It’s easy to get confused and bogged down with a multitude of metrics available on Facebook’s Ads Platform, but there’s only a handful you should be keeping your eye on.
Less is more is definitely the strategy when optimising your Facebook Advertising.
If you start analysing every metric, you’ll probably do more harm than good.
In this article, we’re going to run over the important metrics you should keep an eye on and those that you might like to keep your eye on.
CTR: Click-Through Rate
Impressions / Clicks = CTR
This metric should be the vanity popularity metric because that is exactly what it does.
Are your ads appealing, interesting and do they look good?
If they don’t, then you’re not popular or interesting and therefore nobody wants to click on you.
It’s a brutal world on the Facebook platform.
You think you’ve created the best ad in the world only to have a CTR below 1%…damn!
But take this as a learning experience – and most importantly – proactively respond to it because the people (not your audience, but people) don’t find your ad appealing or interesting to them personally.
And that’s fine because you’re probably targeting the wrong group of people and they’re clearly not your audience; they’re people who have been subject to collateral damage from your ads.
If you’re 100% certain that you are targeting the right people then you need to look at your ads and find out why your audience doesn’t want to click on your ads.
Here are a few reasons why they don’t click on your ad:
- It doesn’t invoke curiosity
- It doesn’t highlight their problem
- It doesn’t offer a solution to their problem
- You’ve included pricing in your ad before providing value
- Your creative is boring, or flat and needs to be spruced up a bit
These are just a few reasons and it will take some introspection to find out what is causing a down-fall with your ads.
CPM: Cost-Per-Impression
(Total Cost of Advertising / Total Impressions) x 1,000 = CPM
This is an important metric because it lets you know how much it costs to advertise to the masses.
Depending on whether you’re targeting a specific & lucrative audience, such as retargeting to people who downloaded your ebook, or doing some loose broad targeting, your CPM can vary greatly.
Expect to pay higher for the more specific & lucrative audiences and a whole lot less for the broad targeting.
If you’re a new business, then you can focus on those loosely targeted audiences because you’re the new kid on the block. But an established business should be maximising their returns with the granular audiences such as remarketing lists.
You may experience high CPM’s however for the following reasons:
- You’re targeting a competitively-priced audience such as the insurance audience
- Not having your privacy policy or cookies in place on your site
- Targeting the wrong group of people for your product/service
We’ve seen it on Facebook where one of our campaigns gets put into a pocket of people who we don’t want to target, and all it requires is pausing the ad, duplicating it and restarting it.
ROAS: Return-On-Ad-Spend
Total Revenue / Total Spent On Advertising = ROAS
ROAS is the big shark in the world of advertising metrics because it can tell you whether your ads are returning more money to you than you spend on them.
Anything below a 1 and you’re making a definite loss and even if you’re 1 or above, you’re still probably at a loss once you’ve deducted your costs.
A healthy minimum ROAS is ideally 2.0 – 3.0.
If you know the in’s and out’s of your costs + your business, then you should have a good idea of what is expected as a return on your ad spend.
Some of the factors that can cause low ROAS are:
- Poor check-out experience
- Slow-loading website speed
- Not enough information on the product page
The 3 factors above are mainly focused on the user-experience which is crucial in your ability to sell online.
A slow-loading website or a frustrating check-out can be a deal-breaker for your customer and it’s been proven in so many studies that we don’t even need to cite it anymore because it’s common-sense.
Other Metrics Specific To The Different Campaigns
CTR, CPM are universal for all campaign types, whether it’s a lead generation, messenger or conversion campaign.
ROAS can be used for many objectives too and can even be converted for certain campaigns such as lead generation where there isn’t a direct ROAS calculated for you.
For example, if you know how much a lead is to you then all you have to do is multiply your number of leads by how much a lead is worth to you and then divide by your total ad spend.
But there are metrics which aren’t universal such as:
- Cost-Per-Lead
- View Content
- Add-To-Cart
- Purchases
Cost-per-lead is only relevant to either lead generation or it can be applied to messenger campaigns.
View content (VC), add-to-cart (ATC) and purchases are specific to conversion campaigns in particular – and they’re crucial.
You may have a good number for your VC + ATC, but 0 purchases.
We’ve seen it where a client has had over 50 ATC – but received no orders – only to find out that they’re check-out crashes when the customer goes to enter their card details!
Conclusion
The list may look small and it is.
We’ve done the reporting and analysis where we’ve had all the metrics available to us on, and it hinders, not helping your Facebook Ads – or any ads for that matter.
Don’t forget that golden rule – tell a story with your ads, engage your audience and make it like you can solve their problems.
You can get stuck in the minutiae if you focus purely on metrics and forget the big picture. Which is creating compelling ads that promote the action you want from your audience.
The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generating conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
Facebook stock photo by PixieMe/Shutterstock
