Understand how to improve your Ads Campaign’s Performance in 15 minutes — P1
Facebook Series
When you launch a Facebook Ads campaign, tons of questions can come into your head.
Is it working? How can I make it better? Should I increase the budget?
Let’s dive right into understanding how to read your campaign’s performance and improve based on data!
Here are the questions that we will answer in this post:
- What devices do people use when they view my ad?
- How many unique people did my ad reach across different platforms and what were their demographics?
- Which age range is most interested in my campaign?
- Is there a specific region where my ads are performing better?
All this information is available in your Ads Manager dashboard. You can create, export and share reports to see the metrics that matter!
MAIN DASHBOARD
The main dashboard of your Ads Manager looks like this:
There is a “default” way of arranging the columns. I personally follow a customed order that helps me visualize the important columns to me.
Let’s look at each column from the default dashboard:
- REACH:
The number of people who saw your ads at least once. - IMPRESSIONS:
The number of times an ad is on screen for the first time. (Example: If an ad is on screen and someone scrolls down and then scrolls back up to the same ad, that counts as 1 impression.
“Impressions” is NOT reach. The same user can see the ad twice (2 impressions) but the reach will be 1 user. - FREQUENCY:
The estimate of the average number of times each person saw your ad. It is calculated as impressions divided by reach.
This is one of the underrated columns to look at!
Frequency that gets to be too high can become too annoying to your audience, depending on how long your audience takes to convert. - RESULTS:
This depends on the objective you assigned to your campaign. The results may vary from “add to carts” to “purchases” or “leads”. - COST PER RESULT:
This will show how much a conversion is costing. This is where you can evaluate if your campaign is being profitable or costing you more than expected.
I recommend setting up a “maximum cost per result” before creating the campaign. This helps you keep an eye on this stat and make sure you don’t overspend. - SCHEDULE:
This will remind you if you added an end date or an ongoing type of campaign.
Now, the juicy and more advanced columns you should add:
- CLICKS (all):
The total clicks your ads have. This includes likes, “view more”, photo clicks, clicks to profile, or others. - LINK CLICKS:
Total clicks on the ad’s text, media or call-to-action, that link to the ad landing page or the objective destination. - LANDING PAGE VIEWS:
This shows you how many people actually saw the landing page. This stat is important because people can click on your ad but not even see the lp! This will help you see if too many people drop out before viewing the lp and fix why people don’t go through. - ADD TO CART:
When the pixel and attributions are installed correctly, you will be able to see how many items have been added to the cart. - PURCHASES:
For ecom, this is a bit obvious. This will show how many purchases your campaign has. - ROAS:
For e-commerce, THIS IS THE BIG DEAL. This will show you how much you have invested vs. how much your campaign has made. This is a plain number and it’s calculated as purchase conversion value divided by amount spent.
Now that you know the meaning of these columns, what is the next step to do with them?
Having all the latest columns will help you see if and where there is a leak. For this, you have to compare how many people have clicked vs. landing page views vs. add to cart vs. purchases.
I usually put this info into a spreadsheet and compare it in a funnel way. It helps me to get the conversion of each step (%) to see where the rate is higher — that’s where your leak is!
In the next post, I will explain to you how to optimize according to what data tells you 😉
See you soon!
-Denisse Gp
