How to audit your Meta ad account like a pro with Dahna from Bright Red Marketing

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:00)

It's really odd to me how few people know about this, because it has been around a while, and how rarely people are checking it. Because it is one of those things that is changing — one week it might be skewing exactly the way you need it to, and three weeks later it's completely gone the other way.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:14)

Hi and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. I'm Dahna, founder of Bright Red Marketing, and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in eCommerce and eCommerce store owners. If you're wanting relatable stories and actionable advice, as well as the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you're in the right place. So let's get into today's episode.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:34)

I have to ask you a question, because this is going to be a slightly different episode to usual. When was the last time you had a really good look at your ad account? When was the last time you did a proper audit? If the answer has not been in the last week, this episode is for you.

This is not an episode to listen to while you're in the car or driving. This is a sit-at-your-computer and follow-along kind of episode. So what we're going to do today is actually audit your ad account, and we're going to do it together. And if at the end of this you're like, "I do not want to do this" — I will have the link, I will do it for you.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (01:11)

So first things first, I want you to head to your ad account, straight to Ads Manager, and we're going to make sure that your dashboard is set up properly.

This probably has to be one of my biggest problems with Meta and their whole platform — how difficult they make it to see whether you're making money or not. So what you're going to do is head to your Ads Manager and select the columns. From Columns, we're going to choose the default option of Performance and Clicks. Now, Performance and Clicks tells you absolutely nothing about whether you're making money or not, but it is a really nice base. So once you've got Performance and Clicks selected, what I want you to do is go to Customise Columns.

I want you to add a bunch of fields in here. The first field I want you to add is landing page views — we'll get to that in a second. Then I want you to add your view content, your add to cart, your initiate checkout, and your purchases. For most of those, we want at least the numbers and the cost. And then for purchases, we want the number of purchases, the cost of those purchases, the ROAS, and the conversion value. Those are the ones we want.

You can also go in and create a custom metric for your average order value and your conversion rate if that's something of interest to you, but I won't go into that today. So once your dashboard is set up correctly, at least now we've got some more information.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (02:25)

So make sure that's all set up nicely. The next thing we're going to do is set up your audience segments. Now, if you've listened to my previous episode, I've gone through how to set this up already. But essentially what you need to do is go to your Advertiser Settings — not your Business Settings, your Advertiser Settings. On the far left-hand side, go down to the little hamburger menu — there are three lines on top of each other — click on that, and find your Advertiser Settings. Then we're going to find your audience segments.

If you've already set this up, we're just going to double-check it. If you haven't set it up, pause this and set it up as we go.

What we want to do is make sure that both your engaged audience and your existing customers are filled out properly. For your engaged audience, what I really like to have in there is all of your website traffic — max that one out. I also like to have your email list, but if you're going to add your email list in here, it is absolutely essential that you exclude any purchases made from that email list. So we are not uploading your full email list — we are just uploading the email list of people who have not purchased from you yet.

It's important to know that you will need to update that list every three months. So if you're adding your email list in, make sure you set yourself a reminder to go back and update it in three months.

For your existing customers, you can go in and add that pixel data — you can add in your past purchases. It's also a nice idea to add your email list of anyone who's purchased from you. What this does is tell Facebook who a customer is, which gives them a little bit more information, but more importantly, it tells them what an engaged customer is.

And this is going to be really important when we're going through your ad account audit in a second — especially if you're one of these businesses thinking, "I'm running Facebook ads but I just don't think it's reaching new customers." Especially if you're running Advantage+, but even if you're not — there are a number of accounts that I've audited recently where they think they're spending on new customers and they're not. Meta is actually spending nearly all of their budget on an existing or engaged audience, which is not what we want when we're trying to grow our businesses.

Those two things are really important. I do speak really fast, so if you need to go back and pause, please do. On the show notes for this episode I'll also add some screenshots so you can reference back if you need to. And if you're finding this on YouTube Shorts or Instagram, there'll probably be some screenshots for you there too.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (04:57)

Now, once you've had a good look at all of that, there are a couple of things we're going to do — we're going to start to see where problems are. Obviously I'm not looking at your ad account right now, so I can't tell you what the problems are in your account. I can just tell you where to look for them.

