The Meta ad account audit: 12 things I check before touching creative

Clients almost always ask for a creative refresh first. I almost always start somewhere else, because if the account's tracking, structure, or audience setup is broken, better creative just finds new ways to spend the same wasted budget faster.

The checklist covers three layers before creative ever comes up: measurement (is the Conversions API actually deduplicating against the pixel, is a real event value being passed), structure (how many campaigns are competing for the same audience, is the account still running vestigial ad sets from a strategy nobody remembers), and audience health (how stale is the core audience, is frequency creeping past the point of return).

On a typical audit, at least four of the twelve checks fail: usually the CAPI deduplication, an audience overlap nobody noticed, and a conversion event still firing on the old checkout flow that was replaced two redesigns ago.

Fixing the plumbing rarely produces a dramatic screenshot. But it's the reason the next round of creative testing produces a trustworthy signal instead of noise dressed up as a result.