If you are running Facebook or Instagram ads for an e-commerce brand in 2026, the platform you are advertising on is fundamentally different from the one that existed three years ago. iOS 14.5 and App Tracking Transparency shattered the old playbook. Advantage+ Shopping campaigns replaced the hyper-segmented account structures that used to work. Broad targeting outperforms interest stacking in most verticals now. And the Conversions API is no longer optional — it is table stakes for accurate measurement.
Yet most e-commerce brands are still running accounts that were structured for a pre-ATT world. They have Pixels that fire intermittently, audiences that overlap by 50% or more, creatives that fatigued months ago, and attribution settings that make it impossible to know what is actually working. The dashboard shows a number for ROAS. Whether that number reflects reality is a different question entirely.
This guide is the audit framework we use at BTB Media when we take on a new e-commerce client. It covers seven critical areas — from tracking infrastructure to landing page experience — organized by the order that matters most to your revenue. For each area, we walk through what to check, what bad looks like, what good looks like, how to fix problems, and the revenue impact of leaving them unfixed.
If you prefer a quick-reference format, our 45-point Meta Ads audit checklist distills every concept in this guide into a scannable, numbered list you can work through in a single sitting. If you also run Google Ads, start with our complete Google Ads audit guide for e-commerce for the paid search side.
1. Pixel and Conversions API (CAPI) Health
Tracking is the foundation everything else in your Meta Ads account sits on. If your Pixel is misfiring, your CAPI integration is incomplete, or your events are not deduplicated, every other metric in your account is a fiction. ROAS, CPA, conversion count, audience building — all of it depends on accurate event data flowing from your site to Meta.
Post-iOS 14.5, browser-side tracking alone misses 20-60% of conversions depending on your audience demographics and device mix. This is not speculation. We have seen accounts where the Pixel reported 40 purchases in a week while the Shopify backend recorded 95. The algorithm was optimizing against less than half the actual conversion data. Every bid decision, every audience signal, every creative performance metric was built on incomplete information.
What to Check
- Pixel fires correctly on every page, including product pages, cart, checkout, and thank-you page
- CAPI is active and sending server-side events for all priority actions (Purchase, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, View Content)
- Event Match Quality (EMQ) score in Events Manager is above 6.0 for all key events
- Browser Pixel events and CAPI events are deduplicated using event_id or a consistent matching key
- Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) events are prioritized in the correct order for your business
- Domain is verified in Business Manager
What Bad Looks Like
The Pixel is installed but CAPI is not configured, or CAPI is technically active but sending events without adequate customer information parameters (email, phone, IP), resulting in an EMQ score below 4. Deduplication is not implemented, so every conversion gets counted twice — once from the browser Pixel, once from the server. Your Meta-reported purchase count is 40-80% higher than your actual Shopify or WooCommerce orders. The algorithm thinks it is performing better than it is, so it never makes the bid corrections it should. AEM events are in default priority order rather than configured for your specific business, meaning your most valuable conversion event may not be the one Meta attributes and optimizes toward.
What Good Looks Like
Both Pixel and CAPI are firing on all key events. EMQ score is 7.0 or above. Deduplication is working and your Meta-reported conversions match your backend data within a 10-15% margin (some variance is normal due to attribution modeling). AEM events are prioritized with Purchase at the top, followed by Initiate Checkout, Add to Cart, and View Content. Domain is verified. You cross-reference Meta data against GA4 or a third-party attribution tool weekly.
How to Fix It
If CAPI is not set up, implement it through your e-commerce platform's native integration (Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce all have direct CAPI connectors now) or through Google Tag Manager server-side tagging. Ensure you are passing all available customer information parameters — hashed email, hashed phone number, client IP address, user agent, and click ID (fbc/fbp). For deduplication, use a consistent event_id that matches across browser and server events. Re-prioritize AEM events in Events Manager with Purchase as the top-priority event. Verify your domain if you have not already.
Revenue Impact
Brands that go from Pixel-only tracking to properly configured CAPI with deduplication typically see a 15-35% improvement in reported (and actual) ROAS within 4-6 weeks. This is not because the ads suddenly perform better — it is because the algorithm finally has accurate data to optimize against. We audited one e-commerce brand spending $45K per month that was missing 42% of its conversions due to a broken CAPI setup. Fixing tracking alone increased their attributed ROAS from 2.1x to 3.4x without changing a single ad or audience.
