One thing Facebook ad managers sometimes forget is what exactly they are trying to achieve from their Facebook advertising. They will sometimes look at Cost per Click (CPC) as their most important metric. This is how much it costs for someone to click on your ad. We recommend taking this almost completely off the table. There are so many more metrics that are worth focusing your time and energy on.

If you want to have effective ads on Facebook and make decisions that will convert for your clients then you need to be monitoring based on purchase intent metrics. You have to decide where you want the ad to be in the sales process. Ultimately, if you are working with an e-commerce brand, that means focusing on purchases. if you are working someone that requires leads, you are going to focus on lead conversions.

So what specific metrics should you be honing in on? Read below to find out!

Return on Ad Spend

It’s extremely important to know what you break even Return on Ad Spend is to understand what you want your optimum ROAS to be. Generating traffic from your ads is of course important, but if you aren’t getting any revenue or potential revenue from the ad, then you aren’t going to benefit from the ads. By knowing your most and least effective Facebook ad campaigns you will better understand where to allocate your marketing budget on this platform.

If you have a Facebook tracking pixel set up on your website, you will be able to track a clear return on ad spend for any purchases based off of your ads.

Typically you will find that your remarketing campaigns will result in a much higher return on ad spend. You are marketing to a warm audience who is familiar with your brand and much more likely to convert.

Cost Per Action (CPA)

What is the action you are looking to monitor? It’s the behavior that you want your prospect to take. This can be anything from a play of your video, an add to cart, a visit to your website, or an engagement on your social media. If we were to look at the total number of actions that were taken, this might not give us insight into how our ads are actually doing. You may think that if an ad is generating more clicks then it must be doing better - however, how efficient is this ad? The CPA will give you a better idea of how your ads are doing. If your CPA is lower, you will have a higher conversion rats and drive higher revenue from the same exact spend.

Frequency

Monitoring frequency of your ads is very important. This tells you the number of times your ad was shown to an average user. Think about it, if you keep seeing the same ad in your feed, do you get annoyed by it? Does it make you more or less likely to purchase a product? There is a difference between seeing an ad 2-3 times and seeing it 8-9. The likelihood is, that if you are seeing an ad for the 8th time and haven’t clicked on it, you aren’t going to. We want to avoid having banner blindness creep in.

You could also take a hit to your relevance score - which tells Facebook that your content is not interesting and therefore it will be less effective and may cost you more in the long run.

Another important thing to consider is that once your frequency gets too high you will start to see your CPC go up, your CTR go down and other metrics take a hit. We typically like to limit our frequency to about 3 on prospecting and 6-7 on Remarketing.

If you see your frequency getting too high you can swap out your creatives, or try out some new targeting.

Sure, these metrics are not the only important ones, but they will definitely help you assess how your ads are doing and help you to optimize your ads for the conversions your brand needs.