Is advertising on Facebook right for your brand?
There are several ways to help answer this question. We cover the answer to this question in this Blog post. Generally speaking there are 3 steps to running ads on Facebook.
Step 1: Determine your marketing campaign objective. Are you looking to raise awareness for your brand, drive traffic, get video views, generate leads, app installs, store visits or drive sales? This is referred to as the marketing funnel. In the case of Facebook Ads there are 3 categories: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.
Step 2: Choose the Ad set which includes choosing your Audience, Placements, Budget and Schedule.
Step 3: Create your ad! Choose the format (Carousel, Single Image, Single Video or Slide Show), Create the Text for your Headline and Description. You’ll also choose a (CTA) Call To Action button and add the url destination.
Headline- Add a headline that grabs people’s attention and tells them what your ad is about. The character limit for headline is 40. You can add more text and go over the character limit, but it may be cut off when people see your ad in certain placements, for example Mobile News Feed.
CTA- Choose the action you want people to take when they see your ad which include:
- Download
- Learn More
- Get Directions
- Get Quote
- Get Showtimes
- Listen Now
- Send Message
- Save
Once you’ve determined whether Facebook Ads are tight for your company or not then you’ll want to know how the Dashboard works. Ask your Marketing Coordinator to give you a tutorial so that you can better understand how it works. Below you’ll find the definitions to some basic terms. There are many more terms to define in the Facebook Ads platform, however, we feel these are the fundamental terms to understand if you’re running ads on Facebook.
- Reach
- Impressions
- CPM
- Frequency
- Results
Reach
The number of people who saw your ads at least once. Reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people.
This metric is estimated.
How It’s Used
Reach gives you a measure of how many people were exposed to your message during an ad campaign. People may not always click on your ads, but they may be more likely to engage with your business when they see your message.
Your reach can be affected by your bid, budget and audience targeting.
How It’s Calculated
This metric is calculated using sampled data.
Impressions
The number of times your ads were on screen.
How It’s Used
Impressions is a common metric used by the online marketing industry. Impressions measure how often your ads were on screen for your target audience.
Facebook and Instagram first party served impressions are accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC).
How It’s Calculated
An impression is counted as the number of times an instance of an ad is on screen for the first time. (Example: If an ad is on screen and someone scrolls down, and then scrolls back up to the same ad, that counts as 1 impression. If an ad is on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.) Since impressions are counted the same way for ads that contain either images or video, a video is not required to start playing for the impression to be counted. Though this method of counting video impressions differs from industry standards for video ads, it ensures consistency in reporting impressions when ad campaigns contain both videos and images.
In a few cases when it can’t be determined whether ads are on screen, such as on feature mobile phones, impressions are counted when ads are delivered to devices.
Impressions aren’t counted if they come from invalid traffic we detect such as from non-human sources (such as a bot).
CPM (Cost per 1,000 Impressions)
The average cost for 1,000 impressions.
How It’s Used
CPM is a common metric used by the online advertising industry to gauge the cost-effectiveness of an ad campaign. It’s often used to compare performance among different ad publishers and campaigns.
How It’s Calculated
CPM measures the total amount spent on an ad campaign, divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000. (Example: If you spent $50 and got 10,000 impressions, your CPM was $5.)
Frequency
The average number of times each person saw your ad.
This metric is estimated.
How It’s Used
Frequency helps to build awareness and recall by showing your message to people in your target audience multiple times. Frequency may average 1 to 2 per ad set or may be much higher, depending on your budget, audience size and schedule.
However, it’s important to monitor frequency along with your results and relevance score to make sure the same people aren’t seeing your ads too often during a campaign. If performance begins to drop as your frequency numbers rise, your target audience may be experiencing ad fatigue, and it may be wise to change your ad creative or targeting.
How It’s Calculated
Frequency is calculated as impressions divided by reach.
This metric is calculated using sampled data.
Results
The number of times your ad achieved an outcome, based on the objective and settings you selected.
How It’s Used
The results metric shows how well your ad campaign performed based on the business objectives and settings you chose. You can use it to compare performance among similar campaigns and identify areas of opportunity to get better results.
Depending on your campaign and ad account settings, your results may not reflect how you are billed for your ad. Example: If you selected Conversions as your objective, your results may count the number of purchases that happened, but you may be charged for the number of impressions your ad gets.
How It’s Calculated
The metric counts the number of results you received based on the settings for your campaign. Example: If you selected Conversions as your campaign objective, the results metric may show the number of purchases that happened as a result of someone seeing your ad.
For results where time may pass between when someone sees your ad and when they take action, Facebook uses a default attribution window to count results that occur within 1 day after viewing or within 28 days after clicking your ad. If you change the attribution window settings for your ad account, results will be counted within the attribution window you set.