Running and tracking Facebook ads can be a valuable tool for businesses, but it’s important to know what you are looking for in order to get the most out of this functionality. Facebook Ads has comprehensive analytics that allow you to track your ad performance across different channels (paid and organic), as well as detailed insights into who is clicking on your ads, how long they are spending on them, and more.
However, if you don’t have a good understanding of what these stats mean or how to use them effectively, then you are missing out on unlocking the true potential of your Facebook Ad campaign. In this blog, we will guide you on how to run and track Facebook ads so that you can get the most out of this powerful marketing platform.
Facebook is a digital advertising giant. They have the largest user database in the world, and this allows them to provide targeted advertising at affordable prices. Their turnkey solution makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to advertise their products online, without having to worry about the technical side of things.
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What are Facebook ads?
Facebook ads are a type of advertising that allows businesses to target their audience with precision. Through the use of targeting parameters, businesses can find and reach their target market more effectively than ever before. Facebook ads allow you to run targeted campaigns based on interests, demographics, and even behaviors.
With over two billion active users each month, Facebook is the largest social media platform. It is common knowledge that setting up a Facebook account is free. Now, one might ask, how does Facebook generate income? The answer is through Facebook ads.
Facebook ads aren’t free – they cost money per day or per ad campaign. However, if your business targets a specific demographic or region (for example), then this might be a worthwhile investment. Besides ad campaigns, you can also create landing pages for your website or product using the Facebook Pages Manager tool. This will give potential customers an easy way to learn more about what you offer and convert them into customers instantly!
Why Facebook ads?
There is a saying in marketing: if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. This is particularly true for Facebook. Facebook has created a marketplace of over two billion users for any business to sell its product. The notable aspect of Facebook ads is that you can choose your target customers and reach them directly. Facebook advertising is very cost-effective and allows any company to reach its ideal customers.
Facebook has gained over 100 companies in the past few years. These acquisitions have given Facebook a deeper understanding of user behavior and detailed insights into trends. This knowledge has helped Facebook to create highly targeted advertisements that are extremely cost effective.
With Facebook Ad Analytics, businesses can better understand their consumer behavior, get productive feedback, and re-organize their business strategy. Moreover, their user-friendly interface makes it possible for anyone to create and post an advertisement for their business. Facebook advertising is powered by a dynamic, ever-evolving algorithm that optimizes itself over time for better results.
How do Facebook Ads work?
The diversity of Facebook advertisements allows you to communicate with users in multiple ways, including video ads, polls, stories ads, messenger ads, and so on. You may direct customers to your website, application, or other CTAs (call to action) using Facebook advertisements. You can customize your ad as you like and once it is ready, you can choose to boost it directly or use Facebook Ads Manager or Business Manager to deploy it.
With Facebook Ad Manager, you can create and manage custom campaigns that target your ideal customer. You can define the goal of each campaign, as well as the objectives and parameters for reaching that goal. This way, you can ensure that your ads are hitting the right people in the right ways at the right time.
Additionally, through an intuitive and simple interface, you can also do very detailed customer targeting based on age, gender, interests, connections, relationship status, languages (including sign language), education levels/fields of study, workplaces, and more!
You can segment your audience as broad or as narrow as you like. However, creating targeted advertisements and deploying the same for a narrow audience base generally results in maximum return on investments (ROI). Further, you can also choose your geographical location, define a budget, and schedule ads according to your marketing strategy.
Now you are all set to launch your ad. Creating an effective marketing campaign is difficult, but it’s important to remember that tracking, analyzing the response, and tweaking your ad accordingly is essential for success. This is the tricky part. Without this data, you may not be able to determine whether your investment in advertising was worth it or not. Facebook ads allow you to adjust, edit, relaunch, and pause your campaigns at any time. Tracking and monitoring your Facebook ad campaign is one of the most important steps you can take in order to improve your marketing strategy. By tracking how well your ads are performing, you can learn what works best for your brand and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
But measuring just one metric isn’t enough -you need to combine several different data points into a comprehensive report that provides actionable insights. That’s why a robust BI platform like INSIA offers powerful reporting features that allow managers to see detailed performance data across all their channels in one place. This way, they can make informed decisions based on actual results, not preconceived notions or assumptions! This data will let you learn what kinds of ads work best for your business -and help avoid costly mistakes down the road!
