Facebook is a powerful marketing tool that can no longer be ignored. In fact, 93% of marketers use the platform regularly. One of it’s biggest benefits is that it provides a massive suite of tools and metrics to analyze and improve your ad campaigns. But, it’s often difficult to know which of these numbers you should be focusing on, and which can be safely left alone.
Certain metrics are automatically shown to you easily, while others must be accessed through Ads Manager. It’s important, however, to note that this doesn’t necessarily reflect which are most indicative of your brand’s success. Partnering with an experienced Facebook marketing company can be a great way to learn which metrics should matter to your company.
If you decide to take a more hands-on approach, the following five are the metrics you should be most concerned with as a marketer. Keeping track of them can help improve your return on investment.
Frequency
While visibility is an important goal for any marketing campaign, it’s also important to broaden your audience. Frequency measures how many times an average user is seeing your ad. If it’s substantially higher than four, you’re likely seeing diminishing returns on those additional appearances.
Click-through Rate
This statistic represents the percentage of people who go from seeing your ad to clicking on it and accessing your website.
While your target CTR will likely depend on a few factors, including your industry, Facebook’s site-wide average is 0.90%. If you’re getting a number much lower than that, your marketing campaign likely isn’t targeting the right users. You may also need to look to improve your ads themselves.
Cost per Click
If your goal is to attract as many website views as possible, it’s important to know how much you’re paying for each of those clicks.
Cost per click measures exactly that, and with a Facebook average of roughly 27 cents per click, you ideally want to keep your own CPC well below that. Cost per Click is one of the most important figures to monitor throughout your ad campaign.
While these are the metrics you should be prioritizing as a marketer, there are some that may distract your attention from what really matters. Here are a couple of ad statistics that may seem important, but can actually be ignored:
Video Views
A high number of video views is obviously encouraging. But, you should temper that knowledge with the awareness that Facebook counts anything longer than 3 seconds as a view. A majority of the views you’re receiving mean a lot less than they seem, so the above metrics give a much better indication of what’s really happening.
Clicks
Like video views, clicks are an easily inflatable metric that doesn’t necessarily indicate success or failure. Clicks on your Facebook page, from likes to “See More” to the page itself, are all in the eyes of this statistic.
Worse, none of those clicks necessarily mean the user ended up visiting your site or converting (which is what marketers are really after). Stick to the three previously mentioned statistics to find out how engaged your users actually are.
These quick tips are a great starting point for fine-tuning your Facebook marketing strategy. But with such a wide array of metrics, there are countless more that can be valuable when used in the right context. The best way to improve your Facebook marketing approach is by learning how and when to use each of the tools and statistics it has to offer.
