“The greatest value of data is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” When it comes to Facebook advertising, one of the most common questions after 'Do Facebook ads work?' is 'How much do they cost?' The truth is Facebook advertising can be incredibly cost-effective when carried out strategically. But if you do it without a clear focus, you’ll find yourself losing money, and the system will spiral out of control.
The good news is that you can transform data into actionable insights that will delight your clients. How? By understanding the nuances of Facebook's metrics and presenting them effectively. Here is a guide that will help you take control of Facebook ad data to create client reports that justify your ad spend and drive future business.
What is a Facebook Ads Report?
One tool that can help you monitor your advertising campaigns, assess their success, and maximize your ad expenditure is a Facebook Ads Report. Ads Reporting gives you the ability to generate, personalize, share, export, and schedule reports on the effectiveness of your ads according to a customizable set of parameters. You may create recurring email reports and manage your campaigns with the information found in Ads Reporting.
What Can We Learn from a Facebook Ads Report?
You may find out how well your ads are doing and how close you are to achieving your business objectives by using Facebook Ads reports. The data in these reports allow you to see who is interacting with your ads and where you may make improvements. You can learn several things from Facebook Ads reports, including CTR, performance, demographics, platform, and delivery.
But beyond the usual click-through rate metrics, Facebook Ads reports spill the financial beans. Most of all, through ROI (Return on Investment) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), you can measure the profitability of your ad spend directly. You can use these metrics to pick the winners from the losers in your ad campaigns and spend your ad money wisely.
Why Use Facebook Ads Reports?
Delivering value to your clients can be effectively demonstrated through reporting on Facebook Ads. Here are some ways that these reports can help you and your client. Employing the reports, you can:
- Enhanced Transparency and Trust: Detailed and clear reports help to show your clients exactly how their ads are performing. This builds trust, transparency and credibility. As a result, the clients become confident in your advertising strategies.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making and Optimization: Facebook Ads reports aid in identifying trends, strengths, and weaknesses, enabling informed decisions and continuous optimization of campaigns for improved results.
- Upselling Opportunities and Client Retention: Upon seeing the positive results of your campaigns, the clients tend to increase their advertising budget. This enhances performance, creates opportunities for upselling and helps retain clients.
- Communication with Stakeholders: Ad reports help clients communicate campaign performance effectively, align expectations, and ensure engagement in the advertising process with stakeholders. They can provide clear evidence of campaign performance.
- Planning of Ad Campaigns: Facebook Ads reports strategize future campaigns. One can tailor them to target the right audiences, optimize ad content, and set realistic goals.
- Allocating Resources: Reports reveal campaign performance, guiding resource allocation. Investing in high-performing ads and optimizing underperforming ones maximizes advertising budget efficiency and impact.
10 Essential Metrics and KPIs for the Facebook Ads Report
“Tracking the right metrics and improving your ads accordingly is no small challenge.”
Running Facebook Ads doesn’t alone provide all the results that a marketer would be anticipating. One would need to analyze the performance of these ads and optimize their campaigns accordingly.
Since your money is on the line, you’ve got to measure the ROI you’re gaining from your campaigns carefully. Many marketers don’t think beyond the likes and reach of their Facebook posts. And that’s a terrible way to measure the success of your campaigns.
Check these Facebook Ad success metrics that you can bank on to judge the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns.
For Audience Reach and Engagement:
These metrics help you understand how well your ads are reaching and engaging your target audience.
1. Frequency:
Frequency provides information about how often your target audience sees your ad, helping to calculate the audience response and your campaign's success. Frequency is the benchmark for understanding if you’re about to reach your potential audience correctly or not!
For that simple reason, it’s a really good social media performance metric! When it comes to understanding how to define success on Facebook Ads, frequency may tell you more about how people are responding to your ad than you’d initially think. For an ad campaign to be successful, you need to track the frequency of your ads so that you don’t show your ads again and again to the same people who don’t convert.
Typically, a frequency range is one to two per ad set, depending on budget and audience size. It is crucial to monitor frequency with other metrics to avoid ad fatigue and optimize performance, as the metric is estimated using sampled data. Frequency is calculated as the number of impressions divided by the reach.
