Being able to make sense of your Facebook ad performance is vital in having a successful campaign. The goal remains conversion, which means you should be able to know how well people interact with your ad and how much it is costing you.
As we know by now, budget is one of deciding factors in how an ad performs. To increase the number of people that see your ad, you need to add more money to your account. Away from that however, we shall take a look at how to measure your Facebook ad performance and what can be done.
READ ALSO: Effective Facebook Ads Creation: Traffic Campaign Objective
First, get to your Ads-manager on Facebook or click here You would see the image below. It gives you a general overview of how your campaign is performing. Once you have this information, it becomes easier to know what can be done. Below is a dashboard.
From Your Adsmanager Dashboard
- Results: The number of times your ad achieved the desired results. This is estimated and is based on your ad objective. Keep in mind that your budget, placement and targeting affects the overall result you would get from campaign.
- Reach: This has to do with the number of people that saw the ad. It is considered a vanity metric and does not translate to interest. 2000 people could have seen the ad, but only 50 clicked and say 5 took the desired action. This means your focus should be more on conversion and less on the number of people that saw the ad.
- Impressions: Means the number of times the ad was viewed generally, taking into consideration the fact that one person can view the ad multiple times. The more people see the ad, the higher the chances of conversion. Keep in mind that you do not have primary control over this, unless you optimise the ad for viewable impressions. This is however not advised, with the exception of brand awareness and reach ads
- Cost per result: The average cost of each result you are getting from the campaign. This is based on your optimisation which could be impressions, click or landing page views. Simply put, how much is Facebook charging you for each person that takes the desired action? If it is higher than usual, you must take a look at your audience. This would enable you see the age range and gender that seem to be consuming the most resources, and decide either to limit or remove that faction permanently.
- Amount spent: Refers to the total amount of money which has been spent on the campaign and is updated daily.
- Ends: Date for which the ad is scheduled to end
- Frequency: The rate at which people see the ad. A score of 2.00 means that each person saw the ad at least twice. Brand awareness and reach ads tend to have higher frequency, as the goal is to reach the maximum number of people personally, depending on your budget.
- Unique link click: This means the number of times the links were actually clicked on. Again, note that it does not mean that the person got to the desired destination. It is possible to click on a link and not get to the desired destination. To fix this, you can optimise the ad for landing page views, and would be primarily charged when people actually get to the destination
How to interpret Facebook ad performance based on charts
From your campaign dashboard, click on ‘view charts’ below the campaign name. Now we shall take a look at how to make sense of what you can see and how to optimise it.
Performance
This is an overview of the campaign as can be seen from the ads-manager. The only difference is that it comes with a chart which shows the flow of traffic. This is based on result gotten, and cost for said results on a daily basis.
Demographics
Here, the goal is to take a look at your Facebook ad performance based on gender and age. From the above image, neither of the age brackets or genders were expensive as the cost of reaching them was very reasonable.
If your cost per result is on the high side, this is one place to begin from. It is possible that one age range or gender is costing way more than others. What this means is that Facebook is finding it hard to target people within that category.
You then have to decide whether you can cut off people in that category. This can be done by editing your ad and removing the age range or gender that is causing your ad spend to shoot through the roof.
Placement
This is influenced by the placement you chose while creating the ad. From the above image, this particular campaign ran more to Facebook and audience network, then Instagram and messenger. Reason for this is because I chose ‘Automatic Placement‘
Seeing as the ad was created on Facebook, it focused more on that platform. If I want to get better traction on Instagram, I would have to duplicate the ad, then choose ‘edit placements‘ under that section, then un-check all the other platforms, leaving Instagram as the sole advertiser.
You can see results gotten from each placement and can check if any of the platforms is costing you too much. If that happens, then it means the audience on that platform might not be best for your brand and can be removed. Before doing this however, ensure you got the targeting right, as this is key in all of your online advertising campaigns.
The delivery option is only available for ads with ‘reach’ as the campaign objective.
In conclusion.
It is very possible fro your ad to be very cost effective and still not get the desired results. The ultimate goal of each advertising campaign is conversion, hence the focus should be more on ‘cost per acquisition’
When you run a campaign online, the focus should be on the results gotten after the ad and not necessarily on the money spent. Let’s say you ran a conversion ad of $100 and get to make sales of $1000, then the cost of acquisition is $1 which is a great deal.
That same ad could have cost $0.10 per action which is considered high, but the end result is fantastic. So the focus should be on how you can close the leads you get sometimes, and not always on the cost per action.