Ever tried to assess the performance of your Facebook Ad and felt completely lost? What metrics are you supposed to be looking at? And how do you know if the ad actually brought in revenue?
It’s a tale that’s all too familiar for many marketers and business owners, and in this article I plan to tell you how to measure the success of your ads the right way.
But First, The Two Golden Rules of Measuring Facebook Ads Performance
- Disregard the Fluff
I’ll let you in on a little secret…most metrics don’t matter. Or at least not as much as you think they do. Yes, it’s interesting to know how much ‘reach’, ‘likes’ or ‘comments’ an ad got, but it’s not really what’s bringing in customers or generating more revenue. Anything that is not directly tied to money or related to the main objective of the ad campaign (which in most cases is either ‘leads’ or ‘sales’) is in my view, a ‘fluffy’ metric that shouldn’t be given much attention. - Customize Your Reporting Dashboard
Once you know that most metrics are fluffy and don’t matter, you have to get rid of the fluff so that it doesn’t overwhelm, confuse and waste your time when you’re reviewing the results of your ads.
Here’s the thing – when you first open up Ads Manager, the ‘default’ mode for reporting is set to ‘performance’. I’d say a handful of metrics in default mode are useful, and the rest are fluff that clouds my vision.
That’s why it’s crucial to actually create your own custom view and isolate the metrics that are actually tied to your main objective. In the screenshot below, you can see that right at the bottom I have set up a custom view, aptly called ‘Alina Custom View’.
When setting up a Custom View, please keep in mind that:- You have to save your view so that you don’t lose it and can reuse it each time you open up Ads Manager
- You will have to set up a Custom View across every ad account that you manage, in case you are a marketer or your business has multiple ad accounts for difference lines of business
- A custom dashboard will only be saved for your profile, it cannot be shared with someone else on your team. They will have to set up their own custom view with the same metrics.
- Your custom view will be viewable across all three layers of Ads Manager, the campaign level, the ad set level, and the ad level. This way you can easily see the performance of your campaign: as a whole, against specific audiences, and against specific ad creatives. It’s crucial to always look at all three layers of a campaign to read results properly and make the right decisions on how to optimize.
So, What Metrics Should You Measure for Facebook Ads?
This answer depends on the type of business you have, and the main objective of your Facebook Ads campaign. Most businesses will fall into these two camps:
1) You’re an eCommerce business and your goal is to receive online purchases
2) You’re a B2C or B2B service business and your goal is to get a high volume of inbound ‘leads’, which you can then convert into sales
In both cases, the metrics in your Facebook Ads Manager ‘Custom View’ should reflect each step of your customer’s digital journey – from the moment they click on your ad, all the way to the end objective i.e. ‘leads’ or ‘revenue’.
This allows you to critically assess each step of the customer journey, see what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be fixed in order to improve your results.
Setting up Your Facebook Ads Manager Custom View
Ready to get started? Go ahead and open up Ads Manager, click on ‘Customize Columns’ and you should see a window like this pop up.
Next, we’re going to find all the metrics that matter to our business and tick them, these will appear on the right hand side. If there’s any metrics that you don’t want to include, simply click the ‘x’ to remove them from your dashboard.
Lastly, once you have all the metrics you’d like on your right-hand side, you can rearrange them in chronological order to reflect all the steps in your customer journey, from click to ‘end objective’.
Not sure which metrics to choose or what order to put them in? Let’s head to the next section!
What To Measure for Facebook eCommerce Ad Campaigns
What I love about running eCommerce Facebook ads is that you can measure the exact revenue and profitability, down to the exact ad and target audience.
To measure your campaigns exactly the way we do, simply copy and paste the custom dashboard metrics below.
Note:
You’ll see that the first four items in pink are related to the setup of our ads. They let us know if a campaign is running, the budget we’ve set for the campaign, and how much is spent vs. remaining.
Following the pink items, we then focus on the actual customer journey i.e. after clicking on an ad, how many people actually add to cart? Checkout? Purchase? And most importantly, what is the revenue vs. the amount we spent to acquire a customer? How much return did we make?
- Delivery
- Budget
- Amount spent
- Budget remaining
- Landing page views
- How many people clicked and viewed the product page?
- Cost per landing page view
- How much did it cost to get one person to view a product page?
- CTR
- This measures how engaging your ad is. Out of the total number of times this ad was shown, what percentage of people actually clicked on the ad? Anything above 1% is good for eCommerce.
- Add to cart
- How many people added a product to their cart?
- Cost per add to cart
- How much does it cost to get one person to add to cart?
- Initiate checkout
- How many people initiated a checkout?
- Cost per initiate checkout
- How much does it cost to get one person to initiate a checkout?
- Purchase
- How many purchases did you receive?
- Cost per purchase
- How much did it cost you to acquire one sale?
- Purchase conversion value
- What revenue did you earn?
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
- For every dollar or dirham you put into advertising, how much did you earn back? The formula for this is revenue/amount spent. For example, if you earned $1000 and spent only $100, your ROAS was 10X.
- Frequency
- How many times on average has each person in your target audience seen your ad? This is a useful metric for seeing if your ad is hitting fatigue and knowing when it’s losing its effectiveness. When it creeps up closer to 4 or 5 you may see ad performance decline.
What To Measure for Facebook Lead Ad Campaigns
If you’re a B2C or B2B service based business that needs to generate leads with their ad campaigns, this is the list you want to copy/paste.
Note:
As with the section above, you’ll see that the first four items in pink are related to the setup of our ads. They let us know if a campaign is running, the budget we’ve set for the campaign, and how much is spent vs. remaining.
- Delivery
- Schedule
- Ends
- Amount spent
- Budget remaining
- Landing page views
- How many people clicked and viewed your landing page?
- Cost per landing page view
- How much did it cost to get one person to view a product page?
- CTR
- This measures how engaging your ad is. Out of the total number of times this ad was shown, what percentage of people actually clicked on the ad? Anything above 2% is good for lead generation ads.
- Leads
- The number of people who viewed your landing page, and then opted into the form.
- Cost per lead
- How much did it cost you to get one person to opt into your form?
- Frequency
- How many times on average has each person in your target audience seen your ad? This is a useful metric for seeing if your ad is hitting fatigue and knowing when it’s losing its effectiveness. We’ve found that when this when it creeps up closer to 3 or more we see ad performance decline.
The Bottom Line
What gets measured gets managed 🙂 So make sure you’re measuring the right metrics for Facebook Ads that are actually tied to revenue, as opposed to fluffy metrics such as likes and comments.
To do this, set up a custom view in your Ads Manager account. Simply copy our custom dashboard views above for either product or service based businesses, and save that view to your own ad account. Then watch how analyzing the performance of your Facebook ads shifts from overwhelm and confusion, to a place of clarity and confidence.