Top 3 Facebook Ads Metrics to Track | 140
So, you are ready to run Facebook Ads. You know what type of ad you will run and how much you’re willing to spend, but you’re feeling nervous.
How do you really know if your ad is performing? Sure, you’ll likely see an increase in sales or email subscribers, but is the result worth what you paid?
I want to walk you through my three personal favourite Facebook Ad metrics, so you can determine how well your ads are performing.
#1 Facebook Click Through Rate
There are actually two CTRs for Facebook Ads. There is a CTR all and CTR link click. The CTR all will tell you if they clicked on anything, from the “read more” button to enlarging the ad photo to the link. The CTR link click, however, just looks at how many people clicked through the ad to the next step.
Obviously, the purpose of ads is to get people to click the link, so you want to keep a close eye on your CTR for your Facebook Ads which is why I like to focus on the link click number. On average, this number will be between 1-3%.
The Link Click CTR tells you more about the copy - Are people reading it? Does it resonate? Do they want more? The CTR (All) all tells you more about the image and headline - Are they getting people's attention as they scroll?
#2 Cost Per Result
The result will vary immensely based on the type of ad you are running. It could be a lead, sale, page view, engagement, or other. In general, an ad to your email list is going to be cheaper than a sale because a sale requires that someone hand over money - which takes a lot more convincing.
For page views, expect to spend around thirty cents. With list building, you’ll likely spend between $2 to $3 per lead. However, with a sale, the cost of the offer will influence how much you’ll end up paying (I’ve heard it being as high as $500/sale for a $10,000 offer! 😱).
If these numbers start getting well out of the normal range, your audience may be getting exhausted by your ad. That means it’s time to switch up the copy, image, or end the campaign altogether.
#3 Frequency
This Facebook Ad metric doesn’t get talked about enough, but it’s a daily check for me. Frequency tells you the average number of times someone has seen your ad. For instance, your ad might have been shown 10000 times to 5000 people. That means each person saw the ad, on average, two times.
This data can help you determine if your ad is exhausted. After a frequency of three or more, people are going to begin ignoring it, reporting the ad, or making comments that they are tired of the ad. That means it’s time to switch up the ad.
The only time I don’t pay much attention to frequency is during open cart because we want to show up a lot for the short open cart period.
Don’t want to stress over these Facebook Ad metrics? Looking for a Facebook Ad Management service? Explore our Facebook Ads services, and learn more about our pricing and services.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Okay, so let's talk about my favorite metrics to be tracking. When we're talking about Facebook ads specifically, I'm only going to be referring to and chatting about metrics that you can pull up in the Facebook Ads Manager. I have other favorite metrics. If we have time, maybe we can get to those.
So my top three…
Number one is the CTR link click. Number two is cost per result. And then number three is frequency. Let's talk through each of these metrics, what they are, what they track, why they're important. Let's jump in.
Number one, CTR link click. So CTR stands for click through rate. And we're specifically looking at, or I personally like to specifically look at the link click. So there's two different click through rates. There is the click through rate all and click through rate link click. And so why this is a great metric that I love tracking is because it tells you the percentage of people who are actually clicking on your ad. So if a hundred people see the ad, there's a hundred impressions, and three people click, then that is a CTR of three percent.
Now the difference between C T R all and C T R link click is that CTR all is all of the clicks. Clicking on the image to make it bigger, clicking on read more, clicking on the link, clicking on anything to do with your ad. That's CTR all. And that's really great to look at if the link click CTR is low, because the link click CTR is only looking at the percentage of people who click on the links.
And typically you will see a two to five percent difference in those two different metrics. So the click through rate all is probably going to be in the three to five percent range. I've seen it as high as 10%. And then the CTR Link Click is probably going to be in the 13 percent range. Because fewer people are going to be clicking on the link, then everything. Then obviously the all also includes the sub segment of link clicks.
If the link click through rate is at least 1%, that is where we want to see it. At least 1 percent of people who see the ad are clicking on the link to go to your landing page, go to the sales page, go to whatever the link is sending people to. If that's less than 1%, then I will look at the CTR all and see if this is a problem with all the clicks or is it specifically just the link? Because that can help to tell if it's an issue with the image and headline or the ad copy. The C T R all typically will give you a bit more information about the image and the headline. Is it drawing attention and getting people's interest?
And then the CTR link click is a little bit more related to the ad copy. Are people actually reading it and clicking on the link? So it gives you a little bit of an idea where the problem may lie. Like I said, about 1% minimum will be clicking hopefully. Now if there's a problem with your link click through rate, then you're going to try and diagnose if it's image, headline, or ad copy.
The second metric that I like to look at is cost per result. The result might be leads, it might be sales, it might be page views. Depending on what it is, each of these have different metrics. A page view, just getting someone to look at a page is going to be less expensive than a lead, which means somebody who's putting their name and email address in and signing up for something.
And a lead is going to be less expensive than a sale, because a sale is actually requiring someone to give over credit card information or PayPal information, which is going to be obviously harder than getting them to just look at the page or give an email address. So I highly recommend that you have a bit of an idea of what your result would be costing for your situation.
A paid view might be 30 cents, a lead might be 2, a sale you might be willing to pay. I've heard people paying up to $500 for a sale. Because the program is $2,000 or they're willing to pay $500 for a $500 sale because they know that once people buy this $500 course, then they're very likely to sign up for the $10,000 mastermind. And so the sale one is very dependent on the situation, but page view and lead is going to be a little bit more industry specific.