What we're going to do is first look at your link clicks and your cost per link click. We like to see these at about one each — at least a 1% click-through rate and a maximum of $1 cost per click. Will you be exactly on those benchmarks? Probably not. But that's sort of what we're aiming for. If you've got a cost per click of $1.10, you're probably fine. If it's $5, there's a problem.

So we're aiming for those ones: a 1% click-through rate and a $1 cost per click. Now, it's really important that you're looking at those numbers as link clicks, not just clicks. Clicks can mean all sorts of things — someone expanded your ad, tapped on it — so many different interactions. We really want them to be link clicks.

Those numbers basically tell us: is our creative good, and are we showing the ads to the right people? Those are the two metrics and levers that really affect those numbers. If you're targeting completely the wrong people, they'll be really bad numbers. If your creative is terrible, they'll be really bad numbers. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which of those is which.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (06:50)

The next number we really want to look at is the ratio of link clicks to landing page views. What that essentially tells us is: are the people we're paying to land on our website actually landing on our website? That should be about a one-to-one ratio. It's never perfect — there's always a little bit of drop-off — but we want to get as close as possible.

So if you've got a thousand people who clicked on your ad, we sort of want 900–950 people to have landed on your website. If it's 500, there's a problem. Usually this comes down to site speed, so it's generally a pretty easy fix. Or the link you're sending people to is just very wrong, and they're bouncing out so quickly that the tracking doesn't even have a chance to work.

The next metric we're really going to pay attention to — and if you're listening to this, you're probably in the eCommerce space — is landing page views to view content. We want that to be a one-to-two ratio. For every person who lands on our website, ideally we want them looking at at least two products. If they're looking at at least two products, they're having a browse, they're checking things out. The only exception is if you only sell one product — then it'll have to be a one-to-one ratio. But most brands these days sell at least a couple of different products.

If that number is off, there are probably a couple of things going on. You're probably sending people to the wrong landing page. I usually see this most when people are sending traffic to a homepage for a product that's harder to find. If you're in fashion and someone clicked on an ad for a dress, they want to see the dress — they do not want to go hunting for it from your homepage. So really, really keep that in mind. We want to get people as close to the point of purchase as possible.

To get that one-to-two ratio, you really want a browsable website — "people who liked this also liked this," "style this with this," collection pages that are easy to navigate. These are the sorts of numbers where we go, this is probably less of an ad issue and more of a website issue. But it's one to keep in mind.

Now, depending on your industry, there are a whole bunch of metrics for the next steps — but essentially we want to make sure that a good chunk of those view contents are adding to cart, and then from those add to carts we want to see those benchmark drop-offs all the way through to purchase. You're never going to get 100% of people who view content to add to cart and so on, but we want pretty good conversion rates across those steps.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (08:51)

What this does — by having your dashboard set up properly — is you can actually start to see which campaigns are converting the best, which ones are driving the most traffic, whether certain landing pages are performing better than others, and whether certain products are performing better than others. You can really start to make a difference here.

All of this is really interesting to look at at the campaign level, the ad set level, and also the ad level. At the campaign level, we're just looking pretty generally — is the campaign working? Is it profitable? Is it doing what we need it to do? Yes or no.

We can then go into the ad set level. If you're running Advantage+, that's going to look very similar to the campaign level. If you're running a more traditional structure, you can start to look at this from an audience level — are particular audiences performing better for you than others? Is there some logic or strategy you can play with there?

And then the ad level is the most important. Are there particular ads that are more profitable? Are there particular products converting more highly? This is very much a game of: let's find the things that convert the best for you and your business so we can make you the most money.

I think a big trap a lot of people fall into with Meta ads is going, "I really want to sell this one product," despite the fact that none of the ads for it are working — when another product is doing really well. There's definitely a balance between finding the products that are going to do well in ads and finding the ads that are actually going to make you profit. So keep that in mind.

And if you do have a product that the ads just aren't cutting it for, it might be time to rethink how you're doing those ads, or maybe there's an issue with the product itself. Can we re-merchandise that page? Can we add some more detail? Those sorts of things.

If you haven't audited your ad account in a while, that's your first place to start. We need to be looking at things. Are there things that need to be turned off? Do we need to be trying different audiences? Are our conversion rates for each of those steps working? Is our site loading fast enough? Are we getting enough people looking around? Those are all really, really important things that can make a massive difference to the success of your business and your ads.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (10:44)

Now, the next thing I want you to do — and we've already set this up — is head to the breakdown tool. I think it's under Demographics, but mine just sits at the top because I've used it so much. In there, we're going to select Audience Segments.

