This is a guest post by Ilan Nass.

The Essential Facebook Metrics for Authors

Photo by https://offers.hubspot.com/science-of-facebook-marketing

Facebook Ads are useful to marketers because they offer the chance to track a wide range of metrics. However, determining how effective a campaign actually is requires understanding which metrics are worth tracking, and which you can ignore.

Authors who are just beginning to use Facebook Ads often don’t realize that the statistics and data Facebook highlights often don’t fully illustrate a campaign’s return on investment |(ROI). That’s why, when you’re just starting out, it can be helpful to partner with an experienced Facebook marketing agency. Doing so will help you develop a thorough understanding of how to succeed with Facebook ads.

But, if you’d like to get an idea of the process behind selecting and tracking important campaign metrics, keep reading.

Metrics to exclude

First of all, it’s a good idea to identify certain metrics that aren’t worth your time. These include:

• Reach – Reach simply shows how many individuals actually saw your ad. Statistics indicate that on average, people only actually click one out of every 2,000 Facebook Ads they see. Thus, your reach doesn’t necessarily say much about how many users may have actually engaged with your campaign.

• Clicks – The fact is, many clicks you’ll receive won’t represent any genuine value, like a conversion. When Facebook displays this metric, they often serve solely to make a campaign look more effective than it actually is.

• Video Views – Facebook counts a video view as any instance when a user let a video play for three seconds or more. The problem is that most videos autoplay in user’s feeds. Therefore, many “views” don’t actually indicate that someone actually watched or focused on the video ad.

Metrics to include

If you want to get a better idea of how valuable your Facebook Ads have been, focus on these metrics instead:

Impressions & Cost Per 1,000 Impressions

Impressions – unlike Reach – are simply the total number of times your ad was displayed on Facebook. As the name implies, the Cost Per 1,000 Impressions tells you how much you paid to display an ad 1,000 times. This metric helps give you a clearer picture of your marketing expenses.

Frequency

Divide Impressions by Reach, and you get Frequency, or the average number of times a person saw your ad. You want to keep Frequency below four. Otherwise, you risk potentially oversaturating your target audience.

Link Clicks & Click-through Rate (CTR)

Your ad should either link to an opt-in page,  product page, or similar page that allows users to follow an action. As the name implies, Link Clicks tell you how many people clicked your link. Divide Link Clicks by Impressions to get the CTR, which is the percentage of people who saw the ad and clicked the link.

Leads

Leads are the number of people who took the intended action, be it signing up for a service or purchasing a product, after reaching the landing page via your ad. You can install the Facebook Pixel on your page to track this metric.

Cost per Lead

You also want to know what your Cost per Lead is. Unfortunately, Facebook does not readily provide you with this information. To measure it, divide the amount of money you’ve spent on your campaign by the number of Leads you’ve generated thus far.

You want to have the lowest Cost per Lead possible. If it’s higher than you’d like it to be, you may need to design a more compelling landing page or ad.

This gets to one of the main reasons that tracking these metrics is important. They’ll let you know if and when an element of your campaign needs to be adjusted. It’s always nice to know what you’re doing right, but when you know what you’re doing wrong you’re then in the position to do something about it.

The Essential Facebook Metrics for Authors

Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Tweet This