16 Facebook Ad Metrics That Actually Matter (And 3 That Don’t)

You run your Facebook ad, go in to check what’s going and BAM!

You’re hit with a tidal wave of numbers, stats and data.

Where the heck do you start? What Facebook ad metrics should you be paying attention to? What ones can you ignore? It can be a little overwhelming, especially if you’re new to Facebook advertising.

Whenever we run Facebook ads for clients, there’s only a handful of metrics we actually pay attention to – around 16 in total. In this article, I’m going to walk you through the 16 Facebook ad metrics that actually matter.

First, The Funnel…

Before we look at the Facebook ad metrics, we need to understand the customer journey. What steps will people receiving our ads take? Whether a metric or number is good/important is based on your goals and what your funnel looks like.

Your funnel is essentially the steps someone must take to become a customer of yours. You could also call this the customer journey. With the right tracking in place, we’re able to track each stage of the customer journey. This gives us a holistic view of how our campaigns are performing.

As we think about funnels, we can start to jot down the different touch points someone might take to buy from us. For example, in an e-commerce business, they may:

1. Visit website

2. Visit product page

3. Add item to cart

4. Checkout

5. Sale confirmation

With the right metrics, we can look to see how each stage of our funnel is performing. We might send a ton of people to the checkout page, but if none of them buys, are our ads really performing well?

So, with that in mind, let’s go over the Facebook ad metrics that actually matter.

Facebook Ad Metrics Worth Paying Attention To…

FOR SALES CAMPAIGNS

Whenever we run campaigns with the goal of increasing sales, these are the metrics I pay attention to.

1. Results – This is a given… how many sales have we made? The ‘result’ is the event you choose when selecting your conversion objective. So, if you’re looking for sales, this is likely to be it.

2. Cost per result – How much are you spending to get that result? This is your cost per acquisition.

3. Add to carts – If you’re an e-commerce store, how many people have added your product to their cart? (regardless of whether they’ve purchased or not). You would need to have the Addtocart standard event created to track this (and #4, #5 and #6).

4. Cost per add to cart – How much are you paying in ad spend to have someone add to cart?

5. Initiate Checkouts – How many people are initiating checkout with you? This is typically the final step before clicking ‘purchase’.

6. Cost per Initiate Checkout – how much is it costing you to have someone initiate checkout.

7. CTR – The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it.

HOW TO INTERPRET THE DATA

Making sales on Facebook is very challenging, which is why we need to pay attention to metrics other than just results/sales.

If you set up your campaign and you’re generating sales, fantastic! Just make sure you’re paying less than the lifetime value of your customer. You don’t want to be spending ￡200 per sale if a customer is only worth ￡10 to you.

If you’re not seeing sales, that’s when we start to look at the other metrics, for example:

• If we’re not seeing sales, are we seeing Add to carts? Are we seeing people initiate the checkout? If not, we’re not compelling people enough to start the buying process. This means our targeting or our messaging is off. If we are seeing these things, where is our biggest drop off? Are we getting lots of ATC’s but no checkouts?
• What does our CTR look like? Ideally, we want our CTR to be around 1-2%+. If we’re not achieving that, it normally means our message isn’t working with our audience. We need to do more testing. If our CTR is high, but our conversion to sale is low, it could indicate an issue with our website/funnel.

For metrics in other types of campaigns, read the full article here: https://mrgavinbell.com/facebook-ad-metrics/