Marketing Audit Tools

How to Audit Your Facebook Advertisement (and Your Google Ads) Before You Waste Another Dollar

15+ years in local marketing; Google Ads certified; Shopify Partner.

Most Canadian business owners I talk to are running ads. Facebook ads, Google Ads, sometimes both. And when I ask them what their cost per lead is, or what their best-performing ad actually says, I get a pause.

That pause is expensive.

Here's the thing: a Facebook advertisement that looks busy isn't the same as one that's working. Same goes for Google. You can be spending CA$3,000 a month on ads and have zero idea whether the campaigns are set up right, targeting the right people, or converting at anything close to a reasonable rate. This guide is going to walk you through how to actually audit both, what tools are worth your time, what the numbers should look like, and when it makes sense to hand it off to someone else.

What this article won't cover: it's not a step-by-step on how to build campaigns from scratch. It's specifically about auditing what you already have, or evaluating what an agency is running on your behalf.

What a Facebook Advertisement Audit Actually Is (and Why It's Different From a Google Ads Audit)

A lot of people treat "audit" like a scary word. It's not. It's just a structured way of asking: is this thing working, and if not, why?

For a Facebook advertisement, or Meta ad if you want the current branding, the audit is mostly about creative and audience. Facebook is a push platform. Nobody wakes up and searches for your roofing company on Facebook. You're interrupting someone's scroll. So the audit questions are: Is your creative stopping the scroll? Is your audience actually the people who buy from you? Is your offer clear enough that someone who wasn't thinking about you five seconds ago would click?

Google Ads is a pull platform. Someone types "emergency plumber Regina" and your ad shows up. The audit questions there are different: Are you bidding on the right keywords? Are you blocking the garbage search terms that are eating your budget? Is your landing page doing its job after the click?

Both audits matter. But they're looking at different things, and the tools you use are different too. I'll break them down separately.

How to Audit a Facebook Advertisement: What to Check and In What Order

This is the actual work. I'll walk you through it week by week, because if you try to do everything at once you'll get overwhelmed and quit.

Week 1: Account structure and spend sanity check

Log into Meta Ads Manager. Before you touch anything, look at the campaign structure. You want to see: campaigns organized by objective (traffic, leads, conversions), not just lumped together. If you see one campaign called "brand awareness" that's been running for eight months and has never been touched, that's a flag.

Check your spend breakdown. Where is the money actually going? In my experience, accounts that haven't been audited in six months or more tend to have 60-70% of their budget concentrated in one or two ad sets that were never properly tested. The other ad sets are either dead or spending a few dollars a day on nothing.

Pull your cost per result. If you're running lead generation ads, what are you paying per lead? A rough benchmark for Canadian small business lead gen on Meta: anywhere from CA$15 to CA$80 per lead depending on industry, offer, and audience quality. If you're paying CA$200 per lead and your average client is worth CA$500, that math doesn't work.

Week 2: Audience review

Look at who you're actually reaching. Meta gives you audience breakdowns by age, gender, placement, and region. Compare that to who actually buys from you.

Check for audience overlap. If you're running three ad sets targeting similar audiences, they're competing against each other in the auction, which drives your costs up. Meta has a tool called Audience Overlap under the Tools menu, use it.

Also check your exclusions. Are you excluding existing customers? Are you excluding people who already converted? If not, you're spending money showing acquisition ads to people who already bought from you.

Week 3: Creative and copy review

Pull your ad-level data. Sort by cost per result. Your top two or three ads are probably doing most of the work. The rest are likely dragging down your average.

For each ad, ask: Does the first frame of the video or the top of the image communicate the offer in under two seconds? Is there a clear call to action? Does the headline match the landing page the ad goes to?

One pattern I see constantly: the ad promises something specific ("free estimate this week") and the landing page is just the homepage. That's a trust break. The person clicked on a specific offer and landed somewhere generic. Conversions drop hard when that happens.

Week 4: Landing page and conversion tracking

This is where a lot of Facebook advertisement audits stop short. They look at the ad metrics and ignore what happens after the click.

Check your Meta Pixel. Is it firing correctly? Go to Events Manager in Meta and verify that your key events (lead form submission, phone call, purchase) are actually being tracked. If they're not, you're flying blind on optimization.