2. Impressions:
This is defined as the number of times your ad is shown. More impressions lead to higher brand awareness for your company. If you’re reaching new customers, promoting an attitude about your brand or launching a new product, brand awareness should be one of your top priorities.
Watch this number closely – if it stops increasing, your bid may have fallen out of the suggested range.
3. Clicks:
This is defined as the number of times your ad is clicked on. Clicks are a way to measure customer engagement and level of interest. The number of clicks tells you how many times people came to your website because of your ads. Depending on what you are promoting, this could include everything from app installs to page likes (and much more).
For Ad Performance and Efficiency:
These metrics provide insights into how well your ads are performing and how efficiently they are converting interest into action.
4. Click-through Rate (CTR):
CTR tells you how well your ad is performing and how many people care to click it. CTR on Facebook varies very much depending mainly on two factors:
- Quality of your offering (photo, post, ad, video)
- Your target audience
A higher CTR % lets you know that the message-to-audience match is strong. A stronger average click-through rate will, in turn, drive down your CPC (cost per click) and cost per engagement.
5. Conversions:
Conversions refer to actions taken on your website. This could mean different things to different businesses. In general, it refers to the action you want to take. For example, it could refer to adding a product to a cart, checking out or entering an email address.
Put conversions in context by measuring the number of conversions divided by the number of page visits or conversion rate. Your conversion rate indicates how likely it is that a visitor will take the desired action. When considering what to advertise, choose products that have a high conversion rate. Also, keep in mind that a higher CTR does not equate to a high conversion rate.
How you measure conversion rate:
Conversion rate = # of conversions / # of clicks
6. Relevance Score:
Ad relevance score is a metric in ad reporting that provides an estimate of how relevant an ad is to its target audience, based on how the ad is performing and other factors. When your ad’s score is high, it’s more likely to be shown to your audience than other ads. You also pay less to reach more of your target audience.
The score will range from 1 to 10, 10 meaning your ad is highly relevant and 1 meaning your ad isn’t very relevant. It will be based on a number of factors, including positive feedback we expect from the people seeing your ad (ex, clicks, app installs, video views) and negative feedback (ex, someone clicks, I don’t want to see this on your ad).
For Cost Management:
These metrics help you understand and optimize the costs associated with your ad campaigns.
7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA):
Let’s say you want to capture a lead for your offer. You will hopefully know your conversion rate and, therefore, how much that lead is worth to your business. Therefore, you can calculate CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). Then it doesn’t matter if you spend $/£100 or 10,000. If your ads deliver for or less than your target CPA, then you’re winning!
8. Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM):
There might be times when you’re not getting many impressions or your conversions are more expensive than expected. If you’re paying for impressions (which is the case in most campaigns), looking at your CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) is the best way to find out.
When CPM increases, your overall results will become more expensive, regardless of how interesting your ad is or how many conversions you get. So, when results are not as expected, look at your CPM before considering new ads or targeting options.
Here is how you calculate CPM:
CPM = Ad cost 1,000 / # of impressions
9. Spend:
It’s common wisdom that you need to build targeted, high-quality traffic to your website.
But why?
Generating likes and traffic from your ads will give you little, if any, revenue.
Therefore, in the long run, it can be a challenge to build a sustainable business. Since you’re paying to get your brand in front of prospects, you need to have information on the money that you’re making to guide future ad strategy. It will let you know if you need to shift your budget from one ad or campaign to another and raise or lower the spending of an effective or underperforming ad.
For Social Proof and Impact:
These metrics focus on the social influence and the wider impact of your ads within the network.
10. Social Impressions:
This is the number of times your ad was viewed and included social information. Social impressions may be different than the number of unique people who viewed your ad. For example, if the ad is viewed by 3 people 2 times each and it includes information about a friend liking your Page, that means you have 6 social impressions. Social Impressions are comparable to views on paid media or open email marketing. The difference is that impressions put social media on a more even playing field.
Steps to Create Native Reports on Facebook Ads
Creating native reports on Facebook Ads is very easy. You can follow the steps given below:
Step 1: Access Ads Reporting
- Option 1: Open Meta Ads Manager, click on the Reports drop-down menu
- Select "Export table data."
