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How to run an optimization audit and apply findings

Last updated June 10, 2026

The Optimize tab runs an on-demand audit of one ad account and turns its recent performance into ranked, explained recommendations — most of which you can apply in a single click. It scans for wasted spend, pause candidates, budget moves, throttled bids, weak geos, fatigued creatives and tracking gaps, and tells you the spend at stake for each one.

Running an audit

  1. Open the Ads Manager and switch to the Optimize tab.
  2. Pick the ad account you want to audit (the audit always covers one account at a time).
  3. Choose a date range with the date picker — a preset like Last 7 days or Last 30 days, or a custom range.
  4. Click Run audit. uplads pulls the account's insights and breakdowns, then runs every detector instantly. A toast tells you how many opportunities it found.

The audit is cached per account, so when you come back the latest one loads automatically with its original date range. Click Re-run audit any time to refresh against newer data — a few days of fresh numbers usually changes what surfaces.

If you've never audited an account, you'll see a Run your first audit card with a single button to get started.

Reading findings ranked by impact

Findings are grouped under three themed tabs so you're never staring at one long scroll:

  • Save money — pause underperformers, trim budgets, and cut weak countries, placements or devices.
  • Scale winners — lift throttled caps, fund proven ad sets, set cost caps, relaunch your best ads, and reactivate paused winners.
  • Stay healthy — tracking and signal quality, creative fatigue, funnel and landing-page leaks, and audience fragmentation.

The Overview tab opens with Spend at stake — one headline number summing the genuinely recoverable waste — plus the count of open opportunities and what was scanned. A Start here section lists your three highest-impact moves (one per category, biggest money-mover first).

Each finding card shows a severity badge (high / medium / low), the title and a plain-English rationale, evidence chips (spend, ROAS, cost-per-result, frequency, CTR, budget) and, where it applies, an impact pill like Stop ~€420 waste or +€15/day to scale. Findings are sorted by severity first, then by spend at stake.

Applying, bulk-applying and dismissing

Most findings carry a pre-computed one-click action, so applying never needs a second look:

  • Pause an underperforming ad, Increase budget / Decrease budget on an ad set or campaign, Set cost cap or Loosen cap on a throttled ad set, Exclude country from an ad set, or Reactivate a paused winner.
  • When a category has two or more applyable findings, an Apply all button appears in its header to action them together (with bounded concurrency server-side).
  • Advisory findings — creative fatigue, funnel leaks, audience overlap, tracking checks — are marked Manual because the fix lives off-platform (a new creative, a checkout fix, a pixel change). Relaunch winners instead gives you a Relaunch winners button that deep-links into the launch wizard with those ads preselected.
  • Click the X on any card to dismiss a finding you don't want to act on. Dismissed findings drop off the list immediately.

Geo exclusions are applied safely: uplads reads the ad set's live targeting, adds the country to its excluded locations additively (every other targeting key is preserved), then writes — it never touches your home/core market.

Setting goals to reshape scoring

By default the audit judges every ad against your account average. Set explicit targets to judge against your goals instead:

  1. Click Targets in the Optimize header.
  2. Enter any of Target ROAS (e.g. 3.0), Target CPA (your cost-per-result limit) and Max frequency (the fatigue threshold). Leave a field blank to keep using the account average for that dimension.
  3. Save, then re-run the audit to apply them.

With a target set, "below target" is enough to flag a pause or budget cut, scale recommendations require beating your goal, and the creative leaderboard splits winners from losers against your bar rather than the average.

AI summary, deep dive and estimated savings

On the Overview tab, click Summarize with AI to generate a written summary of the audit — the priorities and the reasoning behind them. The summary is saved with the audit; use Regenerate to refresh it.

Once a summary exists, a Deep dive button appears. It opens a richer, on-demand analysis across geo, placement, device, age/gender and time-of-day patterns plus a prioritized action plan, shown in a dialog (this one isn't saved — it's generated fresh each session).

Estimated savings drives the headline number. Only genuinely recoverable waste counts toward it — pausing a money-loser or trimming an overspending budget. Upside-only moves (scaling, loosening caps, geo reallocation, reactivations) are recorded as opportunities but show as €0 savings, so Spend at stake stays an honest figure rather than an inflated one.

The creative leaderboard

Below the findings, the Creative leaderboard ranks your active ads by the account's primary metric — ROAS, cost-per-result, or CTR depending on what the account optimizes for. It splits them into Carrying the account and Dragging it down, using the same yardstick the detectors use, so an ad flagged for pausing can never also appear among the winners. It's the fastest way to see which creatives to scale and which to retire.

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