For Business Owners
If your agency or marketing team cannot tell you your Event Match Quality score, or if they do not know whether CAPI is running and deduplicated, your tracking is almost certainly incomplete. Ask them to pull up Events Manager and show you the EMQ score for your Purchase event. If it is below 6, or if CAPI is not active, every performance number they have reported to you is based on incomplete data. This is the single most impactful fix for any e-commerce Meta Ads account.
2. Account Structure and Campaign Architecture
Meta's algorithm in 2026 rewards consolidation, not fragmentation. The old playbook of running 15-20 campaigns with narrow audiences and small budgets no longer works. The algorithm needs data density — enough conversions per campaign to exit the learning phase and optimize effectively. Every ad set needs roughly 50 conversion events per week to fully exit learning. If your account is fragmented across too many campaigns and ad sets, none of them get enough data to perform.
At the same time, you need enough structural separation to understand what is working. Lumping everything into one campaign with one ad set gives the algorithm data but gives you no visibility. The right structure balances consolidation with diagnostic clarity.
What to Check
- Total number of active campaigns — fewer than 5-8 for most e-commerce brands spending under $50K per month
- Each campaign has a clear, distinct objective aligned to a single funnel stage
- No ad set has been stuck in "Learning Limited" for more than 7 days
- Naming conventions are consistent and include campaign type, objective, audience, and date
- Clear separation between prospecting and retargeting, or deliberate use of Advantage+ Shopping to handle both
- No duplicate audiences competing against each other across ad sets
What Bad Looks Like
Fifteen or more active campaigns, many with overlapping audiences and identical objectives. Multiple ad sets showing "Learning Limited" because they do not receive enough conversions to optimize. Naming conventions are inconsistent or missing entirely — you see campaign names like "Copy of Summer Sale v3" and "Test - DO NOT TOUCH." No clear funnel structure — prospecting and retargeting are mixed together, making it impossible to measure true acquisition cost. Budget is fragmented so thinly that no single campaign gets enough data to learn.
What Good Looks Like
A consolidated structure with 3-6 campaigns: typically one Advantage+ Shopping campaign for broad acquisition, one or two manual prospecting campaigns for specific creative tests or audience experiments, one retargeting campaign with clear exclusion windows, and optionally a retention/loyalty campaign for existing customers. Each ad set receives enough budget to generate 50 or more conversion events per week. Naming is systematic. Every campaign has a clear purpose you can articulate in one sentence.
How to Fix It
Consolidate campaigns ruthlessly. Identify all campaigns with overlapping audiences and merge them. Pause anything stuck in Learning Limited and reallocate that budget to campaigns that are exiting learning. Establish a naming convention before restructuring — something like "[Objective] - [Audience Type] - [Creative Theme] - [Date]" — and apply it to everything. If you have more than 8 active campaigns and you are spending less than $50K per month, you are almost certainly over-fragmented.
Revenue Impact
Account consolidation typically improves overall CPA by 15-25% within the first month. The gains come from two sources: the algorithm gets more data per campaign to optimize against, and you eliminate the CPM inflation caused by self-competing audiences. We consolidated one D2C fashion brand from 18 campaigns down to 5. Their CPA dropped from $34 to $22 over six weeks — a 35% improvement — with no change to creative or budget.
For Business Owners
Ask your team how many active campaigns are in the account right now, and how many are in "Learning Limited" status. If the answer to the first question is more than 8 (at under $50K/month spend), or if more than 20% of ad sets are in Learning Limited, your structure is likely costing you money. More campaigns does not mean more performance — it usually means less data per campaign, which means worse optimization.
3. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC)
Advantage+ Shopping is Meta's most automated campaign type, and for e-commerce brands, it has become the default recommendation from Meta reps and many agencies. ASC removes most manual controls — you cannot select specific audiences, placements are fully automated, and the algorithm decides how to allocate budget between prospecting and retargeting. When it works, it works extremely well. When it is misconfigured, it silently wastes budget while reporting inflated numbers.
The most common ASC problem we see in audits is the existing customer budget cap. Without this cap set appropriately, ASC will default to showing ads heavily to people who already purchased from you. This looks great in the dashboard — high ROAS, low CPA — but generates minimal incremental revenue. You are paying to advertise to people who were going to buy again anyway.
