The Key Metrics To Track in Facebook Ads Manager

There is so much information and data available in Ads Manager that it can be completely overwhelming. How then do you keep track of your campaigns, and understand what is and isn’t working?

In this blog post, I am going to take you through the ad reporting setup that my agency team and I use in Facebook Ads Manager. 

We use this setup to track how well all of our campaigns are doing, as well as to look for opportunities where we can optimise and improve the performance of those campaigns – and also identify where things might potentially be going wrong so that we can hone in on any issues and get them fixed really, really quickly. 

Let’s dive in. 

You can follow along with me as I run through each metric in this YouTube video, or you can scroll through your own ad campaigns as we move through the definitions and use cases of each metric.

Let’s look at an ad for a campaign that I was running a while back to generate some leads which has the right reporting setup. 

Let’s start in the ad set level of Ads Manager to show you how this is going to work. 

Before we break down the first metric, I’d recommend that you make one important adjustment to how your campaign performance is being displayed to you. 

Click on the columns tab in Ads Manager just under the main Ad Sets tab, and you should be able to see all of the pre-defined reporting views that you can choose from when you come into Ads Manager.  

Normally, as you can see, the “Performance” view is the default. But the Performance view really doesn’t give me very much data to look at at all. That’s why I’ve set up my own view, List Building, which has a lot more data and is structured in the way that I want it to be structured.

You can create your own custom view by choosing and sorting the different columns and then saving that as a preset.

Let’s dive into this, taking the columns from left to right:

Starts

I add this column because I can just click and sort all of the information by that column and then the ad sets (or ads) will be listed in date order. That’s a useful little tip that I’d recommend making note of each time you come to review your campaigns. It makes it much easier to find the right rows to look at.

Delivery

This column tells you whether or not ads are currently delivering. In this example, I have delivery switched off simply because we’re not running the ads at the moment. 

Results

Results provides us with a snapshot of performance based on the ad objective chosen. 

In the example, I can see that I got 33 leads from the ad, for £2.43 per lead.

Scrolling to the next block, we have reach, impressions, and frequency. 

Reach

The reach is the number of people that saw your ad at least once while it ran. Think of reach as the number of unique individuals that saw your ad at least once. 

Impressions

With impressions on the other hand, you’re looking at the total number of times that your ads have appeared on screen – regardless of whether or not someone saw your ad twice, or even three times. So even if somebody is just scrolling through Facebook on their phone, and your ad appears, that will count as an impression.  

Frequency 

Frequency is quite simply the impressions divided by the reach and it tells you, on average, how often people are seeing the ad in their feed.  

INSIDERS TIP: My ad reported a frequency of 1.37. Now, this ad wasn’t running for that long anyway because I only spent about £80 so it was only able to run for a few days as part of a test. But with a frequency of 1.37, I’m okay with that. 

Over time, if I noticed that my reach numbers weren’t really going up too much, but my frequency was increasing, then that would mean that Facebook found an audience that they want to keep showing these ads to because they think they’re going to get the best conversions. 

But once the frequency kind of gets to sort of 3 or above, then I’m starting to think okay, maybe I need to do something else to make sure my audience isn’t seeing my ads so often. They’re gonna start getting a bit bored of seeing them and the performance might start to tail off. 

Budget & Amount Spent

Moving on, we’ve got the budget and the amount spent, which is pretty self explanatory. 

End & Schedule

Then we have end and schedule. End is when the campaign is scheduled to stop running. My ad wasn’t wasn’t scheduled to stop and was just an ongoing campaign that I ended up stopping after a few days. Schedule is just the start and end date for the ad. 

Behind the Scenes: All About Soft Stats

Here’s where we get into what we call, in our agency, the soft stats. 

The soft stats are those stats that aren’t hard data in terms of how your campaign performed. Soft stats are really what’s happening behind the scenes. The things that are influencing the performance of the ads overall. 

CPM

We’ll start with the CPM, which is the cost per meal or cost per 1000 impressions. 

Knowing the audience that I was targeting in my ad campaign, a CPM of around £12 here is quite an acceptable CPM. 

CPM is impacted by things like the amount of competition for the audience that you are bidding to get your ads shown to. If you didn’t already know, Facebook Ads is an auction process where you’re bidding against other advertisers to get your ads shown to specific audiences. 

And if you’re targeting a very popular audience, like in the online coaching space, for example, audiences like Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, those kinds of audiences that a lot of advertisers are trying to go after, then you might expect to see higher CPMs there.

Other things that can impact the CPM are the quality of your ads. 

If your ads are you know if you’ve got really good copy and really good creative and you’re getting a lot of engagement and interaction on your ads, then the CPM is likely to be slightly lower. 

It’s very difficult to say what a good CPM might be, because it depends on the industry that you’re in, but certainly in the coaching space where I with this campaign was targeting kinds of coaches and entrepreneurs and course creators and those kinds of people, because they’re my ideal client. I know that £12.84 was a pretty good CPM, and I was kind of happy with that. 

Clicks

So then we have the number of clicks anywhere on the ad and the cost per click. I don’t really have to put too much stock into these data into the stats, but it’s useful to have them there. 

