Facebook ads audit:
a checklist
for Malta businesses.

An audit looks at the whole system behind your ads, not just at the ads themselves. Most accounts that “stopped working” have one or two root causes, such as broken tracking, too many small ad sets or leads that nobody answers fast enough, and many symptoms. A good audit finds the causes and puts them in order, so you fix the one thing that unlocks the rest.

It is not a report full of screenshots and percentages that leaves you where you started. At the end of an audit you should have a short list: what to stop, what to fix and what to keep, each with a reason you understand. If an audit cannot tell you how many enquiries or sales your ads really brought last month, the first finding is that your tracking needs work.

Start with who owns what. Your Facebook Page, Instagram account, ad account and Pixel should sit in a business portfolio that your company owns, with at least two trusted admins and two-factor authentication switched on. Agencies and freelancers should have partner access, not ownership. If the ad account belongs to someone else’s portfolio, everything you learned from past campaigns can leave with them.

Then open Account Quality. It shows any restrictions, rejected ads or warnings on your account, Page or payment method. Rejected ads that were never fixed and repeated policy warnings make future restrictions more likely, so clear them now rather than when a campaign is about to launch.

Check billing last: the payment method, the spending limit and who receives the invoices. It sounds basic, but a card that expires on the weekend of a launch is one of the most common reasons good campaigns stop.

Check that each campaign uses the objective that matches what you want: Leads for enquiries, Sales for online purchases, and Engagement only when engagement really is the goal. Many accounts in Malta still run traffic or boosted-post campaigns and wonder why they get clicks but no customers.

Then count the ad sets. Each new ad set goes through a learning phase while Meta works out who responds, and Meta suggests about 50 optimisation events in seven days to exit it. A small account split into eight ad sets of a few euros each never gets there, and most of them show “learning limited”. For a business in Malta, fewer campaigns with fewer, broader ad sets usually work better than many tiny ones.

Look at how often things were edited, too. Changing budgets, audiences or ads every day restarts learning and makes results look random. Good structure is boring: a few campaigns, clear names, budgets changed gradually, and enough time between changes to see what they did.

Location is the first thing to check in Malta. Meta’s location targeting reaches people who live in or were recently in an area, so a campaign set to Malta also reaches tourists. That is good for a restaurant or a boat trip and a waste for a law firm or a car dealer, whose ads should make it clear who they are for, and whose results should be checked by region and placement.

Then look for overlap and missing exclusions. Several ad sets aimed at similar people compete with each other. Retargeting campaigns that do not exclude people who already bought or enquired pay to show the same offer to customers. Special ad categories, such as housing, employment and financial products, must be declared when they apply; an undeclared category is a common reason for rejected ads.

Finally, check whether your own data is being used: website visitors, video viewers, people who messaged you and customer lists uploaded where consent allows. They are usually the best-performing audiences in a small market, and many accounts ignore them.

Compare link clicks with landing page views in Ads Manager. A big gap means people leave before your page loads, usually because it is slow in the Facebook and Instagram in-app browser. Then open the page on a phone, on mobile data, from the ad itself, and ask: does it repeat what the ad promised, show the price or offer, and give one clear next step?

For lead forms, read the questions and the leads. A form with no qualifying questions brings many low-intent leads; a form with too many brings few. Check where leads go and how fast someone replies. In our experience, many accounts that seem to have an ads problem actually have a reply-speed problem: leads arrive at 21:00 and are called the next afternoon.

If people message you on WhatsApp or Messenger, look at how many chats get a reply within minutes and how many become customers. This is the part of an audit owners skip most often, and it is often where the money is lost.

Send us partner or view access to your ad account, or screenshots of your campaigns if you prefer, on WhatsApp. We go through the six areas above, check your tracking against your real enquiries or sales, and send back a short, plain-language list of what we would stop, fix and keep. The first audit is free and there is no obligation.

If you want us to make the fixes and run the ads, Meta ads management starts from €1,249 a month plus ad spend, excluding VAT, with the Customer Acquisition System and Growth Partner packages for businesses that also need landing pages, follow-up and more creative. Our case studies show the kind of results we report.