What to Check
- Whether ASC is running and what percentage of total spend it controls
- The existing customer budget cap setting (should be 15-25% for most brands)
- Product catalog connection, accuracy, and freshness
- Creative volume and diversity inside ASC (minimum 10-15 varied assets)
- Actual new versus existing customer delivery split
- Performance comparison against manual campaigns using the same attribution window
What Bad Looks Like
ASC is consuming 70%+ of total account spend with no existing customer budget cap, meaning the algorithm is free to spend most of your budget retargeting past purchasers. Reported ROAS is 6x or higher but new customer acquisition has flatlined or declined. The product catalog has stale pricing, out-of-stock items, or missing images. Only 3-4 creatives are loaded, giving the algorithm almost nothing to test. When you compare ASC against manual campaigns on the same attribution window, the performance gap narrows or disappears — meaning ASC's "superior" results were actually just attribution differences, not real incremental value.
What Good Looks Like
ASC runs alongside manual campaigns with a deliberate budget split (typically 40-60% to ASC). The existing customer budget cap is set to 15-25% of ASC spend. The catalog is fully synced with current pricing, inventory status, and high-quality images. At least 10-15 diverse creatives are loaded and regularly refreshed. You actively monitor the new versus existing customer split and adjust the cap if retargeting starts to dominate. You have verified that ASC genuinely outperforms your manual setup using a fair attribution comparison.
How to Fix It
Set the existing customer budget cap to 20% as a starting point and adjust based on your new-versus-returning customer economics. Upload your customer list to define "existing customers" accurately — do not rely on Meta's default definition, which may not match your actual buyer data. Audit and refresh your product catalog. Load at least 10-15 creatives across formats — static images, short-form video, carousels, and UGC. Run a head-to-head test: turn off ASC for two weeks and compare backend revenue, not just Ads Manager numbers, to determine whether ASC is genuinely driving incremental results for your brand.
Revenue Impact
The existing customer budget cap alone can redirect thousands of dollars per month from redundant retargeting into actual new customer acquisition. We worked with a supplement brand whose ASC was spending 82% of its budget on existing customers. Setting the cap to 20% and refreshing creative assets shifted $18K per month into prospecting. New customer volume increased by 47% over the following six weeks while overall ROAS only dipped from 5.8x to 4.6x — a trade-off that dramatically improved actual business growth.
For Business Owners
If your Meta Ads account shows an impressive ROAS but your new customer count is flat or declining, the most likely cause is that Advantage+ Shopping is spending heavily on retargeting without a cap. Ask your team what percentage of ASC spend goes to existing customers. If they cannot answer that question, or if the answer is above 30%, you are paying to advertise to people who already know and buy from you — at the expense of finding new ones.
4. Audience Overlap and Self-Competition
Audience overlap is one of the most expensive invisible problems in Meta Ads accounts. It happens when two or more ad sets target users who fall into multiple audience definitions — for example, a "Lookalike 1% Purchasers" audience that overlaps 45% with an "Interest: Skincare" audience. When this happens, your ad sets bid against each other in the auction for the same user. You are competing against yourself. Meta does not care — it just charges you more.
In the post-iOS 14.5 environment, overlap has become even more common because audience sizes have effectively shrunk. With less granular data available, Meta's targeting definitions cast wider nets, which means different audience types now overlap more than they used to. Brands that built their account structures around highly specific audience segmentation in 2020 or 2021 are often sitting on 30-60% overlap rates without knowing it.
What to Check
- Run the Audience Overlap tool in Ads Manager for all active ad sets
- Identify any audience pairs with overlap above 25-30%
- Check that retargeting audiences properly exclude recent purchasers (7-30 day window depending on your product cycle)
- Verify that Lookalike audiences are built from high-value seed lists (purchasers, high-LTV customers) not low-quality sources (page visitors, video viewers)
- Evaluate whether broad targeting (no interest or Lookalike restrictions) is being tested alongside targeted ad sets
- Confirm audience sizes are large enough to exit the learning phase at your current budget
What Bad Looks Like
Multiple ad sets targeting audiences with 40-60% overlap. CPMs steadily increasing month over month despite no changes to budget or creative. Retargeting audiences that include recent purchasers — so you are paying to show ads to someone who bought yesterday. Lookalike audiences built from low-quality seeds like page visitors or social engagers, which produce audiences that browse but do not buy. No broad targeting tests running at all, despite evidence that broad outperforms narrow targeting in most verticals post-ATT. Audience sizes so small that ad sets stay in Learning Limited indefinitely.
