5 Minute Ads Manager Setup Checklist: How to organize your ads manager for success
When you’re setting up your eComm campaigns – the early stages of action can make or break you.
You’re ultimately building a profit machine – and with big spends and high ROAS targets, it means that you have to be as efficient and as effective at the entire build process – from what you implement on the site to the tools and way you set up your back end processes.
Timing – how quickly you respond, and your ability to visualize and analyze the data can be the difference between thousands (if not millions) in spending, your results, and winning or losing at the ads game.
So, after working with more clients than I can count, organizing my team to execute campaigns and clocking more than $40 million in spending last year, we’ve implemented a standard ads manager set up that helps us visualize how people are flowing through our funnels, analyze data, and see opportunities/problems in our ads much more clearly.
Today I want to share that set up with you to help you scale – it will only take you about five minutes to set up, but it can save you hours in analysis, corrections, and can help set you up to scale more quickly, effectively, and efficiently.
So, want to get better results? Want to be able to see problems and opportunities earlier in the process? Or save you time?
Great – Here’s what you need to do:
✅ PART 1: GO TO YOUR ADS MANAGER
1: go to your ads manager (business.facebook.com/ads/manager – and choose the account that you are working on)
2: Go the far right column and find a drop down menu above the columns that says “performance” or “performance and clicks”
3: Click this dropdown menu and choose “customize”
4: Here you can customize the columns that you’re using to analyze performance of your campaigns.
5: A new window pops open – In the left hand column, you can choose which data you want to see. And in the right hand column, you can drag and drop the order of the data that you want to see.
✅ PART 2: MY CHECKLIST / COLUMN ORDER
One of the easiest ways to organize your ads manager for efficiency is the order of columns:
Here’s the order that we recommend – which will help you evaluate how the data compares with industry benchmarks (and the order of how to audit your results when you’re troubleshooting)
✅ Results – First and primary success metric/KPI for the campaign objective.
✅ Reach – Helps you identify if you reached enough people to meet your goal / first troubleshooting question.
✅ Frequency – How often people see your ad on average. Audience fatigue is real. Once you start hitting above 4 here, it’s time to launch new creative.
✅ Relevance score – This is a secondary metric. The higher your number, the better you fare in the algorithms, but hold this in tension with your primary objective. An ad that’s helped generate $20k in sales but has a relevance score of 4 beats an ad that has only helped generate $5k in sales with a 10 relevance score any day.
✅ Optional – Some choose to see “negative feedback” here. Every business manager has a quality score and earns eCPM (effective CPM, the CPM of your specific business manager). How skilled you have been at launching profitable ads and how people respond to your ads is factored into this cost. Facebook is all about relevance and quality content/depth of engagement. If they a lot of negative feedback happening on an ad / if it’s being reported, the system is going to slow it down in delivery. This is one way to keep an eye on that often-overlooked factor and answers the question “Why did my ad stall out?” without having to click through the link to the ad then examine the individual ad’s feedback.
✅ CPM – Cost per thousand. This will help you estimate spending vs. results and will prompt you to shift campaign objectives or audiences when you’re split testing.
✅ Unique Link Click-through rate
✅ CPC
✅ Landing Page Views – If your Unique Link Click through rate is good, but you calculate how many people actually went to the landing page and notice a significant dropoff – your site landing speed may be too slow. Aim for 1-3 seconds for your site load time.
✅ Cost per landing page view
✅ Add-To-Cart
✅ Cost per ATC
✅ Initiate Checkout
✅ Cost per Initiate Checkout
✅ Purchases
✅ Purchase conversion value
✅ Amount spent
✅ ROAS
✅ Offline conversions
✅ 3: STANDARDIZE ADS & ADSET NAMES
This little hack will save you a bunch of time by organizing your campaigns, adsets & ads.
1: At the campaign level – Agency Name or Abbreviation+Funnel placement+Campaign type
AF | TOF | Conversions
2: Ad the adset level, add the location, placement or other identifiers you feel relevant. Ex: So, for targeting women in UK & Aus for a beauty brand, it would look like this:
AF | TOF | Conversions | AUS+UK | W25-45
3: At the ad level, add the different creative variations:
AF | TOF | Conversions | AUS+UK | W25-45 | Video1
AF | TOF | Conversions | AUS+UK | W25-45 | Video2
4: Finally, some business managers will allow you to use emojis. You can color code your entire campaigns or tops of funnels.
AF | TOF | Conversions | AUS+UK | W25-45 | Video2
If you’re working on large spends with multiple team members or agencies in different countries, it’s crucial to get on the same page with your naming standards. Keep these in a centralized document – ideally with a small training video so that you can all operate from the same central process.
Ok – your turn, rockstars. After you implement, take a screenshot of your ads manager and paste it in the comments. I’ll give you a shoutout in my next livestream or interview.
Every month I choose a few entrepreneurs to personally help them scale their Facebook ads and businesses.

Watch the free training and apply here: https://www.ecommercescalingsecrets.com/home