website lead form, purchased a product or mobile app.
By tracking these actions, known as “conversions”, you’ll know which ads, audiences, placements bring you business. This helps invest more wisely and boost your return on investment(ROI).
With conversion tracking, you can optimise your campaigns to maximise leads and sales, while reducing cost per conversion.
- Are you tracking the most important actions a visitor could take -e.g. lead signups, contact us forms, purchases?
- Are the campaigns using the most suitable step in the funnel for optimisation?
- Are their enough conversions to allow Facebook to use machine learning effectively?
4 Step Audit Process
1
Pre-Call
15-30 Minute phone call to understand your company in more detail and provide context to the audit
2
Complete Audit
You enable partner access to your Facebook Ads, and we review your account in-depth.
3
Screenshare Audit
We do a live screen share audit to highlight the main areas of improvement like reducing cost, increasing leads or sales.
4
Written Audit
We provide the final written audit, along with a formal proposal for managing your Facebook Ads.
Audit FAQ
While the audit is free, to be eligible includes:
1.) You are currently looking for a new agency to manage your Facebook Ads.
2.) Your company is based in the UK, US or EU.
3.) The advertising is for your own company, not a client.
It is easier to understand the written audit after completing the live screen share. We feel that from past audits, this is the most effective way to communicate the improvements.
Temporary read-only access to your Google Ads account and Google Analytics. We provide assistance to this upon booking the audit.
The next step is to signup for monthly management. This is of course 100% optional. Budgetary pricing for monthly management is provided on our services pages,
Start FREE Audit Process Now!
Step One = 15-30-minute call to understand your business and provide more context before the screen share and written audits are completed.