8 Facebook Advertising Metrics Every Brand Needs To Track

When it comes to the amount of data you can gather on ad performance, user engagement or audience demographics, no social media platform rivals Facebook. A quick look into Facebook's Ads Manager reveals valuable information on conversions, relevance and response, and you can access even more metrics through an external advertising platform like AdEspresso. 

What you do with this data is what ultimately makes a difference to your social media marketing strategy. While each brand has different advertising objectives, there are some common metrics that every brand needs to track when advertising on Facebook.

1. ENGAGEMENT

Engagement is one of the most important metrics you should keep an eye on. It tracks every action a user has taken on your ad - it can be a post reaction, a comment, a share or a page Like, and it gives you with an overview on how our campaign resonates with your target audience. Use the comments section as a place to interact with your users and quickly answer any queries that they might have. Engaged users lead to happy customers, and the more interaction your ad receives, the more exposure it will get. Do not ignore any negative comments, as they will harm your ad's performace.

Posts with a lot of engagement do not only rank higher in the News Feed, but are also likely to receive a higher relevance score. You can track your user engagement through the Notifications section on your Facebook page, or use an external social media management platform like AdEspresso, which groups all your user interactions in one place.

2. REACH

This is one of the easiest metrics to understand but also one of the most overlooked by many advertisers. Reach represents the total number of people who have seen your ad at least once. It is different from Impressions, which includes multiple views from repeat users and does not give you an accurate overview of your campaign's performance. If your reach is significantly lower than your impressions, it might mean that your frequency has gone up and the same users are seeing your ad.

Your bid, budget and target audience are all factors that can influence your reach. If you are not reaching enough people, you may want to consider increasing your bid. You can get an overview of your campaign reach in Facebook's Ads Manager or the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

3. CONVERSIONS

If your ultimate goal with Facebook advertising is to get people to take an action on your website or app, the most valuable metric can monitor are conversions. Using the Facebook pixel or app events you can easily track and measure every app install, add-to-cart, completed purchase or newsletter sign-up. You can virtually track views on any website landing page, and when used properly, ads optimized for conversions are one of the most powerful tool available to advertisers.

Essentially, this metric will show you how well your campaign is performing based on your chosen objective. Facebook learns how to effectively optimize your campaign by getting results, so you should aim to get between 15 and 25 conversions per week. If this isn't happening, try optimizing for a more easily achievable conversion event.

You can see the total number of conversions on any campaign by going into Facebook's Ads Manager or simply accessing the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

4. CPA / CPC / CPM

Once you are getting enough conversions, it is time to look at the CPA (Cost per Action) and see if your advertising efforts are paying off and your campaign results are aligned with your business objectives. The CPA indicates how cost-efficiently you have achieved your campaign objective. You should always focus on lowering your CPA, but don't be alarmed if you get more expensive conversions in the first few days. Facebook does need some time to effectively optimize your campaigns, and the longer your campaign has been running and the more engagement it gets, the less you will pay for results.

If you are optimizing your campaigns for clicks or impressions, you would want to look at CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per 1,000 Impressions). These are usually much cheaper than conversions and could be really useful if you are testing multiple ad variations. It is up to you to determine your ideal cost per action, but it is worth noting that in the United Kingdom, the average CPA across all industries is £13.86, while the average CPC is £1.28.

You can get an overview of your cost per result in Facebook's Ads Manager or the main dashboard in AdEspresso. You can go one step further and breakdown the stats by Time of Day to determine the optimum times to run your ads.

5. CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) shows the percentage of people who have seen your ad and clicked through to your website or app, and it is calculated as clicks divided by impressions. Even if you are not optimizing for link clicks you should still closely monitor this metric, as it tells you a lot about why a campaign is performing in a certain way. If your ads get plenty of impressions but not clicks, Facebook's algorithm assumes that your audience doesn't find the ad relevant, and that increases the average CPA and lowers the relevance score.

According to WordStream, the average click-through rate across all industries is 0.9%, and it is greatly influenced by your target audience and ad creative. Your CTR will naturally decrease as your ad frequency increases, so if your campaigns have a low CTR, consider adjusting either of these two.

Keep an eye on your click-through rate in Facebook's Ads Manager or in the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

6. AUDIENCE RETENTION

If you are running video ads on Facebook, there are a few metrics you should track, including Video Views, Cost per Video View and Average Watch Time, but Audience Retention is probably the most important. If you are typically running 3-minute video ads but your audience only watches the first 30 seconds, you might want to consider cutting them down. Use these metrics to determine what percentage of your video gets watched, when your viewers are dropping off and how your ads resonate with your audience.

You can access the Audience Retention graph and other video metrics on your Facebook Page Insights, Facebook's Ads Manager or in the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

7. RELEVANCE SCORE

A key factor in your campaign's performance, the relevance score represents a rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your ad resonates with your target audience. It is based on the amount of positive feedback (clicks, conversions, video views, app installs) and negative feedback (a user clicking "I don't want to see this ad") an ad receives, and the higher your ad's relevance score, the better it will perform.

Understanding the relevance score can help you optimize existing campaigns and see what variations work best when testing multiple ad creatives. If you get a low relevance score on an ad, try updating the target audience or changing the ad's creative.

The relevance score is only visible at the ad level in Facebook's Ads Manager once your ad has received more than 500 impressions, but you can also view it in the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

8. FREQUENCY

If there was only one metric I could recommend looking at when trying to understand a campaign's performance, it would be the ad frequency. It often goes overlooked by advertisers but it is very important to monitor, because it represents the average number of times a unique user has seen your ad. Unlike AdWords, showing your ad continuously to the same people wouldn't work, ad fatigue would quickly set in and the cost per conversion would be driven up by users who are not taking any actions.

Ad Frequency is the single most powerful factor that can bring a high-performing campaign to a steady decline, without any changes to your cost per action, click-through rate or ad delivery. As your campaigns keep spending money, your ad frequency will naturally increase, and campaigns tend to perform poorly when you have saturated the audience.

You can beat ad frequency by changing the ad creative or target audience. As a general rule, the ad frequency shouldn't go above 5, unless you are targeting a group of very engaged users who are constantly driving conversions. As with every other metric, you should look at ad frequency in relation to all other factors that matter to you and help you achieve your advertising objectives.

You can see the ad frequency at the campaign level on Facebook's Ads Manager or in the main dashboard in AdEspresso.

Lastly, Facebook is a very dynamic marketplace which provides marketers with infinite opportunities to reach their target audiences and turn prospects into customers. Understanding these metrics should give you a better overview of how Facebook advertising works and how you can maximize your efforts to achieve your advertising goals.