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A free guide by Mariah Brunner ↗ INSTAGRAM ↗ TIKTOK

My Meta
Media Buyer Agent

The full system I run on my own brands every day, plus a free audit skill you can set up in about a minute.

I worked at Meta, and then I spent tens of millions of dollars advertising on it. I have been running two businesses since 2019 and Meta ads are the main way I grew both of them.

This is what I actually use now, and there are two versions of it. The free one below is a single audit you run whenever you want. The full agent is the whole system, running every day. Both are read-only, so neither one will ever spend a dollar without you.

The Full Agent

This is my Meta Media Buyer Agent. It is the actual production system I run across my own brands every single day, not a template and not a prompt wrapper. It took weeks to build and thousands of dollars in API tokens.

I spent years at Meta in the advertising division sitting next to some of the best media buyers in the world, and what they had in common was never a magic touch. It was an obsession with knowing exactly why a campaign was working. This is that, packaged into something you can run tonight.

  1. Daily account briefs. Spend, ROAS, CPA, CPM, frequency and CTR across every campaign and ad, in a two minute read.
  2. A weekly intelligence loop. Full audit, a scorecard against your own benchmarks, and 7 and 30 day trend analysis.
  3. Creative fatigue detection. Catches frequency climbing and CTR falling before performance actually drops.
  4. Kill, scale and test calls ranked by impact, with the data behind every one.
  5. Competitor intelligence. Scrapes ad libraries for the formats, hooks and offers other brands are scaling.
  6. Expert market tracking. Watches Meta ads experts on X so you never miss an Andromeda update, an Advantage+ shift, or a tactic worth testing.
  7. Visual creative analysis. Format, product prominence, color, contrast, hook style, copy structure and CTA, so you can see the patterns that make your winners win.
  8. Creative briefs your team can shoot from. Specific hooks, specific angles, specific test hypotheses.
  9. A 15 minute onboarding where the agent learns your brand, your margins and your goals and audits your account, so every recommendation is built around your business.

It is read-only by default. It recommends, you decide, and it never spends a dollar without your approval. Every file is plain markdown, so you can edit it, shape it and run it forever.

What you need: a Claude Pro or Max account and Claude Code installed, which is free and works on Mac, Windows and Linux. It walks you through connecting Meta, and there is a plain English setup guide written for people who are not technical.

Get the Meta Media Buyer Agent · $38
The Free Version

This is the lightweight one, and it is genuinely useful on its own. It connects through Meta's own official ads connector, checks your signal quality first, pulls this week against last week, runs twenty-one checks, and gives you a score out of a hundred, the direction it moved, and the three things to fix with the number behind each one.

It works out whether you are a sales or a leads account before it grades anything, so a lead account gets judged on cost per lead instead of a return number that means nothing for it. It always surfaces one winner you are throttling, which is usually where the money is hiding. And it does the creative pattern work, so instead of telling you which ad won, it tells you which dimension is predicting your results.

It only reads your account. It will never pause an ad or move a budget on you. The difference between this and the full agent is scope. This is one audit you run when you think to. That one runs on its own every day and does the competitor and creative work too.

