When Artvertise audits a new client's Meta ads account, we're looking for the same set of issues over and over. Independent artist stores don't fail at Meta ads in wildly unique ways. The problems cluster around eight categories, and once you know what to look for, you can find them yourself in under an hour.
Run this audit once when you first seriously set up your account, and then once a month as part of your regular review.
When to Run an Audit
There are three situations where an audit is warranted:
Performance is dropping. Something changed and you don't know what. Run the audit before making changes - diagnosis before treatment.
You've inherited or taken back an account. If someone else managed your ads and you're now doing it yourself, start with a full audit. You need to understand what's actually in there.
Monthly review. Even when things are going well, a monthly check catches small problems before they become big ones.
The 8-Point Audit Checklist
1. Pixel Health
Start here. Everything downstream depends on your tracking being accurate.
Go to Meta Business Suite, then Events Manager. Select your Pixel and look at recent activity. You're checking:
- Is the Pixel firing at all? If you haven't had any events in the last 48 hours and your store has had traffic, something is broken.
- Are the key events coming through? You need to see ViewContent (product page views), AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, and Purchase. If any of these are missing, you're flying blind on those stages of the funnel.
- Is Conversions API active? In Events Manager, you should see events marked as coming from "Server" in addition to "Browser." If everything is browser-only, you're likely undercounting purchases significantly. Setting up CAPI typically leads to a meaningful increase in reported conversions.
- Check for duplicate events. If you see Purchase events firing twice per order, deduplication isn't working. This inflates your reported conversions.
Fix any Pixel issues before continuing. Nothing else in the audit matters if your data is wrong.
2. Campaign Objective
Every campaign in your account should have an objective that matches its purpose.
For campaigns designed to generate purchases: the objective should be Sales (formerly Conversions), with the optimisation event set to Purchase. Not Traffic. Not Engagement. Not Video Views. Purchase.
Artco regularly audits accounts where artists have been running Traffic-objective campaigns hoping to generate sales. Traffic campaigns optimise for clicks. They'll get you cheap clicks from people who never buy. If you want purchases, you need to tell Meta that's what you want.
The only exception: new accounts with fewer than 50 purchases per week in their data may benefit from optimising for a higher-funnel event (AddToCart or InitiateCheckout) until they build up enough purchase data for the algorithm to work with. Once you're getting consistent purchases, switch the optimisation event to Purchase.
3. Campaign Structure
Open your ad account and look at the list of campaigns. How many are there? How many ad sets are active?
The most common structural problem is too many campaigns and ad sets spreading budget too thin. If you have $50/day in total budget split across 8 ad sets, each ad set is getting $6.25/day. At that spend level, it will take weeks to accumulate enough data for any ad set to exit the learning phase. The algorithm never learns and performance stays mediocre.
For most independent artist stores spending under $500/day, the right structure is simple:
- 1-2 prospecting campaigns with 2-3 ad sets each
- 1 retargeting campaign with 1-2 ad sets
That's it. More complexity than that requires proportionally more budget to sustain it.
If you have more campaigns than that, ask whether each one is getting enough budget to be meaningful. If not, consolidate.
4. Audience Overlap
When multiple ad sets target similar or identical audiences, they compete against each other in the auction. This drives up your own CPMs and reduces efficiency.
In Ads Manager, you can check for audience overlap by selecting multiple ad sets and using the "Audience Overlap" tool. Anything above 20-30% overlap between ad sets is worth addressing.
Common causes of overlap: multiple interest-based ad sets targeting similar categories, lookalike audiences from different seed audiences that end up covering the same people, or retargeting audiences that include people also in prospecting audiences.
Fix: use audience exclusions (exclude your retargeting audiences from prospecting campaigns), consolidate overlapping ad sets, or let CBO handle budget distribution across the overlapping sets.
5. Creative Fatigue
Go to the ad level (not campaign or ad set level) and add the Frequency and CTR columns to your view.
Look for:
- Frequency above 2.5 in the last 7 days for cold audience campaigns
- CTR trending downward over the last 2-3 weeks
- Ads that have been running without creative changes for more than 4-6 weeks
For each fatigued ad, note when it was last updated. If an ad has been running the same creative for 8 weeks at meaningful spend, it's almost certainly fatigued even if the frequency number looks acceptable.
Create a list of ads that need refreshing. This usually becomes the most actionable output of the audit.
6. Budget Distribution
Pull up your campaigns and look at where your total budget is going.
The rule Artvertise uses: roughly 70% of budget toward prospecting (cold audiences) and 30% toward retargeting (warm audiences). These ratios shift based on scale and season, but if you're spending 80% on retargeting a tiny warm audience, you're not growing your customer base. If you're spending 100% on cold prospecting, you're leaving easy retargeting conversions on the table.
Also check: is budget concentrated in the right campaigns? If your "best collection" campaign is spending $5/day and a generic campaign you set up six months ago is spending $40/day, that's backwards.
7. Attribution Window
In your Ads Manager column setup, check which attribution window is being used for reporting.
Meta's default is 7-day click, 1-day view. This should be consistent across all your campaigns. If some are set to different windows, you can't make meaningful comparisons.
The most common issue here is someone having set campaigns to 28-day click attribution at some point (this was the old default before iOS 14 forced the change). If you're comparing a 7-day click campaign to a 28-day click campaign, the latter will always look better - not because it's better, but because it's claiming credit over a longer window.
Standardise to 7-day click, 1-day view across everything.
8. Landing Page Performance
Open Shopify Analytics and look at your conversion rate for the pages your ads are sending traffic to.
If your Meta ads are showing reasonable CTR (1.5-3% for art store cold traffic is normal) but your overall store conversion rate is under 0.5%, the problem is almost certainly the landing page, not the ads.
Things that kill landing page conversion:
- Slow load time on mobile (use Google PageSpeed Insights to check)
- Sending ad traffic to your homepage instead of a product or collection page
- No customer reviews visible
- Shipping times not visible before checkout
- Missing mobile payment options (Shop Pay, Apple Pay)
Purpose-built landing pages consistently outperform homepages for ad traffic. A 1% store conversion rate versus a 0.5% conversion rate doubles the ROAS of every campaign without changing a single ad.
Turning the Audit Into a To-Do List
Once you've run through all eight checks, you'll have a list of issues. Prioritise them by likely impact:
- Pixel or tracking issues - fix immediately, everything else is based on this data
- Wrong campaign objectives - fix before the next billing cycle
- Overextended campaign structure - consolidate within the week
- Creative fatigue - produce new creative within 2 weeks
- Budget distribution problems - adjust within the week
- Attribution inconsistency - standardise in the next review
- Audience overlap - add exclusions in the next review
- Landing page improvements - ongoing, prioritise top-traffic pages first
Run through the top three issues first. You don't have to fix everything at once, and making too many changes simultaneously makes it hard to know what actually moved the needle.
If you'd rather have someone else run this audit on your account and tell you exactly what to fix, that's what we offer for free. Artco's audit covers all eight points plus your email setup and store conversion funnel. Book your free audit here.
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