If you've set that up previously and set it up correctly, what should happen is you get this really lovely breakdown for each ad, each ad set, and each campaign, showing where that budget and those results are going for each of those segments. So how much of your budget is being spent on a new audience? How much on an engaged audience? And how much on your existing customers?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (11:22)

In an ideal world, it would be something like 60–70% new customers, maybe 20% engaged, and maybe 10% to your existing customers. That's generally what we'd like to see. Depending on your business, obviously this is a very broad general guide — I don't own your business, take all of this with a grain of salt. But we sort of want that: new customers, nurturing those existing customers, and that little bit of retargeting and re-engaging.

What you'll find is that it might not look like that at all. We've had quite a few clients come to us after audits where they were in a position where they really needed new customers, and Meta was spending their entire budget on their engaged audience. So they were spending all of this money trying to grow their business and their customer base, and the thousand dollars a day they were spending — most of that was going to their existing audience. Some really small changes we made there made a massive difference immediately.

And it's really odd to me how few people know about this, because it has been around a while, and how rarely people are checking it. Because it is one of those things that changes — one week it might be skewing exactly the way you need it to, and three weeks later it's completely gone the other way. So this is not something you can set, forget, and check once. This is something you need to be checking on a regular basis.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (12:39)

I really like to look at this at the campaign level and the ad set level — especially if you're running different ad sets. If you're running Advantage+, either level is fine. But it's also really important to look at the ad level, because what you'll find is that certain ads will spend more for different demographics. And this is where Andromeda really comes into play — and this is the part of the puzzle that I think a lot of people miss.

The reason Andromeda is working, and the reason Andromeda is kind of not working for a lot of people, is because they don't have the content for those three buckets. You need to have content that goes to a new audience. You need to have content going to an existing audience. You need to have content for your engaged, warm audience. If you don't, Meta doesn't have anything to work with. And that's where I think Andromeda is hurting a lot of people — they're just missing that piece of the puzzle.

So make sure you've got content for all three of those categories. And then the most important part is making sure you're sanity-checking that against your audience segments, so Meta is spending on the right things in the right places.

Because there's no point having beautiful retargeting ads if Meta is deciding to send them to your new customers — they don't care yet. Sometimes you might make a retargeting ad and it spends on your new audience and it works, and we go, "Fabulous, apparently that was enough." But you might also find that you make these great retargeting ads and Meta sends them to new people, and they're not converting.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (14:11)

So having this kind of information gives you the ability to go, "Okay, this is not doing what I need it to do — I'm going to take back a little bit of that control." Meta is moving to a space where they definitely want to take as much control as possible from us. There are a lot of people out there saying you can run ads yourself now — you can, if you know what you're doing. But there is still a lot to it from a strategic standpoint.

It is really important to be able to analyse those breakdowns and know what to do if things aren't working. The simplest thing is to pull campaigns apart rather than having a traditional Advantage+ setup where you just let Meta do its thing. You can actually start to pull it apart into more of a traditional funnel structure. We've had to do that for a couple of clients because regardless of what we did, Meta just kept spending in the wrong spots — so we had to take that control back. And now those accounts are performing again.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (14:57)

So really, really important — we want to look at those audience segments and make sure your budget is going where it needs to. Now, we've all gone very Advantage+, everyone's talking about it. Most accounts are that way, although I reckon we still have about 40% of our clients on a more traditional structure. So anyone saying Advantage+ is the only thing that works right now is wrong.

When you're in that structure, you have given a lot of that control to Facebook. They are changing a lot of things at the moment. What is really important to do is check your breakdowns. This used to be a tool we used all the time back in the day — it sort of waned a little because we didn't need it as much. And now I think it's really imperative for people to be checking their breakdowns.

So if you have a business that wants to target women, check your gender breakdown. If you want to target under-25s, check your breakdown. Meta is doing some very strange things. A lot of the so-called "suggestions" are now actually just suggestions — we used to be able to say, "Only show my ads to these people, this gender, these locations." Meta is very quickly taking that option away from us and using it more as a guide.

So it's really important that you check on that and ask, "Is this actually going where I need it to go?" And if it's not, try to work out why and how you can fix it.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (16:16)

You may have heard that Meta is using your creative as your targeting. So if you're trying to target 18-year-olds and your copy was written by a 50-year-old man, Meta can probably tell — it probably doesn't sound like copy for 18-year-olds, and therefore it's not going to be shown to 18-year-olds. If you're trying to sell fashion to 40-year-olds and your models are 18-year-olds, Meta is probably going to look at that and go, "I'm going to show this to a different group of people."

So just really keep in mind that your creative is a really big indicator for Meta as to who you want to see those ads. Changing up your copy, changing the text, changing the graphics and imagery to make sure it's really relevant to the person you want to see it — that's really important. Because those suggestions are becoming more about what Meta reads from your creative, and less about, "Hey, can you only show my ads to these people?"

So keep an eye on that, because sometimes you'll find that Meta is spending wildly on people and placements that you just don't want your ads going to.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (17:19)

Now at the creative level — this is where I find a lot of people come unstuck. There seem to be some people out there telling people not to touch their ads, which is wild to me, because we are always touching ads. The creative turnover at the moment is monumental.

Which is where I struggle with people who think they can run ads themselves if they're not creatively minded or don't have in-house graphic design teams — because the amount of creative that needs to be produced is astronomical.

So we're going to have a look at the creative level. Wherever your ads are, we're going to have a look. The thing I like to suggest is to take your target cost per purchase and double it — if an ad has spent more than that and it's not profitable, kill it. We're actually more brutal than that — if we haven't hit about one times your target cost per purchase, it's gone. But we've been doing this a very long time, so keep that in mind.

You also want to look at the frequency of individual ads. We want to look at the cost per click and the click-through rate — those are pretty good signs as to whether a piece of creative is working or not. If it's got a really high click-through rate, people like that piece of creative. If it's got a really low click-through rate, it's just not resonating with people.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (19:01)

At the end of the day, the big numbers we really want to be looking at are your return on ad spend, your number of purchases, your conversion rate of those purchases, and how much those purchases cost you. The rest of it is a guide as to where problems may be if you need to improve performance. Looking at cost per purchase will only tell you whether you should turn that ad off or that it's doing really well — it's not going to tell you why.

So those are the things you can do. We want to make sure your dashboard is set up properly. We want to make sure your audience segments are where they need to be and that we're looking at that information. We want to check your breakdowns. And we want to make sure we're doing a creative review — oh my goodness — at least once a week, please and thank you. If you're spending good money, it needs to be more often than that, it really does.

If you're spending less than $100 a day, don't check it every day — you'll drive yourself insane. Two or three times a week, like a Monday and a Thursday, is a pretty good benchmark. But you want to be in there checking.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (19:36)

At the end of the day, Meta is changing constantly. There are always things going on. If you're running your own ads, you need to be in there having a look around. If someone else is running your ads, you need to be in there having a look around and making sure it's up to scratch — and I'm not suggesting you go micromanaging your agency. But if you're not getting the results you want, or you're uncertain, you need to have a look at what's going on, work through some of those breakdowns, and make sure it's doing what you need it to do for your business.

Because unfortunately, as much as Meta wants to take control, we still need to be in there. We need to be looking at what's working and what's not, and making those changes. We cannot just set and forget. There is no such thing as a set-and-forget ad account.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (20:24)

So if you have any questions, you know where to find me. If you're listening to this and you're like, "Awesome, still stuck" — please book in a free audit. This is what we do. I love doing these. We will literally jump on a call, I will go through your account with you, and there is no sales pitch. If at the end of it you're like, "Yes please — take over my ad account" — we can have that conversation.

I've had this conversation with people who have been running their own ads, and with people who have had other agencies running their ads. And it's ranged from everything — "Actually, your account's in great standing, good job" — to "I'd probably just change these two or three things and you're good to go." To "Your agency's kicking butt, they're doing a fabulous job, enjoy." To "Your agency's doing okay, but I'd probably change this one thing." There are so many different outcomes to that call, and it is never a sales pitch. I am the opposite of a sleazy salesman — I could not be one if I tried.

All I will do is walk you through your ad account, we'll discuss it, and go from there. There will be a link in the show notes if you want to book in an audit. And any questions, you know where to find me — send us a DM on Instagram or book in a call. I look forward to hearing how your audits go.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (21:28)

Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. As always, you can find the show notes on our website at brightredmarketing.com.au — just look for the podcast page. Thanks for listening.