How to Clean Up Facebook Ads

Is your Facebook Ads Manager a chaotic mess of old campaigns, confusing ad sets, and wasted ad spend? You're not alone. Over time, any active ad account can start to feel like a digital attic full of forgotten tests and outdated creatives. This guide provides a strategic, step-by-step process to audit and clean up your ad account, helping you improve performance, lower costs, and make smarter marketing decisions.

Start with "Why": The Hidden Costs of a Messy Ad Account

Before jumping into the cleanup, it’s helpful to understand what’s at stake. A disorganized ad account isn't just an eyesore, it actively costs you money and time. When your account is cluttered, it's impossible to get a clear picture of what's working. Decision fatigue sets in as you sift through dozens of identically named campaigns. Your reporting gets skewed by old data, and audience overlap can cause your ad sets to compete against each other, driving up your costs.

This digital mess usually happens for a few common reasons: multiple team members running tests, creative experiments from last year's holiday sale, or inheriting an account from a previous agency or marketer. The good news is that dedicating just a couple of hours to this process can pay dividends for months to come.

Your First Step: A Full Campaign Audit

The best place to begin your cleanup is at the highest level: the campaigns. This is where you can make the biggest impact on decluttering your view and focusing your attention on what matters.

Establish a Simple Naming Convention

You can't organize what you can't identify. Before you start archiving, commit to a clear and consistent naming convention for all future campaigns. A great naming system makes it easy to understand a campaign's purpose at a glance, without even clicking into it. While there’s no single "perfect" formula, a solid structure often includes the objective, the audience, and the promotion.

Consider a format like: [Funnel Stage/Objective] - [Product/Offer] - [Audience Type]

Here are a few examples:

• TOF Prospecting - Signature T-Shirt - US LAL 1%
• MOF Retargeting - Black Friday Sale - 7-Day Web Visitors
• BOF Conversion - Free Ebook - Engaged Instagrammers

It doesn't matter what system you choose, as long as it's consistent. Going forward, apply this to all new campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

Identify and Archive Underperforming Campaigns

Now it's time to triage. Your goal here is to hide everything that is irrelevant, so you can focus on the campaigns that are (or were) driving results. To do this, we'll turn old campaigns "off" and then filter them out of view.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

1. Set your date range. In the top right corner of Ads Manager, set the date range to "Lifetime" or at least the "Last Year" to get a comprehensive view.
2. Sort by results. Click the column header for "Cost per Result" or your main KPI to sort your campaigns from worst to best performers.
3. Identify the junk. Look for campaigns with:
   • Zero or very few results.
   • An extremely high Cost per Purchase, Lead, or Install.
   • Campaigns you ran as one-off tests months or years ago.
   • Campaigns with goals that are no longer relevant to your business.
4. Switch them off and filter. Select the checkbox next to these junk campaigns. Then, click the "Edit" button in the navigation bar that appears, and in the panel that slides out, switch the campaign status to "Off." While they are still selected, you can also add a tag like "Archive" or "Old." This helps you easily filter them out of your main view later by using the search and filter bar to exclude this tag. You aren't deleting the data, just cleaning up your workspace.

An important note: don’t delete old campaigns unless absolutely necessary. Deleting a campaign removes all its historical data, which might be valuable for future analysis. Turning a post into an inactive post preserves this history while removing it from your active view.

Pruning Your Audiences and Budgets at the Ad Set Level

After decluttering your campaigns, the next level of mess is often inside the ad sets. This is where you control targeting, placements, and budget - and it's a common area for redundancy and wasted spend to hide.

Consolidate Your Ad Sets and Fight Audience Overlap

It's a common mistake to create dozens of micro-segmented ad sets, each with tiny budgets, hoping one will be a magic bullet. For example, you might see separate ad sets for a 1% Lookalike Audience of website visitors, a 1% Lookalike of video viewers, and a 1% Lookalike of page engagers. While slightly different, these audiences are likely 80-90% the same people.

When you have significant audience overlap, you force your ad sets to compete against each other in the ad auction, driving up your own costs - a process known as "self-cannibalization." Instead of hyper-segmenting, your ad account cleanup should consolidate similar audiences into broader ad sets and give Meta's algorithm more room to work. Especially with features like Advantage+ campaigns, broad targeting often outperforms tightly segmented groups.

