Metrics, specifically Facebook ones, can be daunting.

Going into Ads Manager and seeing a big chart with lots of words you’re not familiar with, a maze of decimal points and percentages.

If you don’t know what all the different numbers mean and how they are affected, you could be wasting thousands on ads that aren’t doing a whole lot for you.

We’ve seen a lot of campaigns that we know to be tried and tested, failing to meet Facebooks forever changing expectations recently, and we know that it’s not just us that’s having to overcome competing with huge businesses dominating the platform and new algorithms.

So, if you need some more info on what these different figures mean, how you can find them and how you can optimise them to get in the best position for making your business succeed, then stay with me and hopefully you’ll come out of this a little less overwhelmed.

To understand how to analyse these metrics it’s important to first start by explaining the difference between a Campaign, an Ad Set and an Ad.

The Campaign:

This is where you choose the objective. It essentially contains all your ad sets and subsequent ads within it. It’ll show you the overall results for a campaign.

The Ad Set:

This is where you tell Facebook who you want to see it, where and how much you want to spend on it.

This is also where you want to be looking at your metrics to know how each ad is doing specifically.

Each ad set contains an ad which will be displayed to an audience you specify in your ad set. Within a campaign you can (and should) have multiple ad sets.

This will allow you to make slightly different combinations of copy, images, headlines etc. in your ads so you can identify what works well for your audience and what doesn’t.

The Ad

Pretty explanatory, it’s what your audience sees on the other end. The aesthetics of an ad are constructed and altered here.

If you are running ads, the sweet spot you want to be hitting is as follows:

Cost Per Results

Less than £3

(Unique) Click Through Rate

Above 1%

Cost Per 1000 Impressions / CPM

As general rule you want to aim for under £6 but this one varies a lot, scroll down for more info on this one.

Cost Per Link Click

Less than 70p

Frequency

Never above 3, unless you mean to be bombarding a small audience with your ad for a small amount of time.

Conversion Rate

Over 20%

If any of these figures are out of this range then chances are you’ve got yourself a poorly performing ad / not getting as many conversions you could be…

SO WHERE DO YOU FIND THESE FIGURES AND WHAT CAN YOU DO WHEN ONE OR MORE OF THESE FIGURES AREN’T IN THE SWEET SPOT?

1.   Go into Ads Manager

2.   Select the time frame you want to analyse, i.e. we usually go by last 7 days for a relevant representation but this will vary depending on what you’re looking for.

3.   Change your columns to “Performance & Clicks” to display relevant information for a conversion campaign

( If you want to see other metrics you can add more columns in the customise section. Simply search or scroll and add the ones you want displayed )

4.   You’re ready to start analysing your data

Cost Per Result

This is reliant on the others performing well.

If this is under £3, you’ve got yourself a good ad and there’s really no need for you to do anything.

Focus a little more of your budget onto this ad set and keep doing your thing.

If this is over £3 go through and check the other metrics below before you do anything else to be able to identify what the exact problem in your campaign is.

(Unique) Link Click Through Rate

Firstly, unique link click views show the most accurate representation of link clicks on your ad, as opposed to just CTR (link). It will only return one click per person.

So if I click on the ad and then click off and the click back on, it will show up as 1 click rather than 2.

Anyway, if this is under 1% you’ve got yourself a boring ad.

You’re not effectively grabbing the attention of your audience for some reason or another.

Check Your Image

• Is it bold, bright and representative of your avatar?
• Is it blending into Facebook too much because your branding is white and blue/the image contains a lot of white and blue?

Check Your Copy

• Is it relatable to your avatar?
• Does it address them directly?
• Is it too harsh and off putting?
• Is it too long?
• Is it too short?

Check Your Headline

• Is it direct?
• Is it outcome based?
• Relatable to your avatar?
• Is the main point being cut off by a button?

Check Your Offer

• Does it give enough value for them to stop what they’re doing and actually take the time to input their details?
• Is it clear what the offer is to your avatar?
• Is it something they’ll actually want or does it benefit you more than them?