Think of the Remaining Metrics in Relation To Your Audience’s Funnel Journey 

The way I’m going to go through the rest of the metrics, I want you to kind of think of it as if I’m taking you through the journey that the user is going to go on as they proceed through the funnel. 

The journey starts with them seeing your ad. Are they clicking anything? Are they engaging with it? Or are they just scrolling past? The number of clicks, for example, are telling me no, they’re not scrolling past. They’re stopping the ad and they’re engaging. 

Let’s look at the CTR. Now, because this is cold traffic, I would want this to be at least 1% and it’s just over. That’s a KPI that I’m more than happy with. What this is telling me is that not only are people engaging with the ad, they’re then clicking on the link or they’re clicking on the call to action button to take the next step into the funnel, which in this case, was to a lead magnet. 

Link Clicks & Cost Per Click

Then we’re seeing link clicks and cost per link click and again, I’m not kind of too hung up on these metrics, but it’s good to just keep an eye on them. 

Landing Page Views & Cost Per Landing Page View

And then we’re looking at landing landing page views and cost per landing page view. So what is important to me is how many of the link clicks are resulting in landing page views. 

What I’ve actually done here is created a custom metric called landing page load rate. 

This is telling me what percentage of people that click the link are allowing the landing page to load. If your landing page takes a long time to load then people might get bored and they will just go and do something else instead. 

My KPI here is 70% if less than 70%. If the landing page load rate is below 70%. Then I need to look at that landing page because there’s a problem. This is doing well at nearly 88% so I’m happy with that.

How To Add a Custom MetricTo set a custom metric, go back to the Columns tab where you set your performance view to List Building earlier. Scroll down and choose “Customise Columns”, and then you’ll click “Create custom metric”.  You can name that metric whatever you want – in this case I call it landing page load rate.  Now, for this example, I wanted it to be a percentage because I want to see the percentage of people that are taking the action that I want to track.  Go ahead and add a description.  For this formula, let’s do leads divided by landing page views.  Finally, because I have an agency, I would state that everyone with access to this business can see this metric and use it as well. To finish, just click the “Create metric” button in the bottom right.

I’ve created another custom metric here which is the landing page conversion rate. 

This is a metric based on the landing page views and the leads generated. I can see that this landing page is converting at nearly 51%. 

In terms of conversion rate goals for a landing page, I’ve heard mixed opinions. Some people say that 20% would be a bare minimum level to hit. Some say 30% and I would feel borderline okay with that. But I normally shoot for 40% as a minimum for my landing page conversion rate. 

If you’re targeting the right audience with the right message and the right offer, and you’ve got a very well constructed ad and a nice landing page, then you should be hitting well over 40% conversion rate. The performance for my ad was nearly 50%. I am happy with that. 

So, How Did I Perform?

There is nothing in this funnel that is causing me any concern. Everything seems to be working really well. The ads are performing well. All of the KPIs are exceeding minimum and the performance is as I’d want it to be. So I’m really, really happy with this. 

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that my landing page conversion rate was 25%. 

All of the metrics are good until this point, so this means that there must be a problem on that landing page. At this point I would go and look at my landing page and try to determine what that problem is. Is  the message on the landing page disconnected from the message in the ads? Does the message just not flow through very well? Are there links on the landing page that shouldn’t be there? 

You know, one of the things I see a lot of without wanting to digress too much is people that put landing pages but they do them on their website and all of their website navigation at the top of the page. That means that people will get to that landing page and click on one of the links in the header and then you’ve lost them. 

So when you create a landing page it is really important to make sure that the only two things people can do are either opt in or close the page, and nothing else. Although, caveat, you do want a little privacy policy at the bottom.

What about a tripwire?

If someone’s opted in for my lead magnet, then on the thank you page I might say, “Hey, it’s on its way to your inbox, but I’ve got something really exciting to share with you”. And I would make an offer to them where they can buy something of really high perceived value at a really low cost. There are loads of benefits to having a tripwire in place, but I didn’t do so on this funnel as it was just meant to be a test ad.

Here’s the kicker: If your audience does convert, they’re essentially contributing towards your ad spend and replacing your initial investment. 

On this campaign, for example, I spent £80. 

If I had a tripwire that was positioned at £17 and I was converting at 10% and I had 33 leads, then that means that I probably sell three trip wires. 3 times 17 is 51. So that would have contributed towards a nice 70% of our ad spend 

So, ideally what you want is a tripwire that’s converting high enough and giving you a return on ad spend of more than one, which means you’re making more money than you’re spending on your ads. And what that can mean in this scenario is that you are growing your audience, you’re building your email list with leads, and you’re not paying for them. That’s a great place to be! 

This is the exact reporting column that my team and I use in our agency to track the progress of the campaigns that we run for our clients, especially when they’re looking to do list building. 

If you have any questions about this setup, or perhaps how to track in another scenario, feel free to drop your questions in the comments and I’ll respond to them as quickly as I can.

If you’re  a coach, course creator, consultant, or entrepreneur looking for an agency to work with to optimise or scale your Facebook ads, then you can schedule a call to see if you’re a good fit to work with us. 

That’s it for now. Until next time – Cheers!

— Danny