Facebook gives us tons of information when you dig into ad reporting.
While that sounds good, it can get confusing.
There is so much and you have to know where to go to see some of the details. In the end, people get confused and don’t look at the numbers their ads are getting or they look at the wrong numbers.
Here are the numbers I look at when I’m evaluating the performance of a campaign:
You can get to most of them by going to the columns field above where your campaigns are listed and selecting the performance and clicks option.
There are many others to chose from but I find most of my information in the performance and clicks set.
Result:
This is what you tell Facebook is the objective of your ad when you create your campaign.
This may be leads, link clicks, video views of various lengths or engagement or reach, or possibly sales.
Once you know your number from your “Money Math” you know what you can afford to spend on each of these. If you missed that article you can click here to read it.
If these numbers are in line with what you expect all is going well for this ad.
I would still look at the other numbers to evaluate the overall health of my campaign and how long before I’m going to need to change it. However, there are no big adjustments needed right now except maybe to add more budget so I can reach more people.
Link Clicks and CTR Link Clicks:
Link clicks are people clicking on a link in your ad to go to another page.
No matter what objective you chose the first number I look at is link clicks. This column shows how many people and what percentage of people who saw your ad clicked to see more.
This depends on what audience I’m targeting, but for a cold audience ( people who don’t know you) I’m looking for a 1% or better number. This tells me that the message in the ad is resonating with the people who see the ad.
If I’m targeting a warm or hot audience you can see numbers as high as 10% or more. You can see why having an audience that’s familiar with you can be valuable.
Most of the ads we create have a link in it to something, and if there is no link we move to the next numbers.
Clicks All:
This is every click that someone does on your ad. It can be clicking the see more if your ad is longer than 3 lines to clicking to watch or turn on the sound of a video or clicking on a link or it can be someone sharing or reacting to your ad.
I’m looking for at least 2X as many of these as I have link clicks.
Most of our ads are longer than the 3 lines so people need to read more. When they do, we’re getting more targeted people to our pages.
I want to use the text to screen out people who aren’t interested in what we’re offering so I’m concerned when this number is not at least 2X and if it’s over 6X I start to worry that our offer isn’t compelling enough.
Reach:
How many people have we reached?
If we’ve only reached a few hundred we aren’t spending enough or our audience is small.
What I’m looking for here is how much of the total audience have we reached?
If we have an audience of 2 million and we’ve only reached 10,000 we have a ways to go to get to the people we want to talk to.
Frequency:
How many times has each person seen the ad. This number is always more than one.
How much frequency depends on the time frame you’re looking at. If you’re looking at a one-week time frame, I’m going to suggest a frequency of 2-3 is great.
If you’re looking at a month, a frequency of 10 is fine.
If you’re running an ad promoting an event or sale that is in 5 days you can spend extra and get a higher frequency.
However, if you have an ongoing campaign and you want to reach millions of people, I would watch the frequency closely, and if it’s going over 3 reduce the budget. You’re spending too much compared to how big your audience is.
Ad Quality Score:
When you click to the ads in campaign manager you can see how Facebook is ranking the quality of your ads.
In these columns, Facebook gives you a below average, average, or above-average rating. They break them down a bit more when you look at them.
I’m always looking for average or above average here, but if my results and the other numbers I’m looking at are good, I don’t make any changes.
Facebook is comparing your ads to other ads that are targeting the same audience.
They break this down into 3 columns.
Quality Ranking, which shows how relevant Facebook thinks your ad is to your audience. They use feedback on your ads from your audience and how the post-click experience is for people who click to go to your landing pages.
The next number is Engagement Rate Ranking, this is how well your audience is responding to your ad. Are they reacting, commenting, and sharing your ad?
Conversion Rate Ranking, how well your ad is achieving the goal you told Facebook you wanted to achieve. You don’t see this rank until an ad has reached a certain number of impressions. That number is between 500 and 1000.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend):
If you’re selling something from your website and it can be tracked, I always look at this – even if the goal of the campaign is generating leads.
You can track any of these numbers no matter what the objective of your campaign is.
What a good number here depends on what your cost of goods is and your money math. I’m always working to have at least a 1 on this which means I generated 1 dollar of sales for every dollar I spent.
For some clients 1 is fine for others it needs to be 2 or more. You need to decide what the number needs to be for your account.
I look at this for all the campaigns that we have running. Many times, some campaigns aren’t supposed to generate sales so that is low, but other ones are generating big numbers. All the campaigns work together to get the numbers that we want.
Summary:
I’m just scratching the surface of what is available inside the Facebook ads manager for data.
You can also see how old and what gender people are who are clicking, what device they used, what placements on the Facebook ad platform the ads are getting clicks on and so on.
The amount of data can be overwhelming.
The ones I listed above are the key ones I use when evaluating the effectiveness of my Facebook campaigns. If you feel like your ads may have failed, check out THIS EPISODE of our podcast to learn what to do about it!
Have a great day!
Brian Hahn
P.S. For an in-depth look at a complete Facebook marketing system sign up for my FREE Masterclass on Facebook marketing: Go Social Experts Facebook Marketing Masterclass. This Free course is a 5-day video series with a video each day, going into depth about each step needed to create a profitable Facebook marketing machine.