Unlock the power of Facebook advertising with expert strategies on targeting, ad types, and campaign optimization. Learn how to create high-converting ads, leverage audience segmentation, and measure success with KPIs to maximize your marketing ROI.
The absolute magic of Facebook advertising is the fact that almost everyone at some point in the day is likely to check their Facebook newsfeed, whether they are the CEO of a multinational corporation, a stay at home moms, or a solopreneur. Combine insane volume with sophisticated targeting options and you have a POWERFUL tool in the hands of savvy marketers.
Think of the potential of reaching exactly the type of audience who might be interested in your product or service, even if they are not actively looking for it! By understanding your target audience and their needs, wants, desires and pain-points, you can sell them products or services that they don’t yet know they need. Using Facebook ads effectively you can target people at every stage of the buying funnel with ads designed just for them.
In this guide, we will explore practical tips for conceptualizing and creating magnetic Facebook ads. The platform itself and tools change almost daily so the focus of this guide will be about the process and overarching strategy for creating Facebook advertising campaigns that truly WORK.
Say you sell an app that monitors teenager’s usage of Facebook, and your target audience is of course parents of teenagers. These parents may not even know that monitoring apps exist. Using Facebook, you can use interest targeting to identify this potential audience and tell them about your service. But how can you identify these parents who might be interested?
How about creating an ad targeting women 30 – 60 who are interested in “prom” or “homecoming”? This will give you an audience of over 1.1 million people in the USA of moms who have teenage children.
Or targeting adults between the ages of 30 and 60 who are interested in “Teenagers” and “Family and Relationships: Parenting”? You can reach over 11 million people this way!
Think of Facebook ads as Evolved Display Advertising, where you can hyperfocus who sees the ads in a way that marketers of the past could only dream of.
Once you identify social segments all you need is a relevant, captivating ads to start promoting your product to an incredibly targeted group of potential customers.
This capacity for identifying psychographically interested audiences is the beauty of Facebook advertising. You can match the psychographics very specifically with the ad image, copy and text, thus improving the potential for conversions.
Your success with Facebook advertising is determined by a combination of factors, including how you track/measure effectiveness, the power of the creatives, and of course the audience that you choose for each ad. Who you target, and where this audience may be in the sales funnel, will directly influence the results of that ad campaign. So if you measure an ad meant for “branding” on direct sales, the results may be dismal…but if you measure that using branding KPI’s, this will paint a completely different picture. Create appropriate goals and KPI’s so you can genuinely track the effectiveness of your campaign.
The overall process of creating Facebook ads is simple. Before you even begin creating the actual ad creative, however, it is crucial to take the time in advance to explicitly spell out to whom you’re going to market, how, and the methodology for measurement.
What do you want your ads to accomplish? How will you measure this? Here are a few examples of types of goals and KPI’s that you can use:
Once you determine your goals, you need to tie KPI’s to your goals. Here are a few examples of powerful KPI’s:
Remember that regardless of your goals and KPI’s, Facebook is more powerful as a “first touch” attribution model, as opposed to Google adwords who is a “last touch” model.
Having determined your goals, you’ll need to figure out what types of ads you want to run to achieve each goal. Next we’ll review some of the most powerful ad types that the platform offers.
Case studies have shown that your audience will always convert better and at a far lower price than other audiences. Consequently, one of the first objectives of a Facebook advertising campaign should be to grow the audience by using Page Like Ads.
Page Like Ads are great for branding KPI’s and community engagement KPI’s. Combining Page Like Ads to grow your audience, and then paying to reach your fans, results in great ROI as fans convert much better than non-fans.
Marketers use page post engagement ads to improve their edgerank and to promote existing content assets. You can use page post engagement to promote your latest blog posts, ebooks, or case studies. It’s an ad type that focuses on getting users to like, comment, and share your content.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking these ads are unable to lead to conversions. If your ad links to a quality piece of content that moves visitors to a conversion-driving landing page, page post engagement ads can be very lucrative.
The key is to begin with powerful, enticing content. Use your own judgement as a gauge. Would you read this content? If the answer is no, reevaluate your content piece because chances are not many people will find it interesting if you don't.