What Good Looks Like
Audience overlap between any two active ad sets stays below 25%. Retargeting audiences exclude purchasers from the last 7-14 days (or longer for subscription products). Lookalike audiences are seeded from your highest-value customers — top 25% by LTV, or repeat purchasers — not generic site visitors. At least one broad targeting ad set is running as a test to benchmark against your Lookalike and interest-based approaches. Every audience is large enough to support the 50-conversions-per-week threshold at its budget level.
How to Fix It
Merge overlapping audiences into broader, consolidated ad sets. If your 1% Lookalike and your skincare interest audience overlap by 45%, combine them into one ad set or choose the better performer and pause the other. Add purchase exclusion windows to all retargeting campaigns. Rebuild Lookalike audiences from your best customer segments. Launch a broad targeting test with at least 3-5 diverse creatives and enough budget to generate 50 conversions in a week. Monitor the overlap tool monthly going forward. For a full walkthrough of competitive audience analysis, see our guide on how to analyze your competitors' Facebook Ads.
Revenue Impact
Resolving audience overlap typically reduces CPMs by 15-40% and improves CPA by 10-25% within the first two weeks. The gains are immediate because you stop paying the self-competition tax overnight. We audited a beauty brand with 8 active ad sets averaging 52% overlap. After consolidating to 3 ad sets with proper exclusions, their CPM dropped from $18.40 to $11.20 and CPA improved from $29 to $19 — a 34% CPA improvement without changing a single creative.
For Business Owners
If your CPMs have been climbing steadily while your ad creative and budget have not changed, audience overlap is the most likely cause. Ask your team to run the Audience Overlap report and share the results with you. If any pair of active audiences overlaps by more than 30%, you are paying a hidden tax on every impression. This is one of the fastest fixes in any Meta Ads audit — and one of the most immediately profitable.
Halfway Through — How Does Your Account Look?
If you have already spotted issues in tracking, structure, Advantage+ Shopping, or audience overlap, the next three sections — creative fatigue, attribution, and landing pages — are where we typically find the rest. If you want our team to run this entire audit for you, it takes us 3-5 business days and the findings come with a prioritized action plan.
Request a Free Meta Ads Audit5. Creative Fatigue and Ad Performance
Creative fatigue is the single largest silent budget killer in Meta Ads for e-commerce. It happens when your target audience has seen your ads too many times, causing engagement rates to drop, costs to rise, and the algorithm to struggle finding new people who will respond. Unlike a tracking error or a structural problem, creative fatigue sets in gradually — a 5% increase in CPA this week, another 8% next week, a slow decline in CTR that nobody notices until costs are 40% higher than they were two months ago.
The post-iOS 14.5 environment has accelerated creative fatigue cycles. With smaller effective audience pools (because Meta has less data to find new users), the same creatives reach the same people faster. What used to be a 6-8 week fatigue cycle for many brands is now 3-4 weeks. Brands that do not have a systematic creative testing and refresh process are constantly behind.
What to Check
- Frequency by ad set — prospecting frequency above 3.0 signals fatigue
- 14-day trending CTR and CPA per creative — declining CTR with rising CPA confirms fatigue
- Creative format mix — should include static images, short-form video (under 15 seconds), carousels, and UGC
- Mobile optimization — vertical or square aspect ratios, legible text, fast-loading assets
- Testing cadence — at least 3-5 new creatives introduced per ad set per month
- Advantage+ Creative enhancements — are automatic adjustments helping or hurting?
- First 3-second hook quality on video ads
What Bad Looks Like
The same 3-4 creatives have been running for 60 or more days with no new additions. Prospecting frequency is above 4.0. CTR has dropped 30%+ from launch performance. CPA has climbed steadily over the past month with no corresponding change to audiences or budget. All creatives are the same format — usually static product shots on white backgrounds. No UGC or testimonial content. Video ads have no hook — they start with a logo animation that users scroll past in one second. The team reacts to fatigue by pausing everything and starting over, creating a boom-and-bust performance cycle rather than a steady pipeline.