Also read Everything You Need To Know Before Launching Your Next Social Media Campaign
How to track Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads Manager also comes up with a number of metrics and KPIs that help you evaluate your ad. It generally classifies KPIs into two types:
- Performance tracking
- Conversion tracking
Performance tracking
It measures the performance of a marketing campaign based on how users are receiving it. It doesn’t tell you if people are interested in buying your product or the campaign’s cost-effectiveness, also known as return on ad spend (ROAS). It provides simple but crucial information on the number of people who have seen the ad, clicked on the ad, and how many times an average user saw the ad repeatedly.
A few of the performance tracking metrics are:
- Reach: This metric shows the total number of unique people who have seen your ad. It is preferable to have a high reach.
- Impressions: It is the total number of times users have viewed your ad. It double counts the same user if s/he is visiting the ad multiple times. A higher impression-by-reach ratio shows that people are revisiting your ad.
- Engagements: This denotes the total number of times users engaged with your ad. Different engagement types are likes, shares, clicks, or comments. The more relevant your ad is, the higher the engagement.
- Click through rate: This shows the percentage of users that end up clicking on your ad after seeing it. A high click-through rate shows that your ads are reaching the right audience.
- Follower demographics: It tells you the demographics of your page’s followers. It helps to re-evaluate your target audience.
Conversion tracking
It monitors the users’ activity as they click on your ad and arrive at your landing page. Conversion tracking provides insights into customer behavior and purchasing patterns. It tells you about the success of your ad campaign purely based on profitability and the all-important ROI.
Here are some metrics that help you in this area:
- Cost per conversion (CPC): This metric, also known as cost-per-action, informs you about the actual amount paid to Facebook for a successful conversion of a target user. A conversion refers to signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, or any call to action intended for your users to complete after clicking on the ad.
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA): A slight variation to cost per conversion is the cost per acquisition, which denotes the amount paid to Facebook for acquiring one paying customer. It is an accurate indicator of the ROI of your ad campaign. The lesser this amount, the more cost-effective your campaign is.
- Facebook referral traffic: This is the amount of your website traffic redirected from Facebook. This metric shows the importance of Facebook as a marketing platform for your business.
- Although performance tracking is possible through Facebook Ads Manager, conversion tracking is a tough space. You should use Google Analytics or your back-end system to track conversion traffic. But is there really a need to choose one over the other?
How does tracking Facebook ads help?
Tracking Facebook ads is of paramount importance for your campaign’s success.
You can reallocate funds from one ad to the next based on its performance, which helps improve the ROI. You must develop your marketing strategy based on the performance of your past campaigns.
All the intermediate steps such as:
- Choosing the ad type
- Selecting the target audience
- Optimizing the ad as per the target audience
must be a direct reflection of the information businesses have gained from tracking previous ads.
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Track your Facebook Ads KPIs with INSIA Dashboard
While Facebook Ads gives you a general picture about your data through KPIs such as impressions, reach and engagement metrics, it is limited in what it can do for you. Optimize your Facebook Ads marketing strategy by integrating it with INSIA’s advanced AI-powered, self-serve analytics software. Create and customize unlimited dashboards that are suited to your needs. A robust business intelligence tool like INSIA can help your small business grow to its full potential. INSIA is designed for non-technical business users that integrates your data from multiple sources (like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Excel, MySQL, and many more) and lets you create visually appealing reports through a Google-like search bar. Connect to INSIA in a couple of clicks and monitor your business performance & the ROI on your marketing decisions with pre-built plug-n-play KPIs and automated dashboards. Click Here for a free trial!
Conclusion
In conclusion, tracking Facebook ads may seem overwhelming initially, but the process becomes a lot easier with consistent usage and practice. Tracking your performance is an essential part of effective ad targeting, so make sure to stay on top of things by using the tips outlined in this article. With a little effort on your part, you can ensure that all of your campaigns are performing well and reaching the right people.Knowing what metrics to track is vital, as you do not want to be inundated with data. While the importance of each metric varies from business to business and industry to industry, it is up to you to find out which metrics work best for you. Here are the top 8 Facebook metrics that you can start with.
