Why Facebook Metrics Never Work Out The Way You Plan?

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What is the Problem?

Why Facebook Metrics Never Work Out The Way You Plan?

Are you tracking your Facebook metrics?

Or you still wondering what works best on your Facebook page?

Have you ever thought why your Facebook Metrics is not showing you the data you wanted to see?

I have answers to all your questions:

The answer is you are tracking the wrong metrics for your campaigns, which is leading to make blunders again and again. This article will help you understand where you are going wrong and which metrics are the most important that you need to keep an eye on.

The strategy / game plan of Facebook Ads at your agency is designed by your facebook ads manager (or) ppc specialist
Let the strategy comes from data. Have you ever derived your game plan by examining your facebook metrics.
Give a try for it, Let your Facebook Metrics Existing data to predict your future Data.

Reporting is a crucial part of Facebook advertising. That’s why each of your ad campaigns should always have a clear goal and a set of metrics through which you can measure its performance. Facebook’s dashboard offers a range of tracking mechanisms that will help you focus on the results you care about. That being said, the analytics Facebook provides sometimes report on proprietary metrics that aren’t always intuitive to understand.

If you’re using Facebook ads to help you ramp up your Facebook marketing efforts, here are the important Facebook metrics you need to understand according to your campaign goal to measure and improve your Facebook ad performance.

One can create Facebook Ad Campaign based on different goals that they have:

  • For Lead Generation Campaigns & For Campaigns to Make Sales.
  • “Content Awareness” Campaigns (driving traffic to specific blog posts).
  • Video Ads.

There are some important metrics which need to be analyzed for any goal category since these depict  the baseline understanding of the ad and campaign performance. We will first get to know about these common important Facebook Ads Metrics and then dive specifically into each of the goal categories.

1. Common Important Facebook Ads Metrics:

Impressions:

Impressions are an important metric for all of your campaigns, no matter what your goals may be. In Facebook advertising, impressions represent how many times your ad was served within a certain amount of time. In a brand awareness campaign, you might not care whether prospects actually end up converting into a lead. But you do need to know how many times your ad is being served across all of your advertising channels.

Many vendors will guarantee a cost-per-one thousand impressions or CPM. This allows you to accurately budget your spend on impressions as well as hold your vendor responsible for the performance of your campaign. The more targeted the impression, the higher your CPM will probably be.

Facebook metrics

Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM):

It is the average cost to show your ad 1,000 times. It varies depending on the demand for the audience you’re targeting at the time you’re running ads. Also note that it may be cheaper to run the exact same ad on one day compared to the next. You don’t have much control over this, but you may notice that some audiences net higher CPMs on a regular basis. It’s all about supply and demand, so make sure you’re always testing out different audiences.

facebook ad metrics

Frequency:

It talks about the average number of times each individual has seen your ad and is calculated by Impressions divided by Reach. This is an important metric to pay attention to to make sure you’re not over saturating your audience with your ads. An optimum range would be keep your Frequency under 4 for ads being shown in the News Feed and under 8 for ads shown in the Right Sidebar.

facebook kpi metric

Amount Spent:

It is the amount you’ve spent running your ads so far. This is set by you in the Budget section of your ad sets. The term ‘spent today’ however means the amount spend on your ad set since 12am today. If you set a daily budget for an ad set, you’ll see your progress towards the budget in the later term.

Engagement:

Engagement measures the number of times someone took action on your posts. That could mean clicking a link, sharing your post, making a reaction or leaving a comment. There are a couple of ways to track engagement. The first is through Facebook Insights.

Why You Should Measure Engagement

Engagement is one of the most important Facebook metrics you can track. For one, engagement is a sign that people actually like the content you’re sharing. But another reason engagement is so valuable is it may give your posts more exposure to your audience.

Facebook thus uses an algorithm to determine where your posts show up in your followers’ News Feed. The purpose of the algorithm is to surface posts users are most likely interested in.

If one of your posts receives a ton of engagement, that signals to Facebook that it’s popular, so they’ll be more likely to surface it to your followers.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS):

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is defined as revenue divided by advertising spend. This metric should be used for advertisers looking to drive sales immediately. The higher the return on ad spend, the better. Most advertisers look to at least break even on their advertising campaigns with a ROAS greater than 100%. If you look at lifetime value, though, you can afford to have a lower ROAS target.

How you measure ROAS:

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) = revenue / ad cost

When evaluating your ROAS results, make sure to consider your advertising budget and click volume. We recommend getting at least 100 clicks on an ad before assessing your ROAS performance.

Keep in mind that if your goal is to build brand awareness or drive engagement, ROAS should not be their primary metric. Revenue is important, but new customers from a branding campaign are just starting to learn about your business. It will take time to nurture their interest before they make a purchase.

facebook metrics tools

Clicks:

The actual number of clicks on the ad. A click is also counted if someone ‘Liked’ your fan page right from the ad itself. Regardless of the kind of ads you run, you’ll invariably get a ton of clicks that don’t matter. Yes, there is such a click, specially the ones on the name of your page, on the Like button, or on the See More button if you’ve got some long ad copy. Since your objective keeps varying, most of these clicks might seem irrelevant but can be helpful for those working on all the different goals and trying to reach as many potential audience as possible.

