Free Meta & Google Ads Scorecard for Dubai & UAE
A free 15-minute, 18-point self-audit you run on your own Meta and Google ad accounts. Sent straight to your inbox.
If you run Meta or Google ads in Dubai, or an agency runs them for you, you can see for yourself where your money goes. You do not need to hand anyone access to your account or wait on a report.
The Dubai Ad Account Scorecard is a free 15-minute self-audit. Open your Business Manager and Google Ads side by side, work through 18 checks across 5 sections, score each one 0, 1, or 2, and see exactly where your spend is working and where it is leaking.
Enter your email and it lands in your inbox, along with the Revenue Engineering newsletter.
What the Scorecard Checks
Eighteen checks across five sections, the same first-pass review a senior media buyer runs before touching a campaign. You score each one 0, 1, or 2 as you go, for a maximum of 36.
Section 1 — Ownership and Access
The foundation. If you do not own the accounts, you do not own the data, the audiences, or the pixel history.
You are the primary admin of the Business Manager, not your agency. If the agency owns the Business Manager, they own your pixel, your audiences, and your history. You should hold admin; the agency gets partner access.
Your ad account and pixel/dataset sit inside your own Business Manager. Assets created inside an agency's Business Manager rarely transfer cleanly. Your assets should live under your entity.
You have standalone admin access to Google Ads, not only the agency MCC. Access through the agency's manager account alone means one revoked login and you are locked out of your own spend history and conversion data.
You could revoke agency access today and still log in tomorrow. If the answer is no, your leverage in the relationship is zero. Ownership is what keeps an agency accountable.
Section 2 — Tracking and Measurement
Ads optimise toward the events you feed them. Weak tracking means the algorithm is optimising toward the wrong thing with your budget.
The Meta pixel fires correctly and shows no diagnostic errors. Check Events Manager. Duplicate events, mismatched domains, or missing parameters quietly degrade every campaign.
Server-side tracking (Conversions API) is live, not just the browser pixel. Since iOS privacy changes, browser-only tracking loses a meaningful share of conversions. CAPI recovers signal the pixel misses.
Your CPA is measured on real outcomes, not on clicks or "link clicks". A cost-per-lead that counts form fills but not qualified leads flatters the report and hides waste.
Conversion events are deduplicated across pixel and server. When browser and server both fire the same event without a shared event ID, you double-count and decisions get made on inflated numbers.
Google conversion tracking is verified and matches your CRM or checkout. A tag that fires is not the same as a conversion that closed. Tie Google conversions back to actual bookings or sales at least monthly.
Section 3 — Account Structure and Budget
Where the money physically goes. Structure is where overspend hides in plain sight.
The majority of budget sits on conversion objectives, not traffic or engagement. Traffic campaigns buy clicks, not customers. Paying for movement is not the same as paying for revenue.
You can name where every 1,000 AED of monthly spend goes and what it returns. If spend cannot be traced to a campaign and an outcome, it cannot be judged.
Retargeting and cold prospecting are separated, not blended in one campaign. Warm audiences convert cheaply and can flatter a mixed campaign's numbers, masking weak cold performance.
Budget is concentrated on what works, not spread thin across many small ad sets. Meta needs roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week to optimise. Fragmented budget never gets there.
Section 4 — Creative and Testing
The lever with the largest effect on cost. In a competitive market like Dubai, creative fatigue is fast and expensive.
You have more than one active creative angle in market. One creative is a single point of failure. When it fatigues, cost climbs with no backup.
Creatives are refreshed on a schedule, and you can see when each was last changed. Frequency climbing past roughly 3-4 on cold audiences with flat creative is a fatigue signal.
You test one clear variable at a time, not full rebuilds. Changing five things at once tells you the result but not the reason. Structured tests compound into a playbook.
Section 5 — Reporting and Transparency
How you know any of the above is true. If you cannot see it, you cannot manage it.
You receive a report that ties spend to business outcomes, not a screenshot of platform metrics. Impressions and reach are inputs. A useful report answers one question: what did this month's spend return?
You can log in and see live spend and results yourself, any day, without asking. Waiting for a monthly deck to learn how your money performed is a transparency gap.
How It Works
Enter your email.
No card, no form fields to fill in about your account. Just your email.
The scorecard lands in your inbox instantly.
The 18-point PDF arrives right away, no waiting, along with the Revenue Engineering newsletter.
Score your own accounts.
Open your Meta and Google Ads accounts side by side and work through the 18 checks. About 15 minutes.
Want it verified for you?
The Account Radar does it done-for-you: a media buyer at Ascensa checks your real data against these same 18 checks.
Why Transparency and Account Ownership Matter
Here is the risk most Dubai advertisers never get told about. Many agencies open the ad account under their own Business Manager, keep the client off the admin, and report results in a slide deck no one can verify. When the relationship ends, the advertiser can lose the account, the pixel history, and the audience data they paid to build.
Ascensa works the opposite way. Every account we manage is registered to the client's own entity, with the client holding admin. Every number we report ties back to something the client can see in their own account and reconcile against their own sales.
This scorecard carries the same standard into a tool anyone can run for free. Section 5 of the 18 checks is entirely about reporting and transparency, because if you cannot see it, you cannot manage it. Run it on your own accounts and you will know exactly where you stand, no access required.
The Account Radar
The free scorecard is the fast, self-serve pass. It shows you where to look. It does not tell you the exact size of each leak or the order to fix them in.
The Account Radar is a $120 productized audit where a media buyer at Ascensa reviews your actual Meta and Google accounts, verifies each of these 18 checks against your real data, and returns a prioritized findings report: what is leaking, how much it is likely costing, and the order to fix it. Human-reviewed by Ascensa, not an automated scan.
Learn about the Account RadarFrequently Asked Questions
See exactly where your ad spend goes, in 15 minutes, for free.
Eighteen checks across five sections. You run it on your own accounts. The scorecard lands in your inbox the moment you enter your email.
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