Now that you have created your first campaign and started advertising on Facebook, the true effort is to constantly analyze and tweak to get the best possible results. In this tutorial we’re going to cover some of the basic metrics you need to keep watching and the tools available for you to track these.
Know The Terms
In order to dive into the Facebook Insights you need to understand what the numbers represent and what they really mean. Facebook offers a great glossary of terms found here to go over – https://www.facebook.com/help/447834205249495
CTR – click through rate: Your click through rate should increase over time. If this number is declining you should consider tweaking your ads content.
CPM – cost per 1000 impressions: Your CPM should also continue on decreasing. If you find this to be a high number, then consider finding a target audience that is not as competitive. It is usually best to create different ads that focus on a smaller group of people to see better results.
CPC – cost per click: The lower you’re paying for clicks the better, but this all depends on whether you’re sending customers to your website or a Facebook page or app. If you’re running a CPM campaign you would still see a CPC analysis which allows you to fully calculate the difference.
Create Reports
The Facebook report section allows you to dive deep into reporting and create scheduled reports to keep you in the loop. Head on over there to go over some of the metrics you really should be looking at.
With reports you can dissect the insights by campaign, ad, time period, demographic, conversion, placement, revenue and cost. Any one of these can be shown to be compared by another. So for example: “the number of page likes that a specific ad generated from a specific country targeting, in a specific period of time.” Or “the number of successful sale coming in from a specific ad in a set period of time”.
The Facebook reports dashboard really allows you to dive deep, and jumping on this early and learning the ins and outs of this tool will allow you to spend smarter on Facebook ads.
Add Fresh Content
One of the most important factors of advertising especially on a platform with limited reach like Facebook is fresh content. You should update your ads frequently to keep the target audience engaged. Experiment with different images, headlines, and copy to increase CTR. This is especially important if you’re Potential Reach (target audience) is low.
Track Conversions
Connecting Facebook to your own website and tracking conversions is necessary for eCommerce. You can track a checkout process, add to cart, registration to a form, and other measures that are necessary to know. This allows you to see if the total you’re spending on advertising your products is leading to sales. Linking to your Google Analytics and making sure you’re using campaign links and event tracking allows you to also see this info in your Google Analytics dashboard. If you’re seeing low conversions, don’t quit too soon, it can mean that your landing pages are not optimized. Let’s discuss this..
Experiment With Landing Pages
Another ideal variation to keep changing and experimenting with is your landing page. If you’re continuously sending customers to a page on your website and seeing low conversions or high bounce rates, then try different pages and ask yourself these simple questions:
- Are you making it easy for them to start shopping?
- Is the page relevant to the ad?
- Are you confusing them when they land on the site?
- Is the call to the action easily seen?
Creating different landing pages will allow you to A/B test and see what is getting you better results.
Use the Power Editor
The Facebook power editor is an editing tool that allows you to edit ads more easily, compare metrics, duplicate ads and export and import ad data. This is great once you have a handle on things to quickly find, edit and create campaigns and ads.
Seeing the full effect of Facebook advertising can take time. Start with a small budget and once you see some positive results start increasing and tweaking. Just make sure to dedicate the time and measure everything to make sure you’re doing your best.
Have any other tools you like to use to measure Facebook advertising? We’d love to hear all about them in the comments.
Read part 1 on how to get started advertising on Facebook.
