Over the years, Facebook’s ad platform has become increasingly sophisticated and powerful. With over 2 billion people on facebook daily, there are a lot of opportunities for businesses like yours to take advantage of this amazing marketing platform. When it comes to analyzing ads on Facebook, there are a lot of different reports and metrics that you can use.
Understanding how all of this works can be daunting for new advertisers, so we created this guide with everything you need to know about setting up a campaign on facebook.
Why is it important to track the right metrics?
Focus on the RIGHT metrics for your Campaign!
Many people think that tracking metrics is not important, but it can actually help you to improve your campaign and bring more conversion.
One of the most important tasks in running a successful campaign is identifying which metrics are most indicative and predictive of your success. The right metrics can be used to develop actionable insights that help you make better decisions, while the wrong ones may give you false impressions.
How to customize metrics in Facebook Business Manager?
First, you will need to access your Business Manager dashboard. Then, head over to the “columns” section and click it. It will show a drop down list of metrics that are already pre-set by Facebook.
Facebook Ads Objectives and Key Metrics to Monitor
In order to analyze your Facebook ads campaign performance effectively, you must know the key metrics definition that you would like to analyze. Then, determine the campaign objective you want to achieve first, because each ad objective is associated with its own set of metrics.
Currently, there are 11 campaign objectives that you can select as per your desired goal. Each of these objectives has its own KPI that you would need to analyze. Below is the definition of each objective and its purpose together with the desired metrics that you should track when selecting these objectives.
1. Brand Awareness
The Brand Awareness is an objective to show the ads to people who are most likely to remember your ad if we asked them within two days. If you have a new brand and just started to warm up your brand on social media, then this objective will be a good starting point. When selecting this objective, it is suggested targeting a relatively wide audience, so the optimisation can find people who are more likely to recall seeing the ad.
Key metrics: Estimated Ad Recall Lift, Impressions, Reach, Cost per Estimated Ad Recall Lift
2. Reach
The Reach objective is to show your ads to the maximum number of people. Reach tends to be misunderstood as an impression due to its similar function. Impression is a metric of the number of times your ads show up while reach is a unique number of times the people see your ad. You can use reach objective if you are organizing an event and want to make the ad to reach as many people as you want.
Key metrics: Reach, Impressions, Cost per Reach
3. Traffic
Traffic is a good objective if you want to drive people to your website after clicking the ad. For instance, if you have a blog and want to drive people to read your blog, you can use this objective to drive more traffic to your blog. Besides that, you can use this objective to warm up your Facebook pixel to retarget people who landed on your page later on. When choosing Traffic, Facebook will only likely find people who will click the ad and land on your desired landing page, but do not expect an action such as purchase or sign up as Traffic is not meant for it.
Other than selecting a website as a destination, you can also choose other desired destinations such as App, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Calls. Facebook by default will optimize ‘link clicks’ on the ad settings, but you can change to ‘landing page views’ if you want your audiences literally landed on the webpage after clicking the ad compared to ‘link clicks’ is just a click on the ad but it is not necessary mean the audience landed and see the page completely.
Key metrics: Link Clicks, Landing page views, Cost per link clicks, Click through rate (CTR)
4. Engagement
Engagement campaign purpose is to help get more page likes, event responses, or post reacts, comments, and shares. If you are seeking to get more engagement for your ads, you can choose this objective as Facebook will find audiences who will most likely engage with your ad. If you just started to create a new business page, you can boost up the page like in a faster way by optimizing it to “page likes”.
Key metrics: Impressions, Reach, Post engagements, page likes, Cost per post engagement
5. App Installs
App installs campaign is a straightforward objective where you want to encourage people to download and engage with your app. When people click the ad, it will drive them to their app store and can choose to download the app. You have two options of App installs campaign:
Advantage+App Campaign (Automated App) is dynamic creative optimization where it lets you test different combinations of creatives such as videos or images without constantly tweaking your ad. While manual app ads is where you set up your ads manually without dynamic automation.
