Last week, we talked about the Facebook Pixel and how to set it up. Now that you’re all set up and that you know how to run ad campaigns, it’s time to start talking about analytics. Running ads is one thing, but you need to analyze how they’re performing to make sure you’re not wasting your money. This is a key part of ads and it will allow you to refine your ad campaign and get better results.

When you log into Facebook’s Ads Manager, the main screen has a lot of data. It’s very useful and you can learn a lot about your ads here.

Analytics Screen

Let’s start with the Campaigns screen. By default, the columns are set for Performance, but you can change that in the dropdown at the top right for other types of data.

The default columns are quite useful, so let’s talk about each one. Please note they can be slightly different, depending on your ad objectives.

  • Results: How many times your ad actually produced the objective you wanted: landing page view, click, etc. (higher is better)
  • Reach: How many people saw your ad.
  • Impressions: How many times your ad was displayed, as ads can be displayed multiple time to the same person.
  • Cost per Result: How much it cost (on average) to obtain your objective (lower is better).
  • Frequency: Average number of times a person saw your ad.
  • Unique Link Clicks: How many people click on your link (higher is better).
  • Landing Page Views: How many times people actually reached the page to which you’re linking (higher is better).
  • Link Clicks: How many times people clicked on your link. People may have clicked more than once (higher is better).
  • Cost per Landing Page View: How much it cost (on average) to get someone to your landing page (lower is better).

The Ad Sets screen has similar columns, with a few minor differences. The Ads screen has one extra column that’s important: the Relevance Score. It’s a rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your target audience is responding to your ad (only shown after 500 impressions). The higher the score the better.

Other types of data

Using the top-right Columns dropdown, you can find other types of data. There are a lot of options and you can even create your own.

For example, if you pick Delivery, you will see these columns. Explore the different options and figure out what data you care about.

Breakdown

A powerful screen is the Breakdown dropdown. It allows you to break the data of a campaign, an ad set or an ad into specific segments: by time, by delivery or by action.

I often use the Breakdown by Delivery option, as it allows me to see how my ad performs within different metrics: age groups, gender, location, device, placement, etc. For example, if I pick Placement, Facebook will show me how my ad performed depending on where it was shown:

It’s a great tool to narrow down audiences and see exactly how your ad is performing. It’s worth exploring to see if your ads underperform with younger people, in certain cities or on specific platforms.

Account overview

I don’t use that screen often because it only provides a very high-level view. But if you’re managing a big account with a lot of campaigns, it might be useful for you. It’s basically a dashboard that gives you an overview of your entire account. You can pick what data gets shown, so you can make it work exactly as you need.

Wrapping up

This is an incredibly important part of the process. I strongly encourage you spend time exploring the analytics screens and figuring out what data is important to you. Next week, we’ll talk about how to use this data to optimize your campaigns and get better results!

 

Header photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash.