Facebook ads and KPIs

Facebook has come a long way from its humble beginning as a way for college students to connect, to be the largest social media network in the world. Today, this is considered a powerful marketing tool and an affordable but effective way to grow your brand.

It goes without saying that it is important for your brand to be on Facebook, but social media marketing efforts can significantly help you with Facebook advertising.

To be most effective using Facebook advertising, you have to know what metrics to track. Without knowing the KPIs and other metrics, you maybe wasting important ad budget and burning a hole through your pocket because you have nothing to compare your Facebook ads campaigns against. So, here are some important metrics we suggest you check.

Engagement

Depending on the end goal of your campaign, you may not be interested in engagement, but even if it is not the goal of your campaign, you should still measure it. If no one ever likes, comments, or shares your ad, how interesting might they find it? Your goal is not just to produce ads that receive clicks and conversions, but you want to produce social content that people want to interact with and share with others who can benefit from it.

Conversions

No matter what type of campaign you run, conversions are key. If no one is actually downloading your premium content offers or buying your product, then your campaign has the Achilles heel, no matter how good your other data may be. You can try out our Facebook gigs if you want to increase your conversions.

Impressions

This is the number of times your ad was viewed (not the number of unique people who saw it, that's a reach). To put objective metrics (website clicks, downloads, etc.) into perspective, you need to understand how many times it has been displayed. If 10 people converted to your ad, it might be great if 200 people were shown to your target audience, but not so great if it were to appear at 2 million.

Objective Rate

Here's where that perspective we get from impressions becomes extremely helpful. By dividing the number of times your ad campaign's goal is reached by the number of impressions your ad received, you can get a percentage that you can compare with other ads, as well as past and future campaigns, to understand how individual ads, audiences, and campaigns align. This allows you to make apples-to-apples comparisons and learn which of your content and audience are winners and losers.

This metric changes depending on the type of campaign goal you selected. If you started a website click campaign, the metric you would use is website clicks to get a click-through rate, if you promote a mobile app, the metric you would insert into the equation is downloads to get install rate, etc.

Engagement rate

Technical engagement rate is part of the last metric because you can create engagement Facebook ads. To get the engagement rate, you would use the same formula (goal/impressions = X as a percentage).

The reason why  I'm breaking it out into a separate metric is that even if engagement is not the goal of your campaign, using this metric will still allow you to compare those ads between apples and apples, to understand which of your ads are most appealing and which of your audience is most engaged with the ad content you create.

Cost per Objective

To find your cost per objective, simply divide the total cost of your ad (or ad set, or campaign, depending on what you want to know) by the number of times you have met the campaign goal in that ad, ad set, or campaign.

This helps you understand how your budget is spent on your ads, and also helps you understand how well your ads are performing (more relevant ads will generally pay a lower cost-per-click because the Facebook auction of ads not only rewards the highest bid, it balances the interests of advertisers and users).

Industry KPIs

Various industries have different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They have to track different metrics, so they could optimize ads performance and cost. We will go through some of the industries and metrics that are important to them.

Automotive industry

When it comes to marketing the brand name for car models, car companies have a challenging task. The decision of the average consumer to buy a car relies heavily on brand and reputation. To complicate matters, most car sales take place onsite at dealership locations and it is often difficult to keep track of marketing returns on a macro scale. However, by properly using social media measurement tools, automotive companies can increase brand awareness, gain product feedback, increase in-store traffic, and more!

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 0.80%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $2.24
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 5.11%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $43.84

Real estate industry

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 0.98%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $1.81
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 10.67%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $16.52

Food and drink industry

In 2019, with the amount of increased noise and competition, customers are looking to build a stronger connection with their favourite restaurant brands. They are also trying to find new places to visit on social media channels and are eager to go above and beyond the ordinary in order to connect with the most innovative companies out there.

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 1.20%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $0.42
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 3.98%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $12.91

Finance and insurance industry

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 0.56%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $3.77
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 9.09%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $41.43

Beauty and fitness industry

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 1.02%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $1.85
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 11.65%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $38.33

Education industry

1.Average Click-Through Rate on Facebook - 0.73%
2.Average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Facebook - $1.06
3.Average Conversion Rates on Facebook - 13.58%
4.Average Cost Per Action on Facebook - $7.85

You can also check out our article with benchmarks for Facebook ads for even more data. They are very different from industry to industry. However, there is one thing to note here. The CTRs (Click Thru Rates), CVRs (Conversion Rates), and CPCs (Cost Per Clicks) are aggregated based on all objectives. Which mean that it will have all the objective averages combined whether it’s a conversion objective like a website purchase or add to cart, or an awareness objective such as brand awareness. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below!