Key metrics: App Installs, Cost per app installs, Link Clicks, Cost per link clicks, Click through rate (CTR)
6. Video Views
Video views campaign is targeting people who will most likely watch your video ad. If you have a complicated product or services, you might want to use video to deliver the features and messages. The optimization for video delivery has two options, ThruPlay or 2 Second continuous video views. ThruPlay is optimized for people who will most likely watch the video complete for at least 15 seconds, while 2 second continuous video views are consecutively videos viewed for 2 seconds.
Key metrics: Impressions, Reach, 2-second continuous video plays, cost per 2-second continuous video plays, 3-second video plays, cost per 3-second continuous video plays, ThruPlays, Cost per ThruPlay
7. Lead Generation
Lead Generation is a campaign where you can use the Facebook contact form to capture audiences contact information without driving them to an external page. You can use this objective if you do not own a website or you have a slow loading page and want to use a fast loading contact form to collect contact information. However, it is only optimized for mobile but not for desktop version.
Key metric: On-Facebook leads, Cost per on-Facebook leads, Impressions, Reach
8. Messages
If your primary goal is to make people interact with your ad and start a conversation, then Messages is the ideal campaign. You can choose 3 destinations of messages conversation to happen, which are Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. You can use this campaign if you want people to inquire more about your product or service. Note that, it is recommended to set up automated messages reply if you constantly get a huge number of messages from people so that you will get all the inquiries replied automatically.
Key metric: Messaging conversations started, Cost per Messaging conversations started, Impressions, Reach
9. Conversions
Conversions is an objective that focuses on specific action that you want people to take. For instance, purchasing a product, signing up a newsletter, and submitting a website contact form are ideally used for conversion campaigns. You must first install Facebook pixel in your website to enable the pixel collect the visitors action for retargeting. When selecting this objective, Facebook will find people who are most likely to take an action after clicking the ad.
Key metric: Website purchase / Contacts (leads), Add to Cart, Link Clicks, Landing page views, Cost per link clicks, Click through rate (CTR), Impressions, Reach, Return on ad spend (ROAS)
10. Catalogue Sales
If you own an e-commerce website and sell a lot of products, you can use catalogue sales to show to your audiences. You may want to set up your ‘commerce manager’ in the ads manager by uploading all your product details prior using this objective. If you sell your products on 3rd party marketplaces such as Shopee or Lazada, you must be familiar with Collaborative Performance Advertising Solutions (CPAS) first because this is an alternative feature required to analyze campaigns effectively.
The advantages of using Catalogue format enable you to create an eye-catchy dynamic ad format such as collection ad that could stop people from scrolling their feed. When clicking the ad, it will also show a number of products based on the catalogue products that you uploaded.
Key metric: Website purchase with shared items, Add to Cart with shared items, Link Clicks, Landing page views, Cost per link clicks, Click through rate (CTR), Impressions, Reach, Return on ad spend (ROAS)
11. Store Traffic
If you have multiple physical stores, you can use this objective to drive more foot-traffic to your store. Upon using this objective, you must input the details of your store address and operations hours. Facebook will likely show this ad to people who stay nearest to the specific radius location. If you only own one physical store, consider to use Reach objective instead.
Key Takeaway
It is important to note that before setting up the Facebook Ads campaign, you must have a clear goal that you want to achieve so that you won’t end up wasting the budget. Other than that, it is suggested that to have a funnel when planning the ads structure starting from Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. You may read our previous blog here to understand what a marketing funnel is and why it is important in every marketing campaign.
By planning the right funnel, you will be able to get the desired results effectively based on the objectives chosen. Last but not least, you can also try testing different campaigns to see the outcome. For example, if you want to get more message inquiries from audiences, you can test both ‘Traffic’ and ‘Messages’ campaigns and determine which one is better.
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