The success of your Facebook campaigns seems like a pretty straightforward thing to measure. After all, Facebook provides you with an abundance of feedback metrics that allow you to track your ad’s results.
The problem is that the most popular metrics don’t tell the whole story. Even when these metrics report positive figures, your campaigns may leave you wanting. Wondering why your seemingly successful ad didn’t produce the results you were after?
The metrics most marketers use to evaluate their campaigns don’t provide them with everything needed to measure its success. There is a lot more to consider than CPM, CPC, and CTR.
You want to know how to measure the success of a Facebook campaigns, and I’m here to shine a big bright light on the subject.
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Measure Facebook Ad’s Success
The real way to determine your Facebook ad’s success involves going deeper than you may be used to. It’s time to take a look at tangible data like clicks, views, and conversions. You’re advertising to produce results. Cost per click and click-through rate aren’t going to tell you about the end result of a user’s interaction with your ad.
Be sure not to overlook intangible data like branding, awareness, and popularity. When aiming to expand brand awareness with a social campaign, the financial benefits may not be as easy to determine, but their impact is real. Likes, shares, and follows are likely to translate to conversions even though they are more difficult to track.
Set a goal
This may seem obvious, but it’s so important that I have to reinforce this point. You need to have a specific goal for each Facebook ad campaign. Your campaign goal could be a conversion, like, click, video play…the list goes on.
Without a goal you won’t be able to measure the success of Facebook campaigns.
Once you’ve determined your goal, you’ll be able to create a unique formula to measure the success of your Facebook campaigns.
Facebook helps you with this. When you start a new campaign, from the ads manager you are required to select one objective; depending on your choice you’ll receive different data as the main result to measure. For instance, when you choose “boost post,” you’ll see cost per interaction. If you chose “send people to your website,” you’d get a cost per link click. When you select “promote your page,” you’ll get a cost per like, etc.
Follow a unique formula
You’re business is unlike any other. The formula you use to measure the success of Facebook campaigns for your business needs to be unique.
Facebook gives you 45 metrics to track with Facebook Ads Report. There are just too many variables to create a one-size-fits-all formula. You’ll have to be the one to evaluate what makes a particular campaign successful.
Whereas many marketers are happy to report positive CPM, CPC, and CTR, these metrics simply do not tell the whole story.
You could have reached the wrong people altogether. In this case, a low CPM and good CPC and CTR won’t matter if you generate zero conversions.
There are certainly more important metrics to follow.
What you should check when measuring Facebook campaign success
When it comes to metrics that evaluate results, some are far more important than others. Here are my favorites for how to measure the success of Facebook campaigns.
Conversions
Pretty important right? Look at how many conversions your ads are returning and the cost of each. In order to monitor your conversions you’ll need to utilize a Facebook Conversion Pixel.
Reach
Expanding your audience means putting yourself in front of more people. How many users did your ad reach? What was the % reach of your target?
Delivery/Frequency
How many times was your ad seen by the same people? Be careful here to look for News Feed placements and not for the right column, which biases the data.
Different types of campaigns should have different frequency goals (based on where it’s being displayed). Also, if an ad is performing poorly and returning a high frequency, you should ditch it and focus on one that performs better.
ROI
Return on investment is a great place to start evaluating success. No matter what metric your ad is targeting, you’ll want it to be providing high value to your brand.
Don’t spend a lot to make a little. Calculate the ROI of your campaigns based on your ad spending and on your revenue generated.
Resist comparing yourself to others
The last thing you need to be doing is comparing your business to anyone else. Sure it can be interesting to see how your ads rank against others, but it’s a waste of time.
Instead of measuring the success of your Facebook campaigns against other advertisers, focus on yourself. Measure the success of each of the campaigns you run. In this way you’ll understand what’s working and what’s not and you’ll learn how to optimize each campaign.
Individually optimized campaigns will return better results
Results come first, period. When you’re ready to measure the success of a Facebook campaign, determining the proper metrics to evaluate your campaign allows you to optimize your Facebook ads strategy and, in turn, improve your outcome. After all, in the end you’re marketing to sell.
Tell us about what type of campaigns you’re running and which metrics you’re using to evaluate your success by commenting below.