Now, I work mostly with teachers with businesses that are selling to consumers. So it's a B to C relationship that they have. I do have clients who have page views to their TPT stores or their websites for as little as 10 cents and then up to a dollar. I also have clients who are getting leads for 30 to 50. Personally, when I run ads to get people onto my email list, I'm paying anywhere from 2 to 3 to get somebody onto my email list. So there is a bit of a variety. Obviously not as big as that sales one. I've never had anyone pay $500 to get someone on their email list.
Having an idea of how much it's going to cost beforehand will help you make a better judgment with your budget, and it will help you to determine, are the ads doing all right or not all right? Do we need to change something? What do we need to look at? I do also highly recommend that you are calculating the cost per result, both from the information that Facebook is giving you, but also from your back end.
So let's talk about a lead funnel, where you're getting people onto your email list. I highly recommend you're looking at your email service provider, so ConvertKit, Flowdesk, MailChimp, whatever you happen to be using, that you're looking there for the data. So I personally use Flowdesk. And if I spend $100 on ads and Flowdesk is telling me that I got 100 people onto my email list, well, that's a dollar per lead.
I'm going to trust Flowdesk over Facebook. Even if Facebook's saying, Oh, you got 200 people or you only got 50 people. It doesn't really matter what Facebook is saying. I trust what Flowdesk is telling me. It's similar to your bank account. It doesn't matter if Thrivecart tells me that there was a sale until that money is in my bank account.
So that's stat number two and metric number three that I like to track is frequency. And this one doesn't come up very often, but I really, really like frequency. I look at it a few times a week. It's on my checklist of things to go through for my clients. Frequency is checking the number of times on average somebody has seen an ad. It looks at reach, which is the number of people who have seen the ad, and the impressions, which is the number of times the ad has been shown.
So let's just say the ad has been shown 10 times, so there's 10 impressions, and the reach is 5. So five different people have seen the ad and it's been shown 10 times. That's a frequency of two. Now that same ad, if it had been shown 10 times to two different people only, then that's a frequency of five. So those are very wildly different numbers.
I probably should have used different numbers for my example. So let's talk a little bit more of a realistic example. So typically impressions are going to be up in the thousands. Let's just say that an ad had been shown 5, 000 times and it had been shown to 2, 500 people. So 5, 000 divided by 2, 500, that's a frequency of 2. Now a different ad has been shown 10, 000 times to 2, 000 people. That's a frequency of 5.
The higher the frequency means the more times people have seen it on average. Now, some of those people might have seen the ad 10 times and some of them have only seen it once, so it finds the average, of course. The reason why I like frequency is it helps to tell if the audience is becoming exhausted. Because you really don't want to be showing the ad to the same people time and again and again, because people will start to either ignore it because they've already seen it, or they're going to get annoyed and might start reporting it. Or make comments on it that you don't want, or unfollow you and take steps towards getting out of your world because they're annoyed by your ads. We don't want that.
And that's why when I'm running an ad for somebody, unless it's one of those very specific situations, I like to see the frequency stay below three or four in that range. Once it hits three, I start to either switch up the audiences or refresh the images and add copies so that we can continue sending the ad out. And that's important because especially the visual image is really what people will start to recognize and say, Oh, I've already seen that picture.
So if the frequency starts to go up above three, then it's time in my mind to either find a new audience that we can start marketing to or change out the images and you can even do both. There are, like I said, very small situations where I don't even look at frequency and one of those would be open cart. The goal is to be in people's faces. So if you have a course, membership or a program that you're launching and you're doing retargeting ads. These things are what I would call trigger actions and they are saying, yes, I'm interested.
And so during that open cart period, which is typically going to be like a week to 10 days at most, that's when you really want to be in their face. And so that frequency rule of three to four, I tend to kind of push it aside. Now, we don't want it to get up to like 40, but we can allow it to creep over four for that limited time period.
I also recommend that you have a couple of different variations of images that you can switch out, especially if you have a higher budget during that open cart period. So you can have like doors are open, and then you can have some testimonial ones in the middle, and then like last chance doors are closing at the end. So you're switching out those images so people aren't seeing the exact same thing for that entire time period.
Now I have a bonus one for you, which is your CPM or the cost per million, a cost per thousand impressions. This one is really helpful for understanding the cost of running the ad because this is actually how Facebook and Meta charge you. They charge you per 1, 000 impressions. So if your CPM is 30, that's going to have a really gigantic impact on the cost of running the ads. And often it comes down to the type of ad you're running. Something like a traffic ad or an engagement ad is going to be cheaper and have a lower CPM than a sales ad.
It also comes down to the audience you're running. How saturated is that market? How many people are running ads to that audience? Something like teachers who are marketing to other teachers tend to have a lower CPM, whereas again, my business, I'm marketing to fellow business owners, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and that's a higher CPM.
And so, while there are some things you can do to lower your CPM, like growing your warm audience and feeding the algorithm, by running nurture ads and running ads regularly does often help lower CPMs. It is a great metric to be looking at because it also is one of the first indicators of an ad going stale.
And when I say like the ads are going stale, it means that it's just been running for too long. And the algorithm starts saying, Hey, we need something fresh. And so the algorithm is actually programmed to kind of force us to refresh our images and refresh our ad copy more frequently. So one of the first indicators that the algorithm is starting to say it’s time, is when the CPM is consistently increasing day after day after day. And so it is something I recommend you track for that reason. And it can be really helpful in noticing what's happening and understanding the costs that your ads are going to be.
So I hope this was really helpful. Again, my top three favorite metrics are CTR link click, the cost per result, and frequency. And then I threw in that bonus, the CPM. Thank you so much for hanging out till the end. I would love to know what your favorite metric is and why you love it. So send me a DM and let me know. And until next week, I hope you have a wonderful day.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!