Then check your landing page speed. Meta's own research shows that a one-second delay in mobile load time can cut conversion rates significantly. Run your landing page through Google's PageSpeed Insights (it's free) and look at your mobile score. If it's under 50, that's worth fixing before you spend another dollar on ads.

How to Run a Google Ads Audit: The Checklist That Actually Matters

A proper Google Ads audit covers five areas. Here's what each one is and why it matters.

1. Campaign settings

Check your geographic targeting. Are you actually targeting Canada, or your specific province/city? I've seen accounts where a Regina business was targeting "Canada and United States" because someone clicked the wrong option during setup. That's budget going to people who will never call you.

Check your bidding strategy. Are you on manual CPC, Target CPA, or Maximize Conversions? There's no universally right answer, but if you're on Maximize Conversions with fewer than 30 conversions in the last 30 days, Google's algorithm doesn't have enough data to optimize well. That's a problem.

2. Search terms report

This is the single most important thing to check in any Google Ads audit. Go to Keywords, then Search Terms. This shows you what people actually typed before clicking your ad.

You will almost certainly find garbage. Searches that have nothing to do with your business. If you're a dentist in Saskatoon and your ads are showing up for "dentist school near me" or "dental malpractice lawyer," you're paying for clicks that will never convert. Add those as negative keywords.

Per DataForSEO data, the average CPC for a Google Ads audit-related term in Canada runs around CA$31 to CA$38. That's what you'd pay if you were advertising an audit service. For local service terms in professional services, Canadian CPCs are generally 30-50% of equivalent US rates, which means wasted clicks are still expensive, just slightly less so than in the US.

3. Quality Score and ad relevance

Quality Score is Google's rating (1-10) of how relevant your keyword, ad, and landing page are to each other. Low Quality Scores mean you pay more per click for worse ad placement.

Check your keywords tab and look for anything with a Quality Score of 4 or below. Those are costing you extra money. Either improve the ad and landing page to match the keyword better, or pause the keyword.

4. Conversion tracking

Same issue as Facebook, different platform. Go to Tools, then Conversions. Are your conversion actions set up? Are they tracking? Are they tracking the right things?

I've audited accounts where the agency had "conversion tracking" set up, but the only thing being tracked was time on site. Not form submissions. Not phone calls. Time on site. That's not a conversion. That's just someone reading your about page.

5. Wasted spend analysis

Add up what you've spent in the last 90 days on keywords or search terms that generated zero conversions. That number is usually uncomfortable. In my experience, accounts that haven't been audited in a year typically have 20-35% of their spend going to terms that have never produced a lead. Not a slow drip of leads. Zero.

The Tools Worth Using (and the Ones That Are Just Lead Magnets)

There are a lot of "free audit" tools out there. Some are genuinely useful. Some exist purely to get your email address and sell you a subscription.

Here's an honest breakdown.

For Facebook/Meta ads:

Meta Ads Manager itself is your best tool. The native reporting is more accurate than any third-party tool because it's reading directly from the source. Learn to use the Breakdown feature (by placement, by age, by device) and you'll find more insights than most paid tools will give you.

If you want something layered on top, tools like Madgicx or Revealbot offer AI-assisted optimization suggestions. They're useful but not free. Expect CA$50-150/month for a small account.

For Google Ads:

Google's own tools, Search Console, the Search Terms report, the Recommendations tab (take these with a grain of salt, Google's recommendations often favour higher spend), are your starting point.

SEISO (seiso.io) offers a free Google Ads audit by connecting to your account. It's one of the more honest free tools I've seen for this. It won't replace a manual review, but it's a decent first pass.

Adalysis has a free PPC audit tool as well. Similar story.

For SEO and website health:

If you want to understand the technical health of your website alongside your ads audit, our free SEO audit guide covers the tools that are actually worth your time. And if you want a broader look at your site's performance beyond just ads, the website audit checklist walks through the full process.

For a quick check on how your site is performing from an SEO standpoint, an SEO checker can flag technical issues that might be tanking your landing page quality scores and costing you more per click.

The lead magnet problem:

A lot of "free audit" tools gate their actual output behind a sign-up or a sales call. That's fine, they're a business too. But know what you're getting into. If a tool asks for your email and then sends you a 200-item list of "issues" with no context on which ones actually matter for your business, that's not an audit. That's a list.

