Inside the lab
We audited 40 ad accounts this year. The same five mistakes kept showing up
Every free audit we do ends with a screen recording. After forty of them this year, the same handful of problems shows up in almost every account. Here's the list, so you can check yours before we do.
Founder
1. Broken or double-counting tracking
Thirty-one of the forty accounts had a tracking problem that made their numbers unreliable. Pixel firing twice, CAPI deduplication broken, GA4 counting pageviews as conversions. The owners were optimising against fantasy data. If your cost per lead has ever looked too good to be true, it probably was. This is fixable in a week and it's always step one.
2. The boost button tax
Boosted posts are Meta's version of the hotel minibar: convenient and quietly expensive. Nineteen accounts were spending real money on boosts with no placement control, no audience logic and no conversion objective. A proper campaign with the same creative costs less and does more.
3. Creative running on fumes
The median account had ads that had been running unchanged for five months. Frequency was climbing, CTR was dying, and nobody noticed because the leads hadn't fully stopped yet. Creative fatigue doesn't announce itself, it just slowly doubles your CPL. The fix is boring: new angles every month, tested properly, like we do in the creative service.
4. Retargeting that doesn't exist (or worse, does)
Half the accounts had no retargeting at all. The other half had a single ad showing everyone the same creative for months, usually the exact product the person already decided not to buy. Sequenced retargeting, different message by behaviour, converts roughly three times better. Our retargeting builds exist because of how often we see this.
Audit stats, 40 accounts
- 31 had tracking issues
- 19 were boosting posts
- 5 months median ad age
- 0 had sequenced retargeting
5. No idea what a lead is worth
The most expensive mistake isn't technical. Most owners couldn't tell us what a customer is worth, which means they couldn't tell us what a lead should cost. Without that number, every decision is a vibe. When we take on an account through Meta management or Google Ads, the value conversation happens before any campaign does.
If you recognised your account in this list, you're in the majority. The free audit exists because showing people their own account works better than any pitch we've ever written. Get yours here.
If you skimmed
The short version
- 31 of 40 accounts were optimising against broken tracking data
- The boost button is a tax on not learning Ads Manager
- Know what a customer is worth or every CPL judgement is a guess
Founder at Target Growth Lab
Still audits every account himself. It's the best part of the job.
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The free audit covers everything in this article, applied to your numbers.