It’s all too common for beginner Facebook Advertisers to stick to the default “Performance” metrics columns when reviewing their ad performance. While this will give you a basic overview of how things are doing, there are a tonne of other metrics that will give you helpful information about how your ads and doing and help you make an educated decision about what to do next.
I’ve rounded up a collection of my favourites that are often overlooked but that I find myself turning to pretty frequently.
Frequency
Frequency is the average number of times that each person within your audience has seen your ad. It’s one of the key metrics we look at to decide when to refresh ad creative.
Advertising, particularly brand awareness is very much about repetition and ensuring that you keep your brand top of mind with your audience. But at the same time, it’s important to make sure your audience isn’t experiencing ad fatigue. Once ad fatigue sets in, your audience will start to become less responsive to your campaign and you’ll start to see the impacts reflected in other metrics, namely your relevance scores, CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and ultimately your conversion rate.
For most campaigns, you want your frequency to sit around 1-2. Once that number starts to creep over 3, chances are, it’s time to refresh your creative.
There are some exceptions to this rule, particularly where you’re using dynamic creative and some types of remarketing. The most important thing is to look at your historical metrics and keep a close eye on those other metrics.
Facebook ads are not a case of set and forget, you should always be testing new creative to ensure you stay relevant and to work out what resonates best with your audience.
Pageviews
When running a traffic campaign, it’s common to report on the number of clicks (specifically link clicks).
There’s another metric very similar to this, however, that is often ignored: Pageviews.
Pageviews gives you a measure of how many people stick around and wait for your website to load after they click on the link.
To measure this, you need to make sure you have the Facebook pixel installed correctly. Pageviews only requires the base code to be installed, no further standard events are required (but you should be using them anyway because that’s where the real value is when it comes to Facebook Ads! More on that next).
It’s important to keep an eye on your page views vs link clicks and make sure there isn’t a huge discrepancy between the two. If the number of page views being recorded is significantly lower than the number of link clicks, it could indicate an issue with your website that you should try to resolve asap. The most common culprit? Poor page load speeds.
Conversion Value
I mentioned earlier that standard events are extremely valuable for your Facebook Ads. This in itself is a whole other blog post. To give you a quick rundown…
Standard events are a tiny piece of code that sends information back to Facebook about the actions your customers and website visitors are taking. For example, you can use standard events to measure how many people have filled out a contact form, booked an appointment, added items to their cart, initiated the checkout and completed a purchase.
But one really cool thing you can do with standard events is actually measure the value of the conversions that have occurred as a direct result of your ads.
This is especially valuable for businesses with online stores. Having your pixel and standard events set up correctly will let you track exactly how many $$$ you’ve made from the ads you’re running.
And that information can be used to make sure your ads are getting in front of people who are actually spending money (not just those who want to order the cheapest item from the sale category).
Ad relevance diagnostics
This metric is technically 3 in 1 as Facebook has transitioned away from a single “ad relevance score” to provide a:
- Quality ranking
- Engagement rate ranking
- Conversion rate ranking
These scores give you an approximate idea of the relevance and quality of your ads in relation to other ads targeting the same audience.
These are measured by looking at:
- Feedback from users (ie how many people hide or report the ad)
- How much text is used in the image
- The use of “sensationalised language”
- The use of clickbait-style language
- The likelihood that someone clicks or engages with an ad
- A comparison of your conversion rate to other ads with a similar audience and goal
It’s not uncommon for an ad with a “below average” ranking for one of these metrics to still get results, but a low score can indicate that there’s significant room for improvement. So, the ad relevance diagnostics can give you a good indication of which of your ads are performing best and help you to make informed decisions when updating your creative and A/B testing.
If you’ve found yourself with a bunch of “below average” scores, the first places to start looking for solutions are:
For low quality ranking scores
Make sure you’re targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. If you’re trying to sell your high-value product to a cold audience, consider building their trust with a brand awareness campaign or offering some free content. You could also look at splitting your audience into ad groups based on gender, age or even location and serving those people ads with messages and images that better align with their demographics (ie. “Gold Coast dog trainers” and “Brisbane dog trainers” as opposed to “Dog trainers”)
Consider removing some of the text from the image, test new ad copy that speaks directly to your audience, offers them a solution to their problem and tells them what they need to do.
Most importantly, focus on actively targeting your niche. Better to target the people you want the most than to try and target everyone.
For low engagement rate ranking
Check that your audience is not experiencing ad fatigue (your frequency score will help here) and refresh your creative as required.
Make sure you have a clear call to action that tells your audience what they need to do next.
Focus on ad creative that is attention-grabbing and relevant enough that it will stop your audience from scrolling and pique their interest.
For low conversion rate ranking
Start to assess why your audience isn’t converting. Is there a disconnect between what you’re offering in your ad and what you’re delivering on your website?
Are you making it too hard for your audience to convert (or even failing to tell them what they need to do via a clear call to action)?
Maybe your website is too slow or poorly optimised. Pageviews vs link clicks may give you some insights here but I would also recommend some further investigation using Google Analytics.
Now, these metrics are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the data Facebook can provide you. But for those of you just dabbling in DIY ads, these extra metrics will be really valuable if you’re trying to take your campaign to the next level.
I’d recommend having a poke around ad manager and checking out some of the different columns and additional metrics available:
Cheers
