One of the common mistakes I see business owners make when running Facebook ads is that they don’t know what metrics to look at when analyzing their campaigns and how to set goals in order to scale the ads.
Today I’m going to teach you what Facebook ads metrics you need to analyze to optimize your campaigns.
The metrics that you want to analyze, go hand and hand with the main goal for the campaign you are running and the objective that you select inside of Facebook ads.
- Engagement Campaigns: Comments, likes, shares, posts saved.
- Website Traffic Campaigns: Link clicks, Link click-through rate (CTR), Cost per link clicks, landing page views
- Conversions: Results (# of purchases or leads), cost per result, Link clicks, Link click-through rate (CTR), Cost per link clicks.
- Brand awareness: Reach, Impressions, Cost per 1000 people reach, cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
Even though I analyze the metrics above based on the specific results that I want, here are some metrics that I always analyze in all of my reports.
- Frequency: The number of times one person sees the same ad. If the frequency is above 5, I update the ad.
- Impressions and reach: How many people and how many times my ad has been seen. These two help me understand if my ad is getting in front of the right amount of people.
- Link click-through rate (Link CTR): This is the number of link clicks divided by the number of impressions. This helps me understand if my audience is engaging with the ad that I’m running, to the point where they actually click to see the landing page.
Metrics I don’t care about:
- Clicks, click-through rate, and cost per click. These pertain to the clicks my ad is getting, this includes when people click the see more button, or the image to make it bigger, or scroll on the carousel ad. Instead of analyzing these, I analyze Link clicks, Link click-through rate and cost per Link click, because what I care about is sending people to the landing page.
After you know which metrics you need to analyze, next you need to define your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). These are the goals that you set for your campaigns to make sure you optimize and scale them. They are not only great for your Facebook and Instagram Ads but for your whole marketing strategy.
If you don’t know what value to give your KPI, run your new campaign for 7 days and monitor the numbers you see for the KPI that you want to set. For example, your KPI is Link CTR (click-through rate), and you got a 1% Link CTR in the last 7 days, set your KPI to be a little higher than 1%. I would set it to be 1.3%. That way you’ll start optimizing your campaign to achieve the 1.3% goal.
Once you have achieved your goal (let’s say you consistently keep getting 1.3% Link CTRs), raise your KPI by a couple more points. For this example, the new KPI would be 1.5%. This will force yourself to continue optimizing and scaling your campaigns!
BONUS TIP: Create your own custom report in Facebook ads and keep track of your numbers in an excel sheet so you can compare week by week.
Ana Katz Digital 