Page Post Engagement ads are great for branding KPI’s as well as community growth and engagement.
Even though the CTR is much lower with these types of ads, they can be used, in combination with optimized landing pages, to send people to your offers, such as a free trial. Using tracking pixels on your sales or lead generation page, you can determine exact ROI for these ads.
In general the cost per acquisition and cost per click for these ads is much lower than Google Adwords, so these ads are worth exploring, especially with the right audiences.
Facebook offers other ad types based on different objectives, such as event sign ups, video views, and app installs. In this tutorial we’ll cover the ad types mentioned above, but know that you can also use more specific ad types.
Before we proceed with the process of creating Facebook ads, we need to discuss the different audiences that you can target with Facebook:
Perhaps one of the most powerful features that few people understand is the ability to create and leverage custom audiences. Facebook enables you to create custom audiences based on people who visit your website, phone numbers, or email addresses. Perhaps you captured someone’s email address by offering a free ebook, but after reading your ebook, they promptly forgot all about you. Or maybe you advertised on Google Adwords, got them to click through, but they weren’t quite ready to make the purchase. Using Facebook remarketing you can continue to promote your product or service to those people when they log in to Facebook.
To create a custom audience, you need to install a tracking pixel on your website. Alternatively, you can import emails or phone numbers from your marketing efforts to create an even more targeted custom audience.
Lookalike audiences are a way to use one of the custom audiences mentioned above to find people with similar profiles, which you can then specifically target.
Say you just added your remarketing pixel but traffic to your website is low. You can create a lookalike audience to find people who fit the same profile as people who visited your site, but you don’t have to pay for them to get to you first before you can start showing them ads for your product or service.
This can be extremely useful when you are growing your audience and expanding your campaign.
People who have already liked your page may only rarely see posts that you share in their newsfeed. You can create ads targeted specifically at your fans, which have a much higher conversion rate. The key to this audience is to keep them engaged. They’ve already liked your page, so offer updated content to keep them coming back to your page and website.
Fans are almost always the least expensive audience. In our tests, ads targeted at fans consistently cost at least 20% less than interest targeting or even remarketing. Buying an audience is truly worth it in the long run.
Let’s start by exploring the basic demographic targeting options:
These demographics can be fantastic “qualifiers” for your interest based targeting options
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of using interests for creating social segments. What people reveal about themselves directly or based on their usage of Facebook can be a gold-mine for creative marketers. Understanding how each interest can reveal new audiences is key to creating powerful interest-based audiences.
Next to family, profession is one of the most powerful components of an individual’s identity. Are there any occupations and places of employment that indicate a FB user may be interested in your KPI? Places of employment can help you reach a specific interest group, for example, you can target computer technicians who work at Dell, HP, Gateway, ASUS, Apple, Compaq, Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, Sony or Toshiba and sell them software
The key here is to start with what we know about physical life and the institutions that people define themselves as part of. People cluster in groups around personal interests and affiliations. For example, you can target people interested in “Boy Scouts” or who belong to a “Chamber of Commerce” or to a “Rotary Club” or Kiwanis.
What does your target audience enjoy reading in the physical world? What about online? Publications are focused on topical hubs and what people read can tell you a lot about them and their interests. For example, if you are marketing meditation classes, you might consider including people interested in “Tricycle” the Buddhist magazine, as an interest.
To discover topical magazines you can use search engines like Google and Bing. Magazines about parenting, writers, travel, equestrian, gourmet food, snowmobiles, and pop music are just a few examples of the thousands of category-specific publications discoverable in the facebook ads targeting tool. Goodreads is a great way to discover relevant books to use in your research.
Identify large popular websites and target their readers. This can be a fantastic way to find people interested in your products/services. For example, for a company selling Social Media monitoring, adding people interested in Social Media Examiner would clearly identify their audience.
