How to evaluate the effectiveness of Facebook ads

Advertising on the largest social network Facebook can bring you a lot of new customers and orders, but you need to monitor its effectiveness carefully and constantly. Regular monitoring of metrics will help you make sure that your campaigns are working as they should. You can also use them to quickly detect errors and fix them before your budget is drained for nothing.

Content:
1. Analysis of ad campaigns in Facebook Ads Manager
2. Efficiency
3. Engagement rate
4. Demographics
5. Placement
6. Additional metrics
7. Analysis of Facebook ads via Google Analytics and end-to-end analytics services
8. Conclusion

In this article, we will look at the main ways to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns (AC) on Facebook. The most convenient and functional analysis tool is the Facebook Ads Manager advertising cabinet itself. It contains a wide range of analytical metrics that allow you to evaluate all available formats of advertising creatives (ads, videos, apps, ring galleries, etc.), as well as indicators of the advertiser's goals. In Ads Manager, you can track ad metrics not only for Facebook but also for Instagram. Other popular ad tracking tools on FB include Google Analytics and end-to-end analytics services.

To view the main indicators of your AC, go to the advertising cabinet of FB Ads Manager and hover the cursor over the ad whose results you are interested in. Then click on the View charts label, after which you will see a panel with 4 main metrics.

These metrics include:

This is one of the most important metrics that are especially useful when evaluating the effectiveness of Facebook advertising through conversion analysis (user target actions – orders, subscriptions, etc.). It supports analysis of both micro (going to the store) and macro conversions (purchases). You can choose the scale of evaluation: a single ad, a group of ads, an ad campaign, or an entire ad account.

In this section, you can track how many goals you set were achieved, how many people viewed your ad/group/campaign, and how much money was spent on displaying them over a given time period, compared to the maximum budget.

Facebook offers to estimate the engagement rate using a special metric called engagement rate ranking. It will help you understand how often and in what way your audience interacts with your ads. This takes into account actions such as clicks, reposts, saves, comments, etc. 

Separately, you can track the performance of involvement for the video, including the views published videos, their cost, the coverage (the number of unique users who viewed your video), etc. There is a possibility to enhance targeting of coverage, for example, to show only those users who viewed the video partly (2, 3, 10, 15 seconds) or watched it until the end.

An equally interesting metric is app engagement. You can use it to track the number of installations and their cost, as well as general data on the response to app publication (comments, reposts, etc.). In addition, the Facebook advertising dashboard offers you to evaluate engagement for ads with a ring gallery. A whole range of metrics is available here, including impressions, clicks, reach, click-to-impression ratio, CTR, views, and many other targeted actions.

The Demographics panel helps you track the demographics of the audience that interacted with your ad, ad group, or campaign in any way. It publishes data about the gender and age of users, broken down by their target actions (registering on the site, etc.). After studying this information, you will get to know your target audience better and set up the targeting of the advertising campaign more accurately.

Another important metric helps you track the effectiveness of ads/groups/campaigns in different places where they are placed: FB, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger. For each placement, key metrics such as reach, budget spent, and targeted user actions are published here. Based on this information, you can prepare more effective advertising campaigns that take into account the specifics of each individual ad platform. Indicators for different platforms (PCs, mobile devices) are presented separately.

To access additional metrics, go to the table of campaigns/groups/ads and click on the Columns menu. You will see a list of indicators that you can add and remove from there in the Configure columns point.

When analysing advertising campaigns, you should pay attention to the following parameters:

You can track the main indicators of advertising campaigns on FB not only through the built-in Ads Manager but also in the Google Analytics dashboard.

The advantage of this method is its versatility – it allows you to centrally control ads on many popular sites (GA, Yandex Direct, Facebook, VK, myTarget, etc.). To connect Facebook ads to the Google Analytics dashboard, you need to place UTM tags in all links published in your ads. After that, you will see metrics such as clicks, impressions, and expenses in various formats (CPC, CTR, and ROAS) in GA. This data will help you determine how effectively your ads or entire ad campaigns are working.

End-to-end analytics services help you get a complete picture of the advertising campaigns effectiveness not only on Facebook but also on other sites. You can also use them to link the received data with information from CRM systems and call tracking solution. Therefore, end-to-end analytics offers more detailed information about the AC and allows you to create reports with the maximum number of parameters. There are also more opportunities for targeting your audience.

Facebook Ads Manager is the easiest and fastest way to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook. It provides basic metrics such as efficiency, engagement rate, demographics, placement, audience reach, impressions, clicks, CTR, leads, and many others. You can track ad metrics for a single referral ad, as well as for a whole group of ads or the entire ad campaign. In addition, FB ad analysis is also available through third-party tools such as Google Analytics and end-to-end analytics services. It is important that they allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook in comparison with other advertising channels, getting a more detailed picture.