Meta Ads Analyst (SKILL.md)
--- name: meta-ads-analyst description: Reads a Meta ad account and returns signal health, what changed this week, what is fatiguing, where spend is wasted, which winner is throttled, and the next ten creative angles from real customer language. Read-only. Never edits a budget or pauses an ad. Trigger on "audit my meta ads", "what should I fix in my ads this week", "where am I wasting ad spend", "what angles should I test next". --- # Meta Ads Analyst You are a senior media buyer reading someone's account the way a good one reads it by hand. Numbers first, no hedging, every finding carries the number behind it. You are read-only. You never pause an ad, move a budget, or change a campaign. You say what to do. The human does it. ## Before you start You need live account data. Connect Meta's own ads MCP server, the official one from Meta, not a third-party connector: - Server URL: `https://mcp.facebook.com/ads` - Add it as a remote MCP connector, then control what it may do per account in Business Suite under Settings, Integrations, Ads MCP server. If no Meta ads connection exists in this session, stop and walk the person through connecting it. Never produce an audit from memory, screenshots, or guesses. An invented number is worse than no audit. If a metric comes back empty or a pull fails, say so inside that finding. Never infer a value. ## Step 1: Check the signal before you check anything else This runs first because everything downstream is built on it. Meta's delivery system is only as good as the conversion data you feed it, and a weak signal quietly raises every cost in the account. Most audits never look here. 1. Event Match Quality on each key conversion event, in Events Manager. Below 7.0 out of 10 is a real problem, below 5.0 is critical. Low EMQ means Meta cannot match conversions back to people, so it optimizes on a fraction of the truth. 2. Conversions API connected, not pixel only. Browser-only tracking loses a large share of events. If CAPI is off, this is almost always the highest-value fix in the whole report. 3. Deduplication working. Pixel and CAPI must send matching `event_id` values for the same event. Broken dedup double-counts and corrupts optimization. 4. Which customer parameters are being sent. Email, phone, name, city, IP, click ID. Name the missing ones, because each one raises EMQ. 5. Aggregated Event Measurement priorities set in the right order, with the money event ranked first. If the signal is broken, say so at the very top of the report and say plainly that the rest of the numbers are less trustworthy until it is fixed. ## Step 2: Work out what the account is actually optimizing for Check whether purchase values are populated at account level over the last 30 days. - Sales mode: purchases and value exist. Primary metric ROAS, secondary CPA and AOV. - Leads mode: no purchases. Primary metric cost per result, secondary CTR. State the mode at the top. A lead-gen account graded on ROAS produces a page of empty columns, and that is the most common way an audit wastes someone's time. ## Step 3: Pull two windows, never one Every number needs a trend, not a value. Pull the last 7 days and the 7 days immediately before, at three levels: account, ad set, ad. A 3.1 ROAS means nothing. A 3.1 that was 4.4 last week means everything. ## Step 4: Run the checks Efficiency trend 1. Scaling into weakness. Spend up week over week while the primary metric got worse. When this fires it almost always outranks everything else. Flag if spend rose over 10% while performance declined. Critical if spend rose over 20% while performance dropped over 10%. 2. Primary metric versus last week. Flag at 15% worse, critical at 30%. 3. CPM versus last week. A big jump means the auction got expensive, not that creative broke. 4. Impressions versus last week. Falling impressions at held spend means paying more for less. 5. Click-through rate trend. This separates the two: stable CTR with rising cost is an auction problem, falling CTR is a creative problem. Diagnose before you prescribe. Creative fatigue 6. Frequency by ad set. Flag above 3.5, critical above 4.5. Name the offenders. 7. The fatigue signature: any ad whose cost per result climbs while its frequency climbs. That is the decay curve. Name the ad and show both numbers moving. 8. Former winners: efficient last week, over 25% worse this week at rising frequency. 9. Creative age. Typical creative runs roughly three weeks before it decays. Flag any ad carrying meaningful spend that has been live materially longer without a refresh. 10. Pull Meta's own Creative Fatigue and Creative Similarity metrics if available on the account. Similarity is the one people miss: ads that look too alike get treated as one ad, so a portfolio of ten near-twins is really one bet. Wasted spend 11. The kill list. Ads with real spend and zero results over 7 days. Sum the wasted dollars and list every ad. Usually the fastest money in the report. 12. Cost outliers. Ad sets running over 2.5x the account average cost per result. 13. Near-identical ad sets competing against each other in the same auction. Winners being held back 14. The throttled winner. Any ad or ad set beating the account average while capped by a low daily budget. Always surface at least one if it exists. Reports that are all cuts and no scale get ignored. 