Identify consumers of specific apps or software as a way to research audiences. Make a list of popular apps in your niche, and then research those in the interests bucket. From book applications to travel maps and mobile Twitter clients, look to web applications for targeting insights. For example, people who use Photoshop or Illustrator are probably designers, people who use CAD are probably engineers, etc
What people do in their spare time can also help you understand how to market to them. For example, people who have “landscape” photography would be a great audience for people selling cameras. Sports, camping, pool, ice-fishing…there are a myriad of leisure activities that can be used to identify segments!
Be sure to get out of the literal and into the sideways when targeting. For example, people who love watching “House of Cards” might be a good audience to sell political thriller books, etc. This is when “lateral” thinking can give you a significant edge, and getting into the mind of your audience is fundamental.
Finally, here are a few others to consider when brainstorming psychographics:
Facebook doesn’t reveal all interests right away. You need to use different methods of research to uncover “hidden” interests. When you start typing in a word into the interests bucket new interests are revealed based on additional letters. For example, when you start typing “Meditation” as an interest, Facebook doesn’t reveal “chopra meditation center” until you type in “Meditation c.” If I type in “meditation a” “meditation b” etc, different interests appear.
To find various “hidden” interests, type in different types of alpha patterns, such as vowels after consonants and vice versa. One approach is to start with keywords, then type in synonyms, then use letter patterns. A few tools that can help you with the brainstorming process are wordtracker.com, google keyword planner, semrush.com, microsoft word’s thesaurus and urbandictionary.com.
Now that we know how to uncover more interests, let’s discuss some of the different mashups to hyperfocus the audience and social segment.
How you market to a teenager interested in “Twilight” may be substantially different to how you market to a Female that is between 35 – 50 who has the same interest. Maturity, buying power, and other circumstances will greatly influence the effectiveness of ads. Creating the right combinations of interests with demographic data can be the determining factor between a failed or successful campaign.
Age, Interest and Gender: Someone who is 38-55 years old interested in Alzheimer’s is probably dealing with their parents’ illness and possible move to assisted living. But the 20-21 years old interested in Alzheimer are likely researching because they have grandparents with alzheimers and may not be the decision makers in the “assisted living” decision.
Targeting Media Influencers: Target journalists with your stories. For example, you can target people who work at Gannet, USA Today, the New York Times, or Chicago Tribune that are interested in “buddhism”. Promote a page post with a juicy article you wrote that they’d be interested in sharing, particularly if it’s a human interest story. Do this for a couple of weeks before reaching out to them and pitching a similar story.
Occupation Targeting: Combining workplaces with interest is very powerful. There are over 200k users who work at Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy. Of them, 15k are managers. Use this combination to offer them something specific – maybe a job at a competing company?
Education and Interests: If you are promoting an expensive phone system, a great mashup would be to target people who have a “telecommunications” major and are interested in “technology”. This audience would be likely to respond to different pitches for this type of product.
To summarize, it’s suggested to start with literal targeting and ads, then segment further. Prove the general message with more generic targeting and pictures in the ads, then segment the winning ads to deeper targeting.
We’ve talked about targeting, campaigns, bidding strategies etc… all of this in preparation to promote your product or service. Now we need to explore how to create powerful, click-enticing ads. Your ad image and creativity is of course a critical part of your campaign.
Headlines: Your headlines have to be AMAZING to grab attention. Headlines are bound up with associated images and are a crucial part of imparting information. Understand what needs to be communicated before attempting to package it with a marketing message. A few things to consider when choosing your headlines:
Ad Images: the image to speak to the social segment and lend context to the headline or vice versa. Decide if you want to use pictures that reflect your segment, or the end result if they use your product/service. When creating your ad images, increase the images’ color temperature and saturation to just below where things look unnatural, and boost the contrast to make soft edges become harder.
Make sure you’re zoomed in to the focus point of the images, so you can stand back 5ft and discern what the image is about and the message it conveys. The image should be at least 560×292, but you can check image dimensions/image ratio requirements in this guideline.
Facebook also only allows “20%” of text within your ad image. This is an arbitrary 20%, but you can improve your chances of approval by checking with Facebook’s Grid Tool.
Remember that you are trying to interrupt Facebook users’ scrolling and draw attention to your ad. Your approach must be direct, provocative, and understandable with a single glance. Try not to use blue, white, and grey colors as those seem to blend in with Facebook's color theme.
Body Copy: The mantra of body copy is to use a combination of user benefit, an offer, and a call to action.
Keep the body copy as short as you can, short ads have higher CTR. 100 character ads are very effective. Having a call to action within the first 90 characters is also known to improve results.
The word count for your ad is based on the placement. Newsfeed ads have a greater character limit, as opposed to right-bar ads. Keep this in mind when building your ads. For more specific information on the text restrictions, visit this page.
How much about your site do you reveal to FB in an ad? Do you show the logo, company name, or just keywords? Given the inexpensive cost and massive capacity to serve impressions, consider including a branding component to all ads.
Plan out what content you want on the ad image, relative to the content that goes on the headline, description, and post text.
For ads with Page Post Engagement, Clicks to Website, or Website Conversions as their objective, these are the elements to fill out your ad.
As for Page Like Ads, this is what you need to prepare:
Finally, here’s an image to use as a guideline when creating your ads:
This image shows you where each element goes, and how all of the elements work together to create a powerful ad that simply WORKS.
Now that you know who you’re marketing to, you can begin creating the ads themselves.
For the beginning of mainstream marketer, the self-serve Ad tool is the tool you will most likely use (as opposed to the Power Editor which gives much greater control, described later). This type of Ad is created by going to Settings > Create Ad, where you will be first prompted to choose “what kind of results do you want for your ads.” The process would be as follows:
The landing page is the destination users are routed to by clicking on an ad. The landing page is the conversion mechanism for the traffic driven from FB ads. Whether it’s on your site or a Facebook post, the landing page needs to welcome the user, reinforce their decision to click, and funnel towards conversion.
Your landing page works hand in hand with the demographic targeting and an ads’ creative. User’s predilections can be leveraged even further with the right socially sensitive landing page. Landing pages for Facebook ads can easily be crafted to resonate to a much deeper and personal level. For example, if you’re selling iPads, create one ad targeted at males and one ad targeted at females, then customize the landing pages accordingly.
Experienced advertisers understand how important the quality of the landing page is to conversion.
When you start advertising on Facebook, having separate campaigns is important so you can designate a budget for each. Budget allocation happens at the ad set level. So you’ll want to have unique campaigns with your overarching objective, each holding ad sets matching an objective, each with their own budget.
Make sure you name campaigns with an easily identifiable naming convention, as this will help you in the reporting phase. For example, you can use: Website – Audience – Objective – Specific Ad Identifier
You can choose a daily or lifetime budget. Daily distributes the ad spend throughout the day, lifetime spreads it for the duration of the campaign. If you check “run my campaign continuously starting today” ads will run at full throttle until the budget is expended. You won’t need to specify an end date as the campaign will end when it runs out of money. If you choose a daily budget, remember to turn the campaign off when you’re ready for it to stop or it’ll keep running.
When choosing the bid type, you’ll be asked to choose between bidding for Engagement, Clicks or Impressions. Your KPI’s will determine the best type of bidding option to choose.
Facebook ads uses an auction model, meaning that advertisers bid against other advertisers vying for the same real estate. You can pay by CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions). There is also a quality score for each ad comprising several FB monitors, including CTR, users who click the little X saying they don’t like the ad, and other factors. The ad’s position is likely determined as follows: bid + quality score = ad position.
FB gives you suggested bids. Experience has shown that bidding to the highest suggested level gets premium placement, as evidenced by CTR. The ads are low-cost enough that there is no reason to cut costs on initial launch. In fact, a poor CTR seems to affect your quality score, which will impact the cost in the future for that ad. To test, go to your own FB profile and add in the interests you’re marketing to. This will give you an idea where your ad will appear. Change the bid and watch the effect. If other interests are affecting your bids, remove other interests, adjust the bids, and watch how it reacts.
Another classic method is to start high and gradually back the bids down, all the while noting the traffic changes. Don’t do this in the other direction. Buy your way into the auction by paying more up front and the campaign will be less costly in the long run.
CPM advertising is usually more effective for advertisers who want to raise awareness of their brand, while CPC advertising is more effective for advertisers who are hoping for a certain response from users, such as sales or registrations.
Your ads visibility is directly correlated to your budget and bid pricing. You simply select how much you’re willing to pay for each click or every thousand impressions and the algorithm will determine the placement of your ad. Like Adwords, FB uses a Quality Score equation in their ad ranking algorithm.
Tag every ad with the campaign, headline, and ad variable. Keep track of these in a spreadsheet. For improved conversion tracking, use headlines from the inbound URL and display it as text on the page. Also, have every image change based on either “headline” or “ad id”. Set up these pages with no index no follow tags in robots.txt The 3 main variables to track are: campaign, headline, and ad-id (unique identifier for every ad).
For any advanced or experienced Facebook marketer, using the Power Editor is a MUST. The theoretical process remains the same, but the Power Editor gives you much more control in how you create and manage your campaigns.
Here is a step-by-step guide to creating your campaigns in the Power Editor:
Each campaign should reflect the objective of the ad you are creating.
Go to Power Editor and click the Campaign tab.
Click on the + icon in the top left corner of the page underneath the campaign tab.
You will be given the same objective choices as in the self-serve ad tool. Edit the name of your campaign to reflect that objective.
In the left column, your campaign will now appear under “Not Uploaded.” Unlike the self-serve ad tool, you can create, save, modify and even revert changes you have made to campaigns within the Power Editor. In order to submit them for editorial approval, you have to click “Upload Changes”, which will then submit your campaign(s) for editorial approval.
In the Power Editor, you will not set your budget or start/end date under campaigns, but under Ad Sets:
Ad sets should be created based on the target audience.
With your Campaign highlighted under the “Not Uploaded” section, click on the Ad Sets tab. Here will you create your ad set (if you wish you can change the name to reflect the set). You will set your budget as well as the start and end dates.
Now that you’ve created your Campaign and Ad Set, you are ready to create your individual ads.
These ads are variations of your objective and target audience, based on ad placement, ad copy, images, etc.
First you will set your Creative. You can set your landing page, choose a post or upload a new post. With a new post, you can choose whether it will be published to the page or published as a “dark” ad, which will not appear on your page, allowing you to post multiple variations of the same ad without clogging up your newsfeed. A good starting point is THREE variations within one ad set.
Click the same + icon under the Ads tab to create a new ad. You’ll be prompted with this:
One issue with unpublished posts is that you might get engagement on that post… but if it’s not on your page, how do you check it? You can do this through the Notifications in your Admin Panel, though the Power Editor (Manage Pages > View Post, though these only show most recent posts), as well as your Ads Manager (Ads Manager > Ads > Preview, though this only works for text, photo, and video updates. Previewing a link post will take you to the link you are promoting).
Once the ad is created you will be able to create the post, target audience, and pricing.
Click on the + sign next to Page Post to create your new ad creative.
Here you can pick the post type, add the URL that people will be directed to when they click. Post Text, Link Headline, Display Link, Description, and Picture.
In the Power Editor you can also create posts and ads with a Call-to-Action button. To create a Call-to-Action button, your ad objective must be “Clicks to Website”, and the ad itself must be a new unpublished Post. When you create your post, you’ll automatically be given the option to include a button (the default will be “No Button”). Note that adding the button will reduce your character limit by 20 characters or so.
Next you will set your Audience, using the interests and guidelines above. With the Power Editor, however, you have the chance to set Custom Audiences and Save Target Groups from existing ads. You can manage Audiences in its own space under Ad Tools.
Once you have input the details of your audience in the Audience tab, it’s time to put your pricing info under the Optimization & Pricing tab.
Generally, having Optimized CPM will ensure your ad gets seen, but if you like to have more control over the bidding you can manually set up your bids.
Just like with most tools, the best way to learn it is to use it. Create a few practice ads and explore all the options available. Just make sure to not click Upload Changes as that will make them go live.
Once you create campaigns and ad sets, creating new ads is as easy as duplicating existing ads and adjusting the name and creative. Remember that naming convention is KEY. As your account grows and you increase the number of ads, keeping track of your ads can become problematic especially if they’re not well organized. Prioritize your campaign, ad set, and ad structure to streamline your advertising process!
Facebook offers a reporting tool that allows you to generate reports based on a variety of metrics. This reporting system is very flexible and has many different options for metrics. Which is great, but it also could lead to confusion as to what’s important to track.
By clicking on "View Report" , you can easily generate a report with the columns you need based on your objective.
You can also click on Reports on the side taskbar to access the reporting tool:
Here you’ll be shown detailed information about your ads and filter them. To edit what information you want to include/exclude in your report. Click on "Edit Columns" Here:
Under the Data Aggregation tab, we can organize the data in the report by specifying Ad, Account, Campaign etc. You’ll want to include campaign, ad set, ad and ad objective so it’s easy to understand the goal of the ad.
So if we select Account, Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad. Our report will look like this:
If we click on "Edit Columns" again, then click on the Data Breakdowns, we see this.
Here we can distinguish the data from an ad to compare its data via Placement (Mobile vs Desktop, Newsfeed Ad vs. Right Column Ad), Age, Gender etc. You can only choose one of these per report.
Ideally, you should run comprehensive reports comparing your data by different data breakdowns at least once a month. Data breakdowns can tell you about the average age of your audience, their gender, country, and placement.
Now when it comes to the reporting metrics. The data is separated into 5 categories:
This section includes all the information that details how many people can, and are seeing your ads, and how much your ads are costing you.
The metrics include:
Impressions: How many times your ad appears on someone’s page.
Reach: This is the number of unique people who received an impression of your ad. Reach might be less than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions.
Frequency: The number of times your ad was served to each person.
Social Reach: The number of people your ad was served to with social information. For example, if 3 people see an ad 2 times each that says a friend likes your Page, it counts as 3 social reaches
Social Impressions: The number of times your ad was served, with social information. For example, if 3 people are served an ad 2 times each and it includes information about a friend liking your Page, it counts as 6 social impressions.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM): The average cost for 1,000 impressions on your ad.
Cost Per 1,000 People Reached: The average cost for 1,000 people reached.
Spend: The total amount you’ve spent on your ad so far.
This section includes all the information on how many people have clicked your ads and how frequently people are clicking them. The metrics include:
Clicks: Clicks are the total number of clicks on your ad. Depending on what you’re promoting, this can include Page likes, event responses or app installs.
Unique Clicks: The total number of unique people who have clicked on your ad. For example, if 3 people click on the same ad 5 times, it will count as 3 unique people who clicked.
Social Clicks: Number of clicks your ad receives when it’s shown with social information (ex: Jane Doe likes this).
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks you received divided by the number of impressions.
Unique Click-Through Rate (uCTR): The number of people who clicked on your ad divided by the number of people you reached. For example, if you received 20 unique clicks and your ad was served to 1,000 unique people, your unique click-through rate would be 2%.
Cost Per Click (CPC): Cost Per Click is the average cost per click for ads, calculated as the amount spent divided by the number of clicks received.
Cost Per Unique Click: The average cost per person who clicked on your ads, calculated as the amount spent divided by the number of unique clicks received.
This section includes all the information on how people interacted with your Ads. The metrics include:
Actions: The number of actions taken on your ad, Page, app or event after your ad was served to someone, even if they didn’t click on it.
People Taking Action: People Take Action is the number of unique people who took an action such as liking your Page or installing your app as a result of your ad. For example, if the same person likes and comments on a post, they will be counted as 1 unique person.
Page Likes: How many people “liked” your Page.
Post Likes: How many people liked your Post.
Post Comments: How many people commented on your Ad Post.
Post Shares: The number of people who shared your Ad Post.
Website Clicks: The number of clicks on links appearing on your ad that direct to your site off Facebook
Website Conversion: The number of times a conversion happened on your website as a result of your ad.
Checkouts (Conversion): The number of times a checkout happened on your website as a result of your ad.
Registrations (Conversion): The number of registrations to your website happened as a result of your ad.
Leads (Conversion): The number of new leads acquired as a result of your ad.
Key Web Page Views (Conversion): The number of times a key page on your website was viewed as a result of your ad.
Adds to Cart (Conversion): The number of times an item was added to a shopping cart as a result of your ad.
Other Website Conversions: The number of other conversions that occurred on your website as a result of your ad.
This section details all the revenue that your website is getting as a result of your ads. The metrics are:
Total Conversion Value: The total revenue returned from conversions from Facebook credit spends and conversions on your website or mobile app.
Gift Sale Conversion Values: The total value returned from the gift sale conversions as a result of your ad.
Website Conversion Value: The total value returned from conversions on your website as a result of your ad.
Registrations Conversion Value: The total value returned for registrations on your website as a result of your ad.
Lead Conversion Value: The total value returned from acquiring new leads on your website as a result of your ad.
Other Website Conversion Value: The total value returned from other conversions on your website as a result of your ad.
This section breaks down how much you’re spending for every type of action people are taking on your ads.
Cost Per All Actions: The average you’ve spent on all actions. For example, if you spent $20 on an ad and you got 10 page likes, each one would cost $2.
Cost Per Page Like: The average cost for each page like as a result of your ad.
Cost Per Page Engagement: The average cost per action related to the Page and Page’s post as a result of your ad.
Cost Per Post Engagement: The average cost per action related to your page’s post as a result of your ad.
The metrics may seem overwhelming at first, but each ad campaign is different and can be geared for a variety of goals which is why Facebook has included so many tracking metrics to ensure that your ads are performing as well as they can be.
If you are starting your first campaign it may be confusing to know which metrics are important to track. What is important to track varied depending on what the objective of your ads are.
For Page Likes it’s important to track:
The above are important for a marketer to keep track of, but when you are issuing a report to a client. It will be hard for them to find out what’s important. In that case you should report:
For Post Engagement it's important to track:
Make sure to filter by Page Name and Post Engagement.
For Website Clicks its important to track:
Make sure to filter by Page Name and Website Click.
For Conversions its important to track:
Make sure to filter by Page Name and Website Conversion.
If you need to create a general overview of an entire campaign or account as a whole, a good selection of metrics to have are:
After you have selected your columns you’ll see your report.
You can adjust the date range here.
You can also hit "Save" to save your report, which can be accessed later under located here:
A good way to save your report and make it better to show clients is to export your report by clicking on "Export" here:
You can export to an .xls or .csv file.
The summary row refers to the top row of your report which totals all the data from all the ads and their placements here:
Your exported data will look like this:
Here you can round the numbers, label them, and do whatever you need to do to make the data legible and understandable. Here’s a sample of one of Gryffin’s Facebook reports.
Here we separated the active ads based on the Ad Goal. We compare the data from each week-by-week. You can also narrow down the information, like we did here:
This sheet is devoted completely to our expenses. It has the active ads we had running during the date range and how much we spent. This is very useful when one aspect of your campaign is extremely important to keep track of.
The nuances of what you need to report on for your Facebook campaign will vary depending on the objectives, but the method of reporting will still be the same even if your informative metrics change.
Here is a sample worksheet with some examples of our reporting scheme.
It’s important to not over-schedule your reports and look for data daily as your Facebook ads need time to gather data. A good time frame is one to two months. You can schedule your reports by clicking on "Schedule"
Here you can schedule your report and email it to yourself and your clients. Make sure that if you are scheduling you are scheduling report by month, that under the date range you choose: "Last Month" as opposed to This Month.
It’s important to understand that the first objective of any Facebook advertising campaign should be to test and explore. When you first start you never know how an ad and interest group will perform.
Once you run a few tests, you’ll start getting a better sense for what works for each target audience and can subsequently fine tune the campaign over time until you arrive at the ideal combination of factors. Trial and error is the best method in discovering what your audience will respond to the most. Be ready to learn and play as you embark on this amazing journey towards successful, ROI-driven strategies.
