There are over 1.6 billion engaged Facebook users, that’s a huge potential audience. What’s even better is that Facebook has given advertisers and marketers the tools to be able to customise who gets to see your ad. However, with so many users, even if your advertising campaign is perfectly set up to target the right demographic, how do you actually tell if your ad is working? This is where you need to get a grasp not on just the creation of an advertising campaign, but also how to pull the data out to be able to analyse the effects your campaign has had, and if it’s reaching the goals you wanted to achieve.
Facebook does provide a range of tools that allow you to generate reports which cover a range of data and provide lots of statistics to analyse. However, Facebook reporting can be quite time consuming to try and extract the data that you want, let alone if you then need to present it in a manner that your client or non-web savvy employer can understand easily. This becomes even more difficult when you are running several split campaigns and need to show the comparison data. If you don’t have your degree in statistical analysis (with a minor in design) in order to create beautiful, easy to follow graphs and charts you can look at the option of using a third-party company.
Facebook Default Reports
Facebook does have several options that allow you to create reports for:
- reach
- Impressions
- amount spent
- link clicks
These are very useful and can even be turned into pretty graphical charts (for help with charts click here). However, the data can also be confusing and limited. Although Facebook does want to you get the best out of using their Ad manager, it’s really not in their best interests to make sure that you’re spending as little as possible while reaching the largest audience that you can. In order to maximise your Facebook advertisement spending you really need to be able to create reports that allow you to break your advertising data down to a demographic level and to analyse by segments. This will help you to understand who is seeing your ads, who is clicking your ads, and who is generating your income!
Demographics
All that personal data that Facebook collects from each user is available to you as an advertiser so that you can work out your exact target market, Facebook guides you to finding this information on their help site here https://www.facebook.com/business/help. Say you’re a company that sells men’s underwear; you’ve created several different ad campaigns and set them to target different audiences. What you discover is that your advertisements are being shown to men aged 18-40, however none of them are clicking through and there are almost no conversions from this audience. However, there is a demographic of 30-50yr old women that has only a small view rate, but they have a huge click through rate and are providing the majority of your revenue. How do you know this? You can either analyse the raw data from your website and from Facebook, or you can use a third-party company that specialises in Facebook reporting. You can also get tips from sites like reportgarden.com.
If you don’t make the effort to understand the data properly, and if you can’t share this data clearly to the people paying for the advertising, there is the risk that income will decrease. Using just the generic Facebook reports means that you may not be getting the full picture. If you altered your advertising campaign to exclusively target 18-40yr old males and excluded 30-50yr old women, you would see a dramatic decrease in your revenue. This is despite the reports showing that your male audience was the ones that had the most views.
Important Decisions
One of the benefits of Facebook advertising is that you can use a targeted advertising campaign. Not just towards a particular country, age group or gender, but even targeted at specific placement. What this means is that when you are looking at your reports you want to see if your Mobile News Feed has better metrics than your Right Column on Desktop positioned campaign. Again, you can pull this data out from your raw Facebook data and use some Excel wizardry to show what the cost-per-action data (as well as actual click and conversion rate data) looks like. If can be easy to get bogged down in overwhelming data, but if you can provide clear analysis you can not only save a significant amount on your Facebook spend, but you can also use this information to increase your revenue by ensuring that you are targeting your advertising towards the audience segment that will actually click and convert.
Calculation Cheat Sheet
There are a few basic calculations that help you work out what your campaign spend is doing, but do you understand what they mean?
Click-Per-Impression (CPM)
CPM literally stands for Cost-Per-Mile (mile is Latin for 1,000). So, this is the amount it is costing you for every thousand people see your advertising. The calculation is simply: $ad cost x 1,000 / # of impressions. You can read a detailed description here. CPM is different to “CPC” which looks at the cost each time someone clicks on your ad or “CPA” which looks at the cost each time someone clicks on your ad then ends up actually purchasing. CPM is often used when you are looking at a campaign to create brand awareness.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
When you set up a Facebook campaign you will usually have a desired outcome. That might be to have people sign up to your mailing list, to like your page, or to actually purchase. You can set up your conversion goals when you set up your campaign, and to see what the percentage of people being converted you look at: # of conversions / # of clicks. The average conversion rate for Facebook ads across all industries is 9.21%, so don’t be alarmed if your conversion rate seems low.