- Choose "See all saved reports in Ads Reporting."
- Option 2: From the left menu bar in Ads Manager, scroll down to "Analyze & report," then click "Ads Reporting."
Step 2: Create a Report
- Click the "Create report" button.
- Choose to either:
- Start from a blank report: Create a report from scratch.
- Start from a template: Build upon pre-existing report templates.
Step 3: Customize Your Report
- Use breakdowns, metrics, filters, and attribution windows to tailor the report to your needs.
Step 4: Save and Export
- Save your custom report.
- Export the report data if needed.
Step 5: Access and Review Reports
- Navigate back to saved reports in Ads Reporting to view or edit your custom reports.
Dos and Don'ts to Create an Ideal Facebook Ads Report for Clients
It is practically possible to commit small mistakes that affect the overall quality of your Facebook Ads report. Remember to follow these promising Dos and Don’ts when building your Facebook Ads report –
Do:
- Set Clear Objectives: Start by defining specific goals for your Facebook Ads campaigns. Whether it's driving conversions, increasing brand awareness, or generating leads, clear objectives guide your analysis and reporting.
- Track Key Metrics: Focus on essential metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Conversion, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). These metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns and help you understand what's working.
- Segment Your Data: Break down your report by audience demographics, device type, and ad placement. This segmentation allows you to see how different groups are responding to your ads and tailor future campaigns accordingly.
- Include Visuals: Use graphs, charts, and tables to represent data visually. Visuals make your report easier to understand and highlight trends and patterns that might be missed in raw data.
- Provide Actionable Insights: Your report should go beyond just numbers; include recommendations based on the data. Suggest specific actions to improve future campaigns, like adjusting targeting, optimizing ad creatives or reallocating the budget.
Don't:
- Ignore Mobile Metrics: Given the significant portion of Facebook traffic from mobile devices, don’t neglect mobile-specific metrics like Mobile CTR and Mobile Conversions. Ignoring these can lead to a skewed understanding of your campaign's performance.
- Rely Solely on One Metric: Avoid focusing too much on a single metric like CTR or CPC. A comprehensive report should consider multiple metrics to provide a full picture of campaign performance.
- Overcomplicate the Report: Keep your report clear and concise. Too much data or overly complex analysis can overwhelm the reader. Stick to relevant metrics and insights that directly relate to your objectives.
- Ignore Underperforming Ads: It’s easy to focus on successful ads, but don't overlook those that didn’t perform well. Analyzing why certain ads failed is crucial for refining your strategy and avoiding similar mistakes in the future.
- Delay Reporting: Timeliness is key in digital marketing. Don’t wait too long to generate reports after a campaign ends. Regular and timely reporting allows for quicker adjustments and more agile campaign management.
Create Facebook Ads Reports on ReportGarden
To help you with your Facebook Ads campaign, ReportGarden measures and analyzes key performance indicators (KPIs), including reach, engagement, likes, and comments. Our reporting tool's features make it quick, simple, and enjoyable!
To create a Facebook Ads report using ReportGarden, you can follow these simple steps:
- Log in to ReportGarden for free
- Click REPORTS
- Reach the Templates section to select a suitable template to create a fresh report.
- Choose from a custom social media report example
- Link the Facebook account
- You will be redirected to Facebook's authentication screen
- Enter your credentials and let ReportGarden access your campaign performance data
- Make use of available widgets to build your report
- You can link your Google Adwords or MCC account and then select the type of report to generate.
ReportGarden provides a free Facebook Ads eBook to optimize client reporting by covering key campaign metrics, segmentation, dimensions, main filters, and Facebook Ads report templates. The guide is available for download.
FAQs
1. Where can I find Facebook Ads reports?
Facebook Ads reports can be found in Ads Reporting, where users can create custom reports or choose from suggested templates, save them, and access them at campaign, ad set, or ad level.
2. Where can I find clients on Facebook?
To find clients on Facebook, join appropriate groups, avoid spamming, start or join conversations, avoid hijacking posts, be persistent, and be mindful of group owners.
3. What are the 3 levels of Facebook Ads?
Facebook uses a three-level system for organizing ads: campaign, ad set, and ad. Developers can access the creative level, which is the fourth level in the API.