This is a good metric to use to estimate the number of people who visited your opt-in page (unless you’re sending people to the same opt-in page from all different sources, which is not recommend).

facebook metrics api

Read Facebook Metrics Simplified: What Marketers Need To Know

Social Clicks:

This shows how many clicks you received from an ad with social context (i.e. with information about a user’s friend(s) who connected with your page, event, or application). Again, this is only applicable when you advertise within Facebook for fan pages, groups, or events.

facebook video metrics

Click-through Rate (CTR):

It is the percent of people who saw your ad and clicked over to your opt-in page. Calculated by taking the number of Link Clicks and dividing it by Impressions. The higher the CTR, the more interested people are in your ad.

Here is how you measure CTR:

CTR = # of clicks / # of impressions.

facebook metrics defined

Google Adwords Metrics can also help you understand how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website. You can use your CTR to gauge how closely your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings.

CPC :

It is the average cost of each click from your ad over to your website. Calculated by taking the Amount Spent divided by the number of Link Clicks.

If your objective is to drive as much interest as possible at the cheapest cost, you want to spend more on ads with lowers CPCs.

Here is how you measure CPC:

CPC = ad cost / # of clicks

Similar to measuring the impact of impressions, remember that the placement of your ad makes a big difference on your CTR and CPC. Ads shown in the news feed generally have higher CTRs and higher CPCs than those in the right-hand column. News feed ads are larger in size and mixed in with a user’s organic content. Many people may click on news feed ads without realizing they are even ads.

facebook campaign metrics 1

Leads:

It is the number of people who signed up on your landing page after clicking on your Facebook ad.

Cost per Lead:

It tells how much each sign-up has cost you so far. Calculated by taking the Amount Spent and dividing it by the number of Leads.

This is important because the more leads you get, the higher chance you have of making a sale, and the more sales you will eventually end up with. The basic idea is that the cheaper you can get those leads, the less you can spend on advertising to make a sale, and the more profitable you will get.

Calculate the cost per lead by taking the total amount you spent on that particular ad and dividing it by the number of leads you’ve got.

If you spent $100 on ads and you got 25 leads, that would be a cost of $4 per lead.

Top facebook metric

2. For Lead Generation Campaigns & For Campaigns to Make Sales:

Social Impressions :

Social impressions tell you how many times your ad has been shown to a Facebook user with social context (i.e. with information about a user’s friend(s) who connected with your page, event, or application). This is applicable only for advertising within Facebook, such as for fan pages, events, or apps.

ffacebook metrics explained

Conversions :

Measurement of how many people responded to your call-to-action. This counts actions from the ad itself and includes when someone visits your fan page and then clicks ‘Like.’

Conversions refer to actions taken on your website. This could mean different things to different businesses. In general, it refers to the desired action you want to take place. For example, it could refer to adding a product to a cart, checking out or entering an email address.

Cost-Per-Conversion :

Calculates your cost per conversion, so you can see how much you pay for a new fan, an event RSVP, or a new group member.

A metric that many marketers use to determine advertising effectiveness is the advertising spend divided by the number of conversions, or cost per action (CPA). The lower the CPA, the more conversions you are getting for less.

How you measure CPA:

CPA = ad cost / # of conversions.

metric facebook

Checkouts :

It is the number of people who converted to customers from your ad. This requires you to have set up conversion tracking on the “thank you” page people see after completing their purchase.

Cost per Checkout :

It tells how much each sale has cost you so far. Calculated by taking the Amount Spent and dividing it by the number of Checkouts.

facebook page metric

What to Do With That Data :

Cost Per Lead is your most important metric for lead generation campaigns. If your leads are more expensive than you’d like – I try not to pay more than $2.50 per lead – then use these numbers to figure out why they’re so high:

  • Divide Link Clicks by Leads to find your landing page’s conversion rate. If it’s below 30% there are lots of things you can do to try improving it.
  • CTR Links number is low (below 1%), either your ad creative isn’t compelling or you’re targeting the wrong audience.
  • CPM is high, you should try out a different audience.

For campaigns to make sales, your priority is how many Checkouts you got and the cost per each. Ideally your Cost Per Checkout is a lot lower than the actual price of your product.

If your CTR Links number is low (below 1%), either your ad creative isn’t compelling or you’re targeting the wrong audience.

If your CPM is high, you should try out a different audience.

Look at the overall sales conversion rate of your sales page using Google Analaytics. It’s possible that Facebook ad traffic isn’t interested in opening their wallet to you, but that warmer traffic from your blog or social media is more willing to buy if that’s the case, trying a retargeting strategy to show Facebook ads to your previous site visitors.