What Good Looks Like
A creative pipeline that introduces 3-5 new assets per ad set every 2-4 weeks. A mix of formats: static product imagery, lifestyle shots, short-form video with strong hooks, carousel sequences that tell a story, and UGC or testimonial-driven content. Frequency is monitored weekly and any creative showing rising frequency with declining CTR is flagged within 7 days. Proven winners are iterated on — new hooks, different angles, updated copy — rather than killed outright. Mobile-first design is the default, not an afterthought.
How to Fix It
Build a creative testing framework with a consistent cadence. Every two weeks, introduce at least 2-3 new creative variations per ad set. Iterate on winners rather than replacing them — take your best-performing static image and turn it into a carousel, or take your best video hook and pair it with a different product demo. Diversify formats: if you are only running static images, test short-form video. If all your video starts with a logo, test opening with a customer testimonial or a problem-agitate-solve hook. Monitor frequency and CTR/CPA trends weekly and flag creatives for refresh before they fully fatigue. For a complete breakdown, read our dedicated guide on auditing for creative fatigue in Facebook Ads.
Revenue Impact
Addressing creative fatigue typically improves CPA by 20-40% within 2-3 weeks of launching fresh creative. More importantly, establishing a consistent testing pipeline prevents the boom-and-bust cycles that plague most accounts. We worked with a home goods brand whose CPA had crept from $18 to $31 over eight weeks of running the same creatives. Refreshing with six new creative variants — including their first UGC content — brought CPA back to $16 within 10 days and new customer volume increased by 62%.
For Business Owners
Ask your team when the last new creative was introduced to the account. If the answer is "more than three weeks ago," creative fatigue is almost certainly affecting your results. Also ask what your prospecting frequency is — if it is above 3.0, your audience has seen your ads too many times and costs are inflated. Fresh creative is not a nice-to-have in Meta Ads. It is the fuel the algorithm runs on. Without it, performance degrades no matter how good your targeting or budget strategy is.
6. Attribution Settings and Reporting Accuracy
Attribution in Meta Ads post-iOS 14.5 is a minefield. The platform can no longer track users as comprehensively as it once did, which means the numbers in Ads Manager are modeled estimates rather than exact counts. That does not make them useless — but it does make configuration critical. The wrong attribution window can inflate your numbers by 30-50%. Inconsistent settings across campaigns make fair comparison impossible. And without a secondary attribution source, you have no way to validate whether Meta's reported numbers are close to reality.
The most common mistake we see is not that brands have bad attribution — it is that they have inconsistent attribution. Campaign A uses 7-day click / 1-day view. Campaign B uses 1-day click only. Campaign C uses 28-day click (from a legacy setting nobody updated). You cannot compare these campaigns against each other meaningfully. Any decision about budget allocation between them is based on an apples-to-oranges comparison.
What to Check
- Attribution window at the ad set level — should be consistent across all campaigns
- Whether 7-day click / 1-day view is your primary optimization window (Meta's recommended default)
- Cross-reference Meta conversions with Shopify, GA4, or backend data over the past 30 days
- Custom reporting columns include cost-per-purchase, ROAS, CPC, CPM, CTR, and frequency at minimum
- Secondary attribution source exists (GA4 UTM tracking, Triple Whale, Northbeam, or post-purchase surveys)
What Bad Looks Like
Different campaigns use different attribution windows, making performance comparisons meaningless. Meta reports 200 purchases but your Shopify backend shows 130 actual orders — a 54% discrepancy that nobody has investigated. Default Ads Manager columns are in use, hiding critical metrics like frequency and cost-per-purchase behind vanity metrics like impressions and reach. No secondary attribution source exists, so the team takes Meta's numbers at face value. Budget allocation decisions are made by comparing campaigns with fundamentally different measurement approaches.
What Good Looks Like
All campaigns use 7-day click / 1-day view as the optimization window. Meta-reported conversions match backend data within a 10-20% margin (some variance from modeled attribution is expected). Custom reporting columns are configured to show cost-per-purchase, ROAS, CPC, CPM, CTR, and frequency in a single view. A secondary attribution source — GA4 with UTM parameters, Triple Whale, or post-purchase surveys asking "how did you hear about us?" — provides an independent check on Meta's data. The team reviews the Meta-versus-backend discrepancy monthly and investigates any sudden changes.
