6.2 Analytics and Dashboards

In the last episode, we went through actually building an ad campaign on 

Facebook and Instagram and in most cases that would be the end of this course. But life is full of surprises and so are we. We just have one last thing we need you to know - which is understanding

Facebook data at a basic level.

DATA- that one word that no one really knows what it is but we use it anyway. But as an ad marketer you need to understand how data works even if at a very basic level. Once your ads are live, you want to know how to track the performance of your campaign.

So let's take you to an earlier campaign that was run by Lancify because we didn’t actually run ads for Lancify Abroad cause its a fake business and that could be illegal.

What you see here is the ads manager. So let’s start at a campaign level. Let’s go over the different elements. On the top right is the date range. This helps you select a date range to view how your ads did. So for example, if you want to see how your campaign did last month or last week, just click on the date range and select that range. Pretty simple. 

Next, let's look at a few of the metrics here. The first thing you see are results. So for whatever date range you have selected, the number of conversions you got will show up here. The next one is reach and impressions which tells you how many people your ad reached and the total number of times it was shown.

Coming to cost per result – now this is a very important metric. The cost of each lead or each person who signed up for a free session. You'll find that here. This is basically the total money spent divided by how many sign ups you got.

This is an important metric for any client you will serve because they would want to know how much it is costing them to get each lead or each sale.

And they will also want that cost to go down over time. When you start the campaign, this could be say 100 bucks for a lead. Over time as you observe and tweak your targeting or copy, you want to see this cost go down to 50, 40 or even 10. Then comes the amount spent and link clicks. These 2 metrics are also important for you to be able to track how much money you are spending and how many clicks you’re getting. These give you insight into how your campaign is doing in general.

Now if you click on ad sets, you again have a set of metrics you can track. Most of these metrics are similar but by looking at results, spends, cost per result and clicks, you can tell which audiences are working better for you.

Then finally when you click on ads, you get to see the individual ad data. Again, even though the metrics are mostly the same you can see which of your ads are performing better.

Now, how do you actually read this information to make decisions?

As a Facebook marketer, your job is not just setting up ads but also constantly tweaking and improving them to get better performance. Which means, your job by no means ends with setting up of ads. In fact, it could just be the beginning. You need to understand how to read all this data and make changes that will help improve the campaign.

So here are a few steps for you to follow. At the campaign level, you aren't seeing any real in-depth data. The data here is basically giving you general information about how your campaign is doing overall. But what you can do is change the date range. That way you can tell how your campaign is doing this week or month vs last week or month.

You can tell if you are getting more results this week and if the cost per results is increasing or decreasing, just by changing the date ranges and looking at the data.

Now at the ad set level, you begin to get more in depth information.

This stage tells you how your audiences are doing. If you have named your audiences well, you can see which audiences are bringing in more clicks, which ones are actually signing up for your free session, and which audiences are more expensive. Over time, you will notice that some audiences are performing better than others. 

The goal, of course, is to get more results for a lesser cost. So once you see some ad sets working better, you might want to go into the ad sets that are performing less and change the targeting a bit to see if the results improve.

Or you might even want to turn off those ad sets and invest more money into the ad sets that are working. If you remember, budgets are also set at an adset level. That means if you turn off one ad set, it does give you more money to work with for the other ad sets. And finally when you come to ads, you can see which ads are working better and which aren't. We recommend you look very closely to see if there are specific messages or images that are working better overall.

You will see specific patterns rising over time. You might find that whenever you have used the word FREE in your headline you are getting more clicks, or ads with a certain image are getting more engagement.

What you can then do is turn off the ads that are not performing too well and invest in the ones that are doing well. The whole idea is to start off the campaign with a bunch of different ad sets and ads and then tweak or turn off specific ones according to the data coming in, to ultimately reach a point where you hit a sweet spot. 

Now, if you start applying these practices and push yourself to constantly observe the data, you’ll find yourself with some really successful campaigns.