Review your active ad sets. If you find multiple ad sets targeting very similar groups, pause the weaker performers and combine their budgets into the single best-performing one.

Clean Up Your Custom Audiences List

Over time, your "Audiences" tab in Meta Business Suite can become a graveyard of old, irrelevant lists. Think "Attendees for September 2021 Webinar" or an outdated customer list uploaded two years ago.

Navigate to your Audiences dashboard and sort your list by "Date Created" or "Last Edited." Go through and delete any audience that fits these criteria:

• Populated rules from old website events or pixels that no longer exist.
• One-off lists for past events or promotions that are no longer relevant.
• Audiences that are "Too Small" to deliver ads.

A clean audience list makes creating new campaigns faster and ensures you're building on your best, most relevant data sources.

Refreshing Your Creative Library

Finally, we get down to the creative level. Even with perfect campaigns and audiences, stale, underperforming ad creative is a quick way to see performance decline due to ad fatigue.

Identify Your Creative Winners and Losers

Within each active ad set, you should be testing multiple ads. Your cleanup process is the perfect time to review what’s working and what isn't. Open an ad set and organize your ads by your most important metric (like ROAS, Cost per Result, or CTR).

Rigidly turn off ads that are clear losers. These are the ads that are spending money but delivering few, if any, results. By pausing them, you force the ad set budget to go toward your proven winners, which can immediately improve performance. At the same time, identify your best-performing ads. Take note of the common themes - is it video? User-generated content? A specific headline hook? These insights should inform your next round of creative development.

Organize Your Media Naming

Just like with campaigns, your ad-level naming conventions matter. It's frustrating to dig through an account looking for "that one UGC video with the dog in it." Adopting a simple naming structure for your creative helps track performance and find assets easily.

A helpful format could be: [Creative Concept]_[Format]_[Key Element]

Examples:

• CustomerTestimonial_1x1Video_DrSmith
• ProductDemo_9x16Reel_RedSweater
• 5-StarReview_Carousel_FreeShippingGraphic

A good naming system can prevent you from having to click "Edit Ad" a dozen times just to figure out which creative is which.

Technical Housekeeping: Check Your Pixel and Events

Your cleanup isn't complete without a quick technical check-up. Flawed data can undermine every decision you make in Ads Manager, so you need to trust what the platform is telling you.

Test Your Events in Events Manager

A misconfigured pixel is a marketer's silent killer. If your "Purchase" event is firing twice, your ROAS will look twice as good as it really is. If "Add To Cart" isn't firing at all, you can't run effective retargeting campaigns for cart abandoners.

Go to your ad account's Events Manager and use the "Test Events" tool. Enter your website URL and click through your entire conversion process as if you were a customer - visit a product page, add something to your cart, initiate checkout, and complete a purchase. As you take each action, make sure the corresponding event shows up correctly in the Test Events tool. If it doesn't, you've found a critical leak to fix.

Review Your Aggregated Event Measurement

For those advertising to iOS users, reviewing your prioritized events is a must. Under Aggregated Event Measurement in Events Manager, you have eight spots to tell Meta which conversion events are most important to your business. Make sure these are configured in the correct order of priority (e.g., Purchase at the top, followed by Initiate Checkout, etc.). Events that aren't one of your top eight aren’t always reported for certain iOS 14+ users, so it's a small check that can have a big impact on your reporting accuracy.

Final Thoughts

Performing a deep clean of your Facebook Ads account may feel more like administrative work than marketing, but the clarity and performance gains are well worth it. By archiving old campaigns, consolidating audiences, refreshing creative, and performing a quick technical checkup, you turn a chaotic dashboard into a fine-tuned machine that helps you make better, more profitable decisions.

Speaking of keeping your marketing organized, a cluttered content calendar is just as bad as a messy ad account. Keeping track of all the videos, images, and copy across various platforms can become completely chaotic. This is where we built our product, Postbase, to simplify our own creative workflow, by having one visual calendar for all our organic social posts, we can map out our content strategy at a glance, helping keep our creative pipeline streamlined long before assets ever make it into an ad. We built Postbase to help run an organized process since we were juggling too much.