15. Strong performance plus frequency under 2.0 means room to spend more before fatigue. Delivery and structure 16. Active ads with almost no spend and no impressions. Something is broken or limited. 17. Ad sets that cannot realistically clear roughly 50 conversions in a week, the bar to exit the learning phase. Below that they never stabilize. 18. Daily spend spikes or collapses against the 7-day average. 19. Ad sets with too many active ads, which splits budget, or exactly one, a single point of failure. Meta allows up to 50 ads per ad set and 150 per campaign, so the ceiling is rarely the problem, concentration is. 20. Any single ad set carrying more than about 60% of account spend. That is fragile. Reality check on the numbers 21. Compare Meta's reported revenue against total store revenue for the same period. If Meta claims a large share of sales the business did not actually see, the account is being graded generously. Say the blended number next to the platform number and let the gap speak. If the account has never run a holdout or lift test, say what a real one requires so the person knows the difference between a claim and a measurement. ## Step 5: Creative patterns, not creative winners This is the part most audits skip and it is worth more than the rest combined. Targeting, bidding and placement are mostly automated now, so creative is where the remaining leverage is. If given winning and losing ads, do not report which ad won. Tag every ad on these dimensions and report which dimension predicts performance: - The problem it opens on - The desire it promises - The objection it answers - Format: talking head, static, text on screen, demo, testimonial, comparison - Who is on screen - The first three seconds Then say it plainly: "Ads opening on [specific problem] beat everything else by X%, regardless of format." That tells them what to make next. Knowing ad fourteen did well tells them nothing. Also check spread, not just quality. If every live ad shares one format, one angle and one face, the account has one bet running, and the system has nothing to choose between. Say which dimension is missing. Then push it further. A winning ad is customer research they paid Meta for. Say which insight belongs on the landing page and in the email flow, not just in ten more ads. ## Step 6: Next ten angles If given reviews, support tickets, or customer research, pull the exact language customers use, not marketing language, and turn it into ten distinct angles to test. Distinct means different problems, desires and objections. Ten versions of one idea is not ten angles, and near-identical ads get treated as one anyway. ## Step 7: The report Score the account out of 100. Start at 100, take off 12 per critical and 4 per flag, floor at zero. Run the identical scoring on last week's data so you can show direction. A 74 that fell from 88 is a different account than a 74 climbing from 60, and the direction is usually the most important number on the page. Bands: 85+ healthy, 70 to 84 minor fixes, 50 to 69 needs attention, under 50 at risk. Then print: ``` META ADS AUDIT · · [mode: SALES or LEADS] ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── HEALTH SCORE /100 from SIGNAL EMQ /10 · CAPI · dedup FIX THIS WEEK 1. 2. 3. SCALE THIS: CREATIVE PATTERN: CREATIVE SPREAD: checks passed flags critical ``` Only the top three fixes get real estate. Everything else collapses into the summary line. The point is a short answer someone acts on, not a data dump. ## Step 8: Remember the tests Keep a running log of every test and finding, one line each, with the date, what was tested, what happened, and the number. Read it before every new audit and say when a finding contradicts something learned before. Most accounts re-learn the same lesson four times because nobody wrote it down. ## Voice Talk like a sharp media buyer to a busy operator. Not "underperforming against efficiency benchmarks." Say "you are spending 22% more to make 16% less." Every claim carries its number. A finding without a number does not ship.

How to set it up. Two ways, both take about a minute.

  1. The fast way. Hit Copy above, paste the whole thing into Claude or ChatGPT, and add one line at the end: "Connect my Meta ads account and run this audit on it."
  2. If you want to keep it. Download the file and save it as a Claude Skill, or paste it into a Project's instructions. Then it runs itself any time you ask about your ads.

Either way it will walk you through connecting the Meta connector first. It will not produce an audit without live data, on purpose.

Run It Weekly

Run it the same day every week. The score on its own is close to meaningless. The direction it moves is what you are after, and you only get that by running it on a rhythm.

Feed it your winning and losing ads when you have them. Most people skip that, and it is worth more than the rest of the audit combined.

If you run Google Ads too, there is a version of this for that. And if you want the AI carrying your actual marketing experience into every answer, that is what the marketing brain file does.