A real audit prioritizes. It says: here are the three things costing you the most money right now, fix these first.

What the Numbers Should Actually Look Like

Let me give you a worked example so this isn't abstract.

Say you're a trades company in Winnipeg running Google Ads and Facebook ads simultaneously. You're spending CA$2,500/month total: CA$1,500 on Google, CA$1,000 on Meta. Your average job is worth CA$1,200 in revenue.

To break even on your ad spend, you need roughly 2.1 jobs per month from ads (CA$2,500 / CA$1,200). To be profitable, you probably need 4-5 jobs per month, assuming a reasonable margin.

Now let's say Google is generating 8 leads per month at CA$187.50 per lead (CA$1,500 / 8), and Facebook is generating 5 leads per month at CA$200 per lead (CA$1,000 / 5). Your close rate on ad-generated leads is 25%. So Google gives you 2 jobs, Facebook gives you 1.25 jobs. Combined: roughly 3 jobs, CA$3,600 revenue against CA$2,500 spend.

That's a 44% return on ad spend before your own time and overhead. Depending on your margin, that might be fine or it might be a problem. But here's the thing: you can only know that if you're tracking it. Most business owners I talk to can't tell me their close rate on ad leads because nobody set up the tracking to capture it.

That's what the audit is really about. Not finding the perfect ad. Finding out what you actually know versus what you're assuming.

Canadian Rules You Need to Know Before You Run Another Ad

This section is short but important.

CASL applies to email follow-up. If someone fills out a lead form on your Facebook advertisement and you want to add them to a marketing email list, you need separate, explicit consent for that. The fact that they submitted a form to get a quote does not give you permission to email them your newsletter. CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation) is clear on this. You need an unchecked checkbox or a separate opt-in. Violations can run up to CA$10 million for businesses.

PIPEDA and provincial privacy laws shape what you can collect. If you're running Meta's lead forms and capturing personal information, that data is going to Meta's servers in the US. Under PIPEDA, you're responsible for ensuring equivalent protection for that data even when it crosses borders. This is worth a conversation with a lawyer if you're in a regulated industry like healthcare or legal.

Quebec Bill 96 affects ad language. If you're targeting Quebec, your Facebook advertisements need to be available in French. This isn't optional. If your ads are English-only and you're targeting Quebec residents, you're offside.

Competition Bureau rules on claims. If your ad says "lowest price guaranteed" or "best service in Canada," you need to be able to substantiate that. The Competition Bureau takes misleading advertising claims seriously, and "best" or "number one" claims without evidence are a real risk.

DIY vs. Hire: How to Know Which One Fits Your Situation

Here's a simple way to think about it.

DIY makes sense if: You're spending under CA$1,500/month on ads, you have time to check the accounts weekly, and you're willing to learn. The tools I mentioned above are accessible. A Facebook ads audit using native Meta Ads Manager reporting is something a motivated business owner can do in a few hours.

Hire someone if: You're spending CA$2,000/month or more and can't tell me what your cost per lead is. Or if your agency currently has your accounts and you've never been given access to them. That second one is a red flag regardless of spend level. You should always own your own Google Ads account, your own Meta Business Manager, your own Google Analytics. Always.

If you're evaluating whether your current agency is doing a good job, the marketing audit guide we put together covers the full process for assessing your marketing performance across channels, not just ads.

One more thing. A COO at a Vancouver SaaS company put it to me this way: "Every pitch I get is a 60-slide deck about methodology and zero slides about what my cost per lead was going to be." That's the right instinct. If an agency can't tell you what they expect your cost per lead to be before you sign, that's a problem. Push for that number. If they hedge, ask why.

3 Takeaways Before You Go

1. The audit is about tracking first, optimization second. You can't fix what you can't measure. Before you change a single ad or keyword, make sure your conversion tracking is actually recording the things that matter: form fills, phone calls, purchases.

2. The search terms report in Google Ads and the audience breakdown in Meta Ads Manager are the two most underused tools in most small business accounts. Both are free, both are native, and both will show you where money is going that shouldn't be.

3. You should own your accounts. Always. If your agency controls your Google Ads account, your Meta Business Manager, or your Google Analytics and won't give you admin access, that's not a partnership. That's a hostage situation. Get access before you need it.