#76: How to Understand Facebook Ads Reporting For Better Results

Facebook ads reporting is the topic of today's episode of The Art of Paid Traffic, specifically, how to get the most out of all the stats and metrics that Facebook makes available to you so you can make educated decisions on improving your Facebook ads.

When it comes to looking at Facebook ads reporting and optimizing your ads, I have three words for you. Keep. It. Simple.

Having so many stats available to us can be overwhelming, especially when you have all these numbers in front of you and you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Keep it simple by looking at the one metric that tells you how well your ads are doing based on the objective you have chosen.

Here’s what I mean by that...

If the goal of your ad campaign is to send people from your Facebook ad to a valuable blog post you’ve written so you can start warming them up to your business, for example, you would choose the Objective “Clicks to Website” when you’re setting up your Facebook ads (the goal here is to drive people from your ad to your website).

Now when looking at your stats, focus first on the cost per click and then the click-through rate which tells you the % of people who are seeing your ad and then clicking on it. If it’s a low CPC and a good click through rate you know you’ve set up a good ad. If it’s a low click through rate, you use that information to make changes to your ad.

So with that said, what’s a good CPC and CTR %?

The answer to that is going to vary by industry, but as a general guideline, I’d try and get your CPC below $1 and your CTR above 1%.

Another example is when you’re sending people from your Facebook ad to an opt-in page or a webinar registration page. The goal here is “website conversions” because you’re trying to get people to opt-in to your email list or register for your event.

In this case, the first metric you want to look at is what is your cost per lead? How many leads have you generated for the amount of money you’ve spent?

Likewise, for cost per lead, what’s “good” is going to vary from industry to industry. Meaning, for a B2B brand to get a $15 CPL, it might be super pumped for that, but if I’m personally getting a $15 CPL, I’m shutting my ads off and changing them up.

So, it’s really going to vary by the niche you’re in. But, if I had to give you a general CPL to stay under, I would shoot for $8 and under. Again, that’s going vary a lot.

Keep it simple, don’t over complicate things any more than they need to be when it comes to reading your stats.

I walk you through all of this in today's episode and more, including:

• What I like to call "troubleshooting" stats like Reach, Frequency and Relevancy Score -- what they are, why they're important, and how to use them to make smart decisions for improving your Facebook ads.
• How to customize your Facebook ads reports
• The metrics you need to be looking at based on the Objective you're using
• The little known yet important stat most people overlook and how to customize it for your ad campaigns