Cost Per 100 Impressions ( CPM ):

Okay here’s the big one. This one is how much Facebook are charging you to show your ad 1000 times.

There are a 101 reasons why Facebook would charge you more to show your ad…these are just a few common reasons

It’s A Bad Ad

It’s a bad ad – check your relevancy score – is it under 8?

That means your audience isn’t into it and don’t want to see it.

And unhappy Facebook users = unhappy Facebook, they’ll force you to turn your ad off or change it by making it infeasible to run the ad.

Check your comments – are people repeatedly asking the same questions/wanting more information? Are you replying/updating the copy or landing page to include this info?

This will give you a lot of insight into what you need to improve.

Your Area / Time Of Year

If you live in a big city, naturally you will have a high CPM.

You have more businesses in a smaller area, all targeting the same people and competing to get their ad out there.

So it’ll cost you more to get your ad seen. Same goes for time of year, in the run up to Christmas and the summer holidays for example, CPMs rise drastically as you’ll start competing with huge corporations that have jumped onto Facebook advertising with budgets the size of your mortgage.

This is pretty much unavoidable and you need to ride it out or cut down on conversion campaigns for a little while and opt to focus on content to build your audience some more (which you should always be doing if you want to advertise successfully).

Audience Size / Interest

Facebook pay the third party companies who provide them with their demographic information, i.e financial interests and assets, buying behaviour and interests.

If you are narrowing your audience heavily with lots of interest targeting (which by all means is a fantastic idea to ensure you are targeting people who will actually be interested in your offer) you need to be aware that your CPM will rise.

You can’t expect to get access to that kind of info for free. But remember, it may actually be more cost effective to this, as you’ll be paying a little more but the people seeing your ads are way more likely to convert (if you have done some research into the types of people who buy your offers and you know your audience).

Frequency

The average amount of time any one person is seeing your ad in the time frame you chose (we recommend always checking the lifetime value of this).

If this is creeping above 2.5 and the number of results you’re returning/cost per results is getting poorer, you need to think about lowering your budget/increasing your audience size (you’ll have to decide which one of these is most applicable to you).

If the results aren’t deteriorating however, this one isn’t so much of a problem, it just means you should start looking into preparing a new campaign soon.This one is crazy important, as it could seriously tarnish your brand.

Like when you’re watching TV and there’s a really annoying ad that you seem to catch ALL the time and it becomes the most jarring thing in existence and makes you curl your toes.

A person will forever attach that feeling to your brand – I still have it with Go Compare for example, I refuse to use their site because I hate the man with the dumb moustache! 😛

Conversion Rate

• Make sure your landing page reinforces the information they have already been given in the ad copy.
• Don’t give a whole bunch more information on here, just the core points that they need to know that have already been touched on but require more detail. People will get confused otherwise.
• Make sure the spacing between separate texts/images/videos are equal and consistent on desktop and mobile previews.
• Limit the amount of steps in the funnel to what is necessary only – you’re going to have a lower conversion rate if they have to fill out their email 15 times or fill out a job application style form, because well… we’ve all been there I don’t need to explain how annoying it is.
• Always walkthrough your funnel and get others to test it too, if you can, to make sure it’s not repetitive and off putting.

So next time you can’t figure out what’s wrong with a campaign, or want to make sure you don’t run into any of these issues to begin with… you can refer back to here and skim over the bits you need.

Hopefully, now you feel a bit more familiar with metrics and know what to do when you run into a dodgy figure.

ALSO, always remember not to get bogged down by numbers.

People are not numbers, they’re unpredictable.

It’s all about knowing your audience, your audience knowing you, and trial and error (if an ad sucks and you can’t fix it don’t worry, just hit the reset button so to speak.

Duplicate, tweak and try again – don’t continue to chuck money at a sinking ship).

And making sure what you’re putting out there is up to a high quality standard that you would expect to see from anyone else.