Facebook Advertising: 5 Key Metrics to Focus On

Kirsten Armleder| June 15, 2021

Facebook is a highly effective and affordable way to advertise your business. The platform allows for precise targeting options and provides advertisers with a lot of data – so much so that it’s easy to get lost in all the various feedback metrics. So which ones should you focus on?

Here are some key metrics to help you gauge the effectiveness of your ads:

Reach

Reach is the number of unique people who saw your ad. This is determined largely by budget and the geolocation settings of your audience targeting. In other words, the more you spend, the more people you will reach. If reaching the maximum number of people is your ultimate goal, then you may want to consider using Reach as your overall campaign objective.

Impressions

Often confused with Reach, Impressions is the number of times your ad was displayed to people. The impressions metric gets a bad rap because how many times should people see the same ad? Considering all the content being thrown at them on Facebook, it’s important for people to see your ad more than once for the message to stick and get them to take action.

Frequency

Repetition plays an important role in advertising, but what if your audience is experiencing ad fatigue? That’s where the frequency metric comes in. Frequency tracks the average number of times your ad was seen by a user. Keeping an eye on this metric allows advertisers to adjust campaigns as necessary, but in order to do this, you’ll need to understand other metrics as well.

Results

Results include Engagement, Link Clicks, Landing Page Views, Video Views, Messaging Conversions and other objective you have chosen for your campaign. For example, if you are running ads to send people to your website, your results would be either Link Clicks or Landing Page Views. Results is one of the core advertising metrics used to determine the effectiveness of one ad or campaign over another.

Cost

Cost is the average cost per result of your ads. This metric can be affected by other factors, such as your target audience, campaign objective and content. Experienced digital marketers do well to keep an eye on this metric and make adjustments, as necessary, to objectives, audiences and content to ensure ad dollars are being used wisely.

This is just a small sampling of the many metrics Facebook offers to help advertisers gauge the success of ads on its platform.

It’s important to keep in mind the intangible data, too, such as branding, perception and awareness—which may not be as simple to determine, but equally important to a brand or business.