In this 6-minute read:
- What are your goals for Facebook Ads?
- Calculate your ROI
- The most valuable Facebook ad metrics
- How to sort and filter your metrics
- How to modify your columns
With any marketing campaign, you want to know what you are going to get out of it. Whether that’s brand awareness, increased leads, or new customers, there should be some kind of value that you get from your advertising efforts.
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As you start your small business’s Facebook Ads campaign, you’ll have access to tons of different metrics and analytics, so we want to provide some insights to help you understand the data that you have before you.
Quick guide: How to set up Facebook Ads Manager for your small business
What are your goals for Facebook Ads?
One of the first things you want to determine when starting any advertising campaign is what your goals are and how you plan to achieve them.
The metrics you gather from running your Facebook Ads will tell you whether or not you have succeeded in your goals.
The three main purposes of Facebook Ads for businesses are as follows:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase consideration for your brand
- Increase conversions
If your goal, or goals, falls within those categories, you’ll find value from your Facebook Ads and the metrics you receive.
Calculate your ROI
When running Facebook Ads, particularly if your goal is to increase conversions, you’ll want to be able to calculate the return you get from your ads.
If your goals are to increase brand awareness or consideration, it will be more difficult to calculate your ROI, so we encourage you to only focus on this metric if you run a conversion-based ad campaign.
To calculate your ROI, it will be helpful to have Google Analytics and a Facebook pixel from your ads campaign set up on your website. Talk to your web developer about this, and they can help you get that taken care of.
Basically, Facebook provides a bit of code to place on your website that helps you to track who visited your website based on your ad, and from there, you can better determine which customers came from Facebook and how much revenue you received from the ad outside of Facebook.
From there, it’s just simple math to determine what your return is. Take the total revenue that you gain from the ad and divide that by the total spend that you put into the ad.
For example, let’s say you spent $100 on a Facebook Ad and gained $300 in total revenue from that ad. That’s an ROI of 3.0, meaning that for every dollar you spend, you get $3 back.
Run a few different ads to find your sweet spot with generating some return and use those ads to help get new customers during a slow spell.
Find the most valuable metrics using Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager provides a large variety of metrics to help you determine the success of your campaigns and specific ads or ad sets. We won’t go in-depth on every single one of these, but we’ll talk about a few of the most valuable metrics that will help you analyze your ad results better.
Performance and clicks
The performance and click metrics are great for measuring the success of your brand awareness campaigns. How many people did your ads reach? Did people that saw the ad multiple times click on it?
In Facebook Ads Manager, look at the Reach, Impressions, and Clicks on your ads to see which ones performed better and the top-performing ads to mold and improve future ads that you run.
Engagements
Engagements with your Facebooks ads will help you to determine how people are responding to it, whether they find it helpful or interesting, and if it is driving traffic to your website.
These are a good way to measure the consideration of your brand. After people see your ads, are they actually clicking to learn more about you and your offers?
Types of engagements you can track:
- Post clicks
- Link clicks
- Messaging
- Media clicks
- Page likes
- Post reactions
- Post shares
- Event responses
- And more
Conversions
If you’re running a conversion-based campaign, Facebook Ads Manager has some great ways to measure those conversions, particularly if people are able to book appointments or make purchases directly from your Facebook page.
(If they aren’t, you can track your conversions through the Facebook pixel we mentioned previously.)
Some Facebook conversions you can track on your ads campaign:
- Achievements
- Adds to cart
- Adds of payment info
- App installs/engagements
- Appointments scheduled
- Contacts
- Applications submitted
How to sort and filter your metrics
You can break down the way you view your ad insights in tons of different ways, so it can definitely get a little overwhelming to understand what you’re looking at if you’ve never run Facebook Ads before.
We’ve put together a few different ways that you can break these down.
Campaigns
You can look at the analytics for your total campaign and compare it to other campaigns as well. When you open Facebook Ads Manager, the default setting for viewing your ads will typically be set to campaigns.
But you can also click the “Campaigns” tab to view the results by campaign.
Just make sure that when you are comparing campaigns, the goals for those campaigns are similar. You want to be comparing apples to apples so you know which one performed best for that specific goal.
Ad sets
Ad sets are the audiences and targeting that you set up to organize your ads. This can be helpful for determining which audiences react the best to your ads so you know who to continue showing them to.
Ads
The Ads tab will let you view your results for each individual ad. This is a great way to determine which ads and media are performing the best.
How to modify your columns
Now that you have an idea of which metrics you want to identify and track and how you can view your ad results by the groups we’ve mentioned, we’ll show you how to modify the columns in your ad results.
This will help you display the exact metrics that you want to track for your campaign or specific ads.
First, click the tab that you want to filter your ads by: Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads. Then click “Columns.”
Find “Customize Columns” and click on that.
In the new window that pops up, check the types of metrics that you want to track for your campaign under the Performance, Engagement, and Conversions sections. Click “Apply.”
Now that you’ve got a good handle on how to read your Facebook Ads results, continue to check in on your ads and further optimize them for the best results.
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