Brand Awareness KPIs
The brand awareness objective is exactly what it sounds like—it helps promote awareness of your brand within your target audience. Here are the Facebook KPIs worth tracking for this objective:
Key Metrics
Brand Lift
Brand lift is what occurs when you experience a definite improvement in your audience’s awareness of your company. Brand lift is based on several factors, including users’ attitudes towards your brand, their ability to remember your brand, and their likelihood to recommend or purchase from your brand. None of these metrics are reported on within Facebook ads since they require methods such as surveys, studies, and focus groups to gather such information.
Impressions
Impressions in Facebook Ads are the total number of times that an ad is viewed. There are two important notes to make about impressions. First, views are counted any time the ad appears on-screen, even if the user did not actually see it. Second, impressions can include multiple views by the same user, so your number of impressions is not the same as the number of individual people that your ad has reached.
Reach
Reach is similar to impressions in that it calculates the number of times an ad is viewed. But unlike impressions, reach is the total number of different users who saw your ad. It’s important to note that a view is counted whenever the ad is on-screen, even if the user did not see it.
Reach KPIs
At its core, the reach objective aims to get you the most impressions for the lowest cost. This is the only objective that does not take previous engagements or behavior history into account when showing your ads. That means that it targets everyone in your selected audience, even if they have no behavioral indicators showing that they would be likely to engage with your ad. We'll explain why this is significant below!
Key Metrics
Reach (of course!)
Reach is much more relevant than impressions for this objective. This is because if your goal is to reach the most unique people and focusing on impressions won't provide the information you're looking for.
Frequency
The frequency of an ad is the average number of times a user saw your ad. This is calculated by dividing impressions by reach. For example: if your ad received 10,000 impressions and had a reach of 4,500, you would calculate the frequency by dividing 10,000 by 4,500, which comes out to 2.22. That means the average user saw your ad 2.22 times. How does someone see an ad 0.22 times? The world may never know. The takeaway here is that the average person sees your ad 2 or more times.
Unique Link Clicks
Link clicks measures the total number of clicks on your ad's link, which may include multiple clicks from the same user. Unique link clicks measures the number of different people who clicked on your ad's link. If your goal is to reach the most (different) people, focusing on unique link clicks will help you determine how effective your ads are at engaging with the most people.
Traffic KPIs
As its name implies, the traffic objective drives users to your website (or whatever link you use within your ads). This objective instructs Facebook to target people within your audience that are most likely to click on the ad but does not take into account behavior or conversions that may happen after the traffic lands on your site.
Key Metrics
Link Clicks
To reiterate, this is the total number of clicks your ad receives, including multiple clicks by the same user. The traffic objective is meant to drive sessions to the link, regardless of how many come from unique users. Basically, 1,000 sessions are 1,000 sessions, even if all 1,000 of them came from the same user. (They won’t actually all come from one user, but technically, we guess, they could!)
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of clicks your ad received out of the number of impressions it received. To calculate the click-through rate, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions, then multiply that number by 100 to turn it into a percentage. For example: if your ad received 300 clicks out of 1,000 impressions, you would divide 300 by 1,000, which equals 0.3. Multiply that by 100, and you'll find that your click-through rate was 30%, meaning 30% of impressions converted into clicks.
Quality Ranking
Quality ranking is the most useful ad relevance metric for traffic objectives. This ad relevance KPI tells you how your ad's creative is performing compared to other ads that are competing for the same audience. Performance in this metric falls into three categories: below average (bottom 20% of ads), average, and above average.
Your quality ranking is a reflection of how relevant your ad creative is to your audience. If you are confident in your audience targeting, then a below-average quality ranking indicates that your ad creative (image, text, headline, CTA, etc.) needs to be improved. If you feel like your creative is spot on, then you may want to adjust your audience targeting to show your awesome ad to more relevant users.
Engagement KPIs
The engagement objective is used for driving and tracking actions on Facebook. These ads are not meant to lead to external links, though. Instead, they’ll be placed in front of users who have shown a likelihood to engage with ads via comments, shares, reactions, and more.
Key Metrics
Page Likes
As you can probably guess, this metric is all about the number of likes your Facebook Page receives that can be attributed to your ads. No matter which engagement objective is used, it’s a good idea to always monitor how your ads influence your page likes.
Engagement Rate Ranking
Similar to quality ranking, engagement rate ranking is an ad relevance metric that can help you determine how effective your ads are at engaging your audience. It is a ranking of your ad's expected engagement rate, including all clicks, likes, comments, and shares that are compared to ads competing for the same audience. The possible engagement rate rankings are Above Average, Average, Below Average (Bottom 35% of ads), Below Average (Bottom 20% of ads), and Below Average (Bottom 10% of ads).
Post Shares
Posts, including ads, can be shared by users to their own timelines, to their friends' timelines, in groups, and on their business pages. Someone has to be particularly engaged with a post to want to share it on their page or a friend’s page. It has to be something that they relate to enough to want to share with others, which is a significant difference from the more self-contained engagements like comments and likes that may not necessarily be seen by their friends’ list.
Conversions KPIs
The conversions objective is all about driving actions. These actions can occur on your website, within your app, or Facebook Messenger. For this article, we’ll be focusing on the website conversions, which are tracked by your Facebook Pixel.
Key Metrics
Standard Events
Standard events are predefined actions that are added to your pixel code. You can track the occurrences of these events within Facebook reports and even use them to build custom audiences. Standard events include:
- Add to cart
- Complete registration
- Contact
- Initiate checkout
- Lead
- Purchase
- Schedule
- Start trial
- Subscribe
- And several others.
Custom Events
Custom events are actions that fall outside those covered by the standard events. Just as with standard events, you can use custom events to build custom audiences. Some possible custom events include:
- File download link clicks
- CTA clicks
- Time on page
- Pageviews
- And endless more possibilities.
Conversion Value
For purchases, the conversion value is determined by the price of the product purchased on your website. For other conversions, such as file downloads or contact form submissions, you can assign custom values based on your internal data. Tracking the value of your conversions can be more, well, valuable than merely monitoring the number of conversions. For example, would you rather have 10,000 conversions valued at $1 each or 2,000 conversions valued at $10 each? Conversion value tracking can help you optimize your ads towards driving the types of conversions that mean the most to your business.
Making Sense of the Numbers
There’s a seemingly endless amount of data available to you, but more important than gathering the numbers is determining what they actually mean.
As you run your Facebook ads campaigns, pay attention to how the different parts of your ads—from the creatives to the calls-to-action to the bidding strategies—affect your KPI performance. You’ll find that these KPIs reveal exactly which parts of your ads need tweaking in order to reach their full potential.