3. For Content Awareness Campaigns (driving traffic to specific blog posts) :

Actions :

The number of people who took the action desired from the ad itself, such as ‘Liking’ your fan page or responding to your event.

Before you even start a campaign, you should know your desired action. It could be any of the following:

  • Page Like
  • Link Click
  • Video Play
  • Share
  • App Install
  • Event RSVP
  • Something Else

If you don’t know your desired action — and it had better be something concrete — you won’t be able to measure success. And when you can’t measure success, you’ll cling to metrics that don’t matter to tell your story.

facebook metrics glossary

Cost Per Action :

Depending on the ad or campaign, Facebook includes actions that may not be relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.

As a result, an ad or campaign may appear more successful than it is if you calculate Cost Per Action and include actions that don’t represent success. You will want to monitor the amount the desired action costs for each ad in your campaign. To accomplish this, you’ll need to pull out those desired actions and then divide the total spent by that number.

Customer Engagement :

When focused on branding, you can use metrics like click-through-rate (CTR) and conversions to measure customer engagement. While it may seem counterintuitive to track engagement, you need to understand if users are responding to your ad content.

Knowing your audience is responding to your ad content will allow you to make better decisions and actively respond to low audience engagement.

CTR is a great metric to track customer engagement through channels such as social media and paid search. Tracking this metric will allow you to measure the ratio of clicks to impressions from your ads.

Conversions are useful on other channels such as the display network, where user behavior is different. On banner ads, where your ads are competing more to get the attention of a reader than on other channels, conversions are a more accurate benchmark to measure performance.

Reach :

Reach is one of the least complex metrics in your brand awareness measurement stack. It simply refers to the unique people who are receiving impressions from an advertisement. Reach may be lower than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions.

This metric is important for because it further breaks down your impression metrics. Now you have a better understanding of how many unique introductions you are gaining from your campaign.

facebook metric

New Leads :

If your goal is lead generation, then you need to make sure that your ads are helping you convert visitors into leads. How many people converted on your offer and opted in to continue their relationship with your company?

key facebook metrics

aNew Customers :

Were you able to drive new customers from all that Facebook advertising? If so, what was the conversion rate from visitor to customer compared to the same conversion rate on a different social network. You should have the data to make such strategic decisions.

Running content awareness ads without paying attention to people’s actions on your site is a waste of your money. Are people clicking on your ads, reading your posts but then leaving your site? That would tell me that your site needs to be optimized to capture more sign-ups.

What to Do With That Data :

Aside from the number of Leads your Content Awareness Campaign got you, here’s what else to consider:

If your CPC (Link) is higher than $1.00 (the maximum I’ll spend on clicks over to my blog posts), then checkout your CTR Link number. If it’s lower than 1%, either your ad creative isn’t compelling enough, or you’re targeting the wrong audience with those ads. You can try testing out a different topic with the same audience first, and then looking for a new one if the CTR doesn’t improve.

For Video Ads :

Video Views :

It is the number of times your video has been viewed for 3 seconds or more.

Average % of Video Viewed :

It talksabout the percent of your video that was actually seen by all the people who “viewed” it.

Video Views to 75% :

It tells what percent of people who “viewed” your video actually watched it until the 75% mark. (That’s almost as good as watching it to the end, don’t you think?)

Video Engagement :

Here you’ll find your video’s total engagement, a breakdown of the likes, comments, and shares on both your original post, and re-shares as well as any negative feedback on your video – when people decide to hide your video from their News Feed or report it as inappropriate.

Engagement is the best measure of how much your video resonated with your audience. If you can understand what types of videos cause viewers to take action, you can better match your content to your audience and reach new people.

If a video has a high negative feedback rate, figure out why and take action. You are likely to also see some negative feedback on any post with high reach numbers, but if you see a spike in negative feedback for a particular post you should work to understand the root cause.

Some people have found that video ads have worked wonders in terms of driving traffic over to an opt-in page and converting visitors.

What to Do With That Data :

Take a look at a few numbers to see how you can improve this campaign next time:

  • If the Average % of Video Viewed is low, the beginning of your video may not be compelling enough to grab people’s attention and hold it. Or your video may be simply too long; even an engaged viewer can only hold on for so long.
  • Check out your Cost Per Lead. If it’s lower than your average cost per leads for non-video campaigns, keep running this video ad! If you’re getting more expensive costs per lead, don’t despair. Those videos views make work in your favor if you re-target those people with a specific ads for something they can’t say no to. After all, if they have watched your video, even if it’s just a part of it, they’ve already started the process of getting to know you.

As you can see, there are a ton of Facebook metrics you can track. It’s up to your brand to decide which ones are important to you. Use the stats in this post as a guideline for where to start from. Also when it comes to your business, one of the other important things every website gets fitted with is Google Analytics Metrics Tracking as well.

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