We will walk you through the main points that should be paid attention to by the customer who uses the services of agencies or individual specialists, or the head of the Internet marketing department to control KPIs in his direction.
And we will also consider a detailed scheme for analyzing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram from the position of an agency specialist, a freelancer, or an in-house marketer who is engaged in targeting himself.
How to analyze targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram if you are a beginner target analyst, in-house marketer, or freelancer
In this part of the article, we will discuss the following questions:
How to analyze targeted advertising using Facebook tools:
- How to use the reports built into the Ads Manager interface.
- How to use the Facebook Ads Reports tool.
How to analyze targeted advertising using Google Analytics tools:
- Traffic Sources report.
- Report Associated conversions.
Why are Facebook statistics different from Google Analytics?
How to use the reports built into the Ads Manager interface
Let’s start one by one. The first report that a targeting analyst sees is the report built into the Facebook Ads Manager interface on the Campaigns tab.
To see it, you just need to go to the advertising cabinet and select the time period for which you want to see the statistics. The system automatically displays data for the last 7 days.
Here we can see summary reports on campaign performance indicators, giving a general idea of their progress.
What to pay attention to:
- The results.
- The value of the result.
- Coverage.
- Showings.
- Spent budget.
These are the main indicators by which, after entering the advertising office, you will be able to form an initial idea about the course of advertising.
Let’s say you see the following situation: few results at a high price in the last week. This is a signal for action and deeper analysis and optimization.
Next, to get more detailed indicators, select a campaign (check the box) that we analyze and go to the Ad Groups tab.
We’ve moved to the ad group level. Here you can see more detailed statistics about how each ad group performed.
What should be paid attention to:
- The results.
- The value of the result.
- Coverage.
- Showings.
- Spent budget.
As you can see, the main metrics are the same, but now we’re looking at them by ad groups.
What conclusions can be drawn by looking at the group statistics:
- Which audience setting worked best?
- Which set of placements worked better (details about each of them should be seen in the Advertising reports section, more on that later).
- Which ad group generated more targeted actions.
- Additional statistics.
Tool: Charts
Let’s move on to a more detailed analysis of each group of ads. To do this, click on the button View charts.
If you are in the mode of editing an ad group, click on this icon:
After that, a standard report from Facebook will open before us.
General performance information
In this report, you can analyze general data on the campaign, such as purchases on the site and their cost, and expenses.
You can also customize this report and choose other metrics for analysis.
Age and gender breakdown and performance across platforms and placements
Standard reports will provide a general understanding of the performance of ad groups, as well as an understanding of the dependence of one indicