7 analytics you need to track to improve your Facebook marketing campaigns
The world of Facebook marketing and paid ads can be a confusing place. So I’m here to help make it simple!
But before we dive into the 7 analytics I recommend tracking, there are a few things you need to do first to make sure you’re looking at the right analytics for your business.
First of all, you need to establish the key objectives of your campaign as this will directly influence what analytics you’re looking for in your Facebook dashboard. This will help you work whether the campaign has been a success based on the goals you wanted to achieve. The most common goals are to increase sales, boost visibility or get more website views.
Depending on these objectives and what type of campaign you set up in the first place, I would then recommend customising your Facebook dashboard to see exactly what you want to be looking at. This keeps things super simple and saves you from scrolling through hundreds of analytics that might not be relevant to your campaign.
Once you’ve done both of those, here are the 7 key analytics I recommend looking at to track the success of your campaign:
1- Reach
This is how many people your advert reached. This will give you a good indication of whether you’ve got a big enough audience pool to be showing your content to, to ensure good results for your ad spends in the first place. If the reach isn’t high, you might want to reevaluate your targets.
2- Impressions
Although reach and impressions are similar, it’s important to remember that they aren’t the same!
Impressions reflect how many times people see the advert. This is likely to be more than once so your impressions will probably be higher than reach.
3- Conversions
If you're an e-commerce site and your objective is to increase your sales, you’ll want to want to track the number of purchases that come through as a direct result of the ad. Conversions will be a key analytic for you to look at. Just be aware that there are standard conversions and custom conversions where you can filter events and add rules to get a more in-depth look at your customer's actions. Conversions don’t always have to be purchases, as you might also deem a conversion as someone that signs up to your free group… so again it’s all about working out what a conversion is to you!
4- Landing Page Views
If you’re using your ad to send people from Facebook to a website URL, landing page views are a great thing to look at.
Sometimes people just click on your advert and then disappear before they make it to your website, so landing page views gives you a more accurate figure of who has actually seen the content on your website.
5- Cost Per Result
Depending on what your objective is, you can see how much it cost for each person who met it.
For example, you could look at Cost Per Click if your goal was to get more people on your website. As a very simple example, if your ad spend was £10 and 36 people clicked on your link, it would have cost you £0.27 for each click!
6-Budget Spent
If you’re running multiple campaigns, it’s particularly important to take the time to analyse the different campaigns and cross-reference them to see what worked best! This way you can make sure you budget more for the campaigns that perform better.
7- Engagement
Engagement includes metrics such as likes, shares and comments.
Typically these are classed as vanity metrics and aren’t always a good indication of how well an ad has performed. However, if your main objective was to increase engagement or visibility, these metrics would be a key analytic to look at.
Bonus Tip
To truly start using analytics to boost your marketing, you could filter all of the above by demographic. This way you can see what type of people are responding in what way and ensure that the ads are reaching the audiences you intended them to!
What’s the point of reviewing analytics?
It’s a good question and I know that reviewing your analytics can take some time but it’s really important to do, especially when it comes to Facebook Ads.
The truth is, Facebook can be a bit of a money pit if you aren’t monitoring it and ensuring you’re getting a good Return On Ad Spend. You want to make sure it’s actually a profitable way to help build your business and the only way to do that is by reviewing the analytics!
Analytics also provide great insight into what type of content works well for you! If you notice one creative has done noticeably well, that’s a good indication of what’s resonating with your audience and you can use this to inform the other content you make, even outside of Facebook.
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with analytics or even your marketing strategy in general and you aren’t sure what’s working best or how to figure out your next marketing steps, I have something that can help!
My one-off marketing intensives are a great way to get the marketing support you need to upgrade your marketing and get crystal clear on what you can do to move your business forward!