How to Fix It
Standardize all campaigns on 7-day click / 1-day view. Set up a monthly reconciliation process comparing Meta-reported purchases to your backend order data. Build a custom column preset in Ads Manager that includes the metrics that actually matter for e-commerce decisions. Implement UTM parameters on every ad with a consistent naming structure so GA4 can independently track Meta traffic. Consider adding a post-purchase survey as a zero-party data attribution source. If the discrepancy between Meta and your backend exceeds 25%, investigate your CAPI setup and deduplication first — the attribution problem is likely upstream in tracking.
Revenue Impact
Attribution errors do not directly waste budget — they cause you to misallocate budget, which wastes it indirectly. When Campaign A looks like it has a 5x ROAS and Campaign B shows 2.5x, you naturally shift budget toward A. But if Campaign A uses a longer attribution window, its true ROAS might be 3x while Campaign B might actually be 3.2x. You just moved money from a better campaign to a worse one because the measurement was inconsistent. We have seen attribution corrections lead to budget reallocations that improve overall account ROAS by 15-30% — not from better ads, but from putting existing budget in the right places.
For Business Owners
Ask your team to compare last month's total conversions reported in Meta Ads Manager against the total orders in your Shopify or e-commerce backend. If Meta reports significantly more conversions than your store actually received, something is wrong — either in tracking, deduplication, or attribution configuration. A 10-15% discrepancy is normal. Anything above 25% means every performance decision being made is based on inflated numbers.
7. Landing Pages and Post-Click Experience from Meta Traffic
Everything in the first six sections of this audit optimizes how you get traffic. This section is about what happens after the click. And for most e-commerce brands, the post-click experience is where a significant portion of their ad budget goes to die. A perfectly targeted ad with a compelling creative that sends traffic to a slow, generic, or mismatched landing page converts at a fraction of its potential.
Meta traffic behaves differently from Google Search traffic. These are users who were scrolling through their feed, saw something that caught their attention, and tapped. They did not search for your product. They are not comparison shopping. They are impulse-curious. Your landing page has about 3-5 seconds to confirm the promise the ad made and make it effortless to take the next step. If the page loads slowly, if the messaging does not match the ad, or if the path to purchase requires more than two taps, most of these users bounce.
What to Check
- Page load speed on mobile — should be under 3 seconds (test with Google PageSpeed Insights)
- Message match between ad creative/copy and landing page headline, imagery, and offer
- Whether campaigns use dedicated landing pages or send traffic to generic collection/home pages
- Path to purchase from landing page — should require no more than 2-3 taps to add to cart
- Mobile user experience — tap targets, font sizes, image scaling, form field usability
- Social proof visibility — reviews, ratings, trust badges visible above the fold
- Bounce rate and time-on-page segmented specifically for Meta traffic in GA4
What Bad Looks Like
All Meta traffic lands on the homepage or broad collection pages regardless of which product the ad featured. Page load time is 5-8 seconds on mobile. The ad promotes a specific product or offer, but the landing page shows a generic hero banner about the brand. Mobile bounce rate from Meta traffic exceeds 70%. The path from landing to add-to-cart requires scrolling past multiple sections, navigating a sub-menu, and selecting product variants on a page that was not designed for mobile. No reviews or trust signals visible above the fold. The team has never analyzed Meta traffic behavior separately from organic or direct traffic.
What Good Looks Like
Key campaigns have dedicated landing pages that continue the narrative the ad started — same imagery, same offer, same language. Pages load in under 2.5 seconds on mobile. The product featured in the ad is immediately visible above the fold with a clear add-to-cart button. Reviews and ratings are visible without scrolling. Mobile bounce rate from Meta traffic is below 50%. The team regularly A/B tests landing page variations for high-spend campaigns. GA4 segments Meta traffic separately and the team knows the conversion rate, bounce rate, and average session duration for this specific traffic source.
How to Fix It
Start by auditing your top 10 highest-spend ads and clicking through to their landing pages on a mobile device. Time the load speed, assess message match, and count the number of taps required to add the featured product to cart. For any page loading above 3 seconds, optimize images, remove unnecessary scripts, and enable lazy loading. For campaigns driving significant spend, create dedicated landing pages that mirror the ad's messaging and make the path to purchase as frictionless as possible. If you do not have the resources for custom landing pages, at minimum ensure every ad links to the specific product page for the product it features — never the homepage. Set up a GA4 segment for Meta/paid social traffic and review its behavior metrics weekly.
