What Do My Facebook Results Mean?

Facebook is an everchanging, confusing and even sometimes daunting ad platform. However, it doesn’t have to be, so whether you just ran your first Facebook campaign, your 10th or your 50th let’s talk about your results and what they mean to you.

What Am I Looking At?

Above is an example of what your Facebook Ads Manager might look like, as I said Facebook is ever-changing so yours may look a little different. You’ll see at the top you can set your date so that you can look at precisely when your campaign ran. There are also three tabs across the top reading campaigns, ad sets and ads. This is where you can see your campaigns on a more refined level. For example, at the campaign level you can see overall how your campaign did. If you look at the ad set level, you can see how your multiple ad sets performed and which targeting worked best. Lastly, if you look at the ads level, you can see which creative did the best.

As you can see above, you can customize your columns so that you can get the full picture of your campaign, whether your more interested in clicks, engagement, leads, conversions or something else, you can fully customize your columns to your liking.

You can also breakdown your campaigns by placement, time of day, geograprapic, demographics and more to get a full scope of who your audience is and what they are most interested in. You also have the ability to create and save your report once you have your columns and breakdowns the way you like and you also have the option to export to a CSV file.

What Am I Looking For?

Okay, you have an idea of what you’re looking at, now what exactly are you looking for? Depending on how you’ve optimized your campaign you can see something different in the results column. You may see link clicks, landing page views, video views, website view content and more. This is a number to pay attention to and compare with other campaigns you run to get an idea of what is sticking with your audience and what’s not.

Frequency is something to pay attention to as well, this is how often a person is seeing your ad, if this number goes above a 3 and you have a fairly large audience, you may need to make optimizations. If it’s a smaller audience this number can be larger. We just don’t want to oversaturate the audience with ads.

Impressions is something we’ve all seen before and is touted as one of the main results you want to watch. At TwoSix, we want to see people go beyond that initial impression and click to the landing page that you worked so hard to build.

That brings us to Link Clicks, this is defintely sometihing that you want to pay attention to to see how effective your ad is at getting people to click. You may also want to check out the ads level to see which creative brought in the most clicks.

Something we talk about a lot is cost per click (CPC) and click-throug-rate (CTR). These are both very important metrics to gauge the success of your campaign. The average CPC in the travel industry is $0.63, so if you’re results are under that you are golden. You’ll notice that campaigns that resonate with people the most will have lower CPC’s. Note that if you have a smaller audience, CPC’s may be higher. The average CTR in the travel Industry is 0.90%, we try to aim for at least a 1.00% and if we see are results dip below that benchmark, we will optimize the campaign.

What Do I Do With The Results?

So now you’re able to move look around ads manager and understand your results and what to pay attention to, so, what do you do now? Check in on your campaign to make sure your results are where you want them.After your campaign exits the learning phase you are free to make changes. If you’re notcing that your frequency is getting high, try to expand your audience via custom and lookalike audineces or geographically. If you notice your CPC is high and your CTR is low, you can change your custom and lookalike audiences, add another ad set and add some relevant interests check how many AI assistants you have enabled and maybe cut back. We have seen better results by setting up the campaign manually instead of relying on AI. You can also switch up your creative, maybe adding another photo or video into the mix can shake things up and boost results. I encourage you to play around with it and see what brings you the best results. Good luck with your next ad!

Ashley Maddix
Digital Advertising Strategist