Find underperforming Meta campaigns that need budget cuts
Analyze 4 weeks of campaign performance against placement and objective benchmarks to surface budget reduction opportunities
Underperforming campaigns might be quietly draining 40% of your Meta budget below acceptable ROAS thresholds
This template identifies Meta conversion and retargeting campaigns consistently underperforming against your ROAS benchmarks across placements and objectives. It analyzes 12 weeks of historical data but focuses on the last 4 complete weeks to catch recent performance degradation, then calculates exactly how much budget is trapped in campaigns that need immediate optimization or reduction.
Why this matters
Campaigns that worked six months ago slowly decay as audiences fatigue, creative wears out, and iOS changes compound—but they keep spending at full capacity. A campaign 30% below your placement benchmark consuming $5K daily costs you $1,500 in inefficient spend every single day. This template catches these budget drains before they compound, distinguishing between fixable issues (high frequency, creative fatigue) and structural problems requiring budget cuts.
How to customize
Adjust the 4-week analysis window based on your sales cycle length—B2B might need 6-8 weeks. Set different ROAS thresholds by objective since Advantage+ Shopping naturally converts differently than standard conversions. Add relevance score and quality ranking metrics to distinguish between audience and creative issues. Include auction competition metrics to understand if underperformance stems from increased competition. Configure minimum spend thresholds to focus on campaigns with material budget impact.
Identify underperforming Meta conversion and retargeting campaigns that you recommend reducing budget on based on ROAS or investigating for optimization.
Follow these steps:
* Pull Meta ads performance for the last 12 weeks
* Pull Meta ads conversions to set a benchmark.
* Pull Meta ads conversions by placement to set a benchmark.
* Pull Meta ads conversions by campaign objective to set a benchmark
* Identify campaigns that are underperforming significantly compared to benchmarks in terms of roas.
* Check if underperformance correlates with high frequency (>6) or low CTR (<0.8%)
* Output a summarized message with findings, summarized bullets to support it and a one sentence line to wrap it up. In the message state what percentage of budget this budget represents.
Note:
* Dont recommend to shift budget to retargeting or brand, they have their own media plan.
* We run both prospecting and retargeting campaigns, we know prospecting campaigns will perform less, but we need them to funnel into the retargeting campaigns.
* Flag if Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are underperforming - these usually need creative refresh not budget cuts
* List out all the campaigns with the recommended action
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