Revenue Impact
Landing page improvements have some of the highest ROI of any audit fix because they improve conversion rate for all traffic, not just new traffic. A conversion rate improvement from 1.8% to 2.8% on Meta traffic means every dollar you spend on ads goes 56% further. We worked with an accessories brand that was sending all Meta traffic to their homepage. Creating three dedicated landing pages for their highest-spend campaigns and optimizing mobile load time from 5.4 seconds to 2.1 seconds increased Meta-attributed revenue by 78% in the first month — with zero increase in ad spend.
For Business Owners
Open your phone, go to your Instagram or Facebook feed, and tap on one of your own ads. Time how long the page takes to load. See if the product from the ad is immediately visible. Try to add it to cart. If any of this takes more than 5 seconds or requires more than 2-3 taps, your landing page experience is costing you sales. This is one of the easiest audit findings to verify yourself, and fixing it often delivers the largest single improvement in overall account performance.
Putting It All Together: The Audit Priority Stack
If you have read through all seven sections, you probably identified multiple issues in your account. That is normal — we have never audited an e-commerce Meta Ads account and found nothing to fix. The question is not whether there are problems. The question is which ones to fix first.
Here is the priority order we recommend, ranked by revenue impact and dependency:
- Pixel and CAPI health — Fix tracking first because every other metric depends on it
- Attribution consistency — Standardize measurement so you can trust comparisons
- Creative fatigue — Refresh or iterate on fatigued creatives to stop the CPA bleed
- Audience overlap — Consolidate audiences to eliminate self-competition
- Advantage+ Shopping configuration — Set the existing customer cap and refresh creative volume
- Account structure — Consolidate campaigns and eliminate Learning Limited ad sets
- Landing page optimization — Improve post-click experience for long-term conversion rate gains
Items 1-2 are foundational — without accurate data and consistent measurement, every other optimization is a guess. Items 3-5 are the highest-impact tactical fixes that produce results within 2-4 weeks. Items 6-7 are structural improvements that compound over time and create lasting performance gains.
For a quick-reference version of this entire audit, use our 45-point Meta Ads audit checklist — it covers every check mentioned here in a numbered, actionable format. If you also need to audit your Google Ads alongside Meta, our Google Ads audit guide for e-commerce follows the same structure for the paid search side. And if you need help planning your next round of ad creative, try our free Content Brief Generator to build structured briefs for your creative team.
The brands that grow consistently with Meta Ads are not the ones that find the perfect audience or the perfect creative. They are the ones that audit systematically, fix what the data reveals, and do it again next quarter. The audit is not a one-time project. It is the operating discipline that separates accounts that scale from accounts that plateau.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I audit my Facebook Ads account for e-commerce?
Run a full audit at least once per quarter. If you are spending more than $10,000 per month on Meta Ads, a monthly mini-audit covering Pixel and CAPI health, creative fatigue indicators, audience overlap, and attribution accuracy will catch problems before they compound. Any time you notice a sudden performance drop, a platform update from Meta, or a major iOS change, trigger an immediate review regardless of your regular schedule.
What is the most important part of a Facebook Ads audit for e-commerce?
Pixel and Conversions API (CAPI) health. If your tracking infrastructure is broken or partially firing, every metric in your account becomes unreliable. Your reported ROAS, cost per acquisition, and conversion counts are all downstream of tracking accuracy. Start by verifying that your Pixel fires on all key events, that CAPI is sending server-side events with a match quality score above 6, and that deduplication between browser and server events is working correctly. Fix tracking first, then audit everything else.
Is a Facebook Ads audit still relevant after iOS 14.5?
More relevant than ever. iOS 14.5 and App Tracking Transparency reduced the data Meta receives from browser-side tracking by 30-60% for many advertisers. This makes server-side tracking through CAPI essential, attribution windows shorter and less reliable, Aggregated Event Measurement a critical configuration to get right, and broad targeting strategies more important than the granular interest targeting that used to work. An audit designed for the post-ATT environment checks all of these areas specifically.
How do I know if my Conversions API (CAPI) is working correctly?
Go to Meta Events Manager and check three things. First, verify that server events are actively firing for all priority conversion events — Purchase, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout. Second, check your Event Match Quality (EMQ) score for each event and ensure it is above 6.0. Third, confirm that deduplication is working by comparing the total event count against your backend data. If Meta shows significantly more events than your store recorded, deduplication is likely broken and you are double-counting conversions.
What should I check in an Advantage+ Shopping campaign audit?
Five critical areas. First, verify the existing customer budget cap is set appropriately — typically 15-25% of total ASC budget — to prevent over-spending on retargeting. Second, confirm your product catalog is connected and up to date with accurate pricing, images, and availability. Third, check that you have at least 10-15 diverse creative assets loaded. Fourth, analyze the new versus existing customer split in actual delivery. Fifth, compare ASC performance against your manual campaigns using the same attribution window to ensure the comparison is fair.
How do I detect creative fatigue in my Facebook Ads?
Monitor three signals weekly: rising frequency (above 3.0 for prospecting audiences), declining click-through rate over a 14-day trend, and increasing cost per purchase on specific creatives. When a creative shows two or more of these signals simultaneously, it is fatigued. The fix is not to pause everything and start over. Instead, iterate on your proven winners with new hooks, angles, or formats while maintaining a pipeline of 3-5 new creatives per ad set per month to prevent fatigue cycles from forming. Our dedicated creative fatigue audit guide covers the complete detection and response framework.
What attribution settings should I use for Meta Ads in 2026?
Use 7-day click plus 1-day view as your primary attribution window for optimization. This is Meta's recommended default post-iOS 14.5 and gives the algorithm the most conversion data to learn from while remaining reasonably accurate. Ensure this setting is consistent across all campaigns so you can compare performance fairly. Additionally, set up a secondary attribution source such as GA4 UTM tracking, Triple Whale, or Northbeam to cross-reference Meta's reported numbers against independent data.
How much does audience overlap actually cost me?
Audience overlap causes your ad sets to bid against each other in the same auction, which directly inflates your CPMs. In the accounts we audit, overlap rates above 30% typically correlate with CPMs that are 15-40% higher than necessary. Beyond cost, overlap makes performance analysis unreliable because you cannot attribute results to specific targeting when the same users see ads from multiple ad sets. Use Meta's Audience Overlap tool to identify overlapping audiences, then consolidate or use exclusions to eliminate self-competition.
Should I audit Instagram Ads separately from Facebook Ads?
Not separately, but you should analyze placement-level performance within your unified audit. Since Instagram and Facebook share the same Ads Manager, Pixel, and CAPI infrastructure, the technical audit is identical. However, creative performance, audience behavior, and cost metrics often differ significantly between placements. During your audit, break down results by placement to identify whether Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, or Facebook Feed is driving the best returns, and adjust creative formats and budget allocation accordingly.
Can I audit my Facebook Ads myself or do I need an agency?
You can absolutely run the audit yourself using a structured framework like this guide or our 45-point Meta Ads audit checklist. The key is having a systematic approach rather than randomly checking things. However, there are advantages to bringing in an outside perspective: agencies that audit hundreds of accounts can benchmark your performance against industry data, spot patterns you might miss because you are too close to the account, and prioritize fixes based on experience with what actually moves the needle. If you have the time and technical knowledge, start with a self-audit. If you want a second opinion or faster results, request a professional audit.
Ready to Audit Your Meta Ads Account?
Every section in this guide comes from real issues we find in real e-commerce accounts. Most brands have at least three or four of these problems active right now — and each one is silently costing revenue every day it goes unfixed.
At BTB Media, we run a thorough, no-obligation audit of your Meta Ads account. We check every area covered in this guide, cross-reference against your backend data, and deliver a prioritized action plan ranked by revenue impact. No retainer required. No sales pitch. Just a clear picture of where your ad budget is going and what to fix first.
Get Your Free Meta Ads AuditTypically delivered within 3-5 business days. Includes tracking health, account structure, creative analysis, audience review, and attribution accuracy.
Continue Reading
Meta Ads Audit Checklist: 45 Points for E-Commerce
The scannable, numbered companion checklist to this guide.
CreativeHow to Audit for Creative Fatigue in Facebook Ads
Detect, diagnose, and fix the silent budget killer in Meta Ads.
Competitive IntelHow to Spy on Your Competitors' Facebook Ads
Use the Meta Ads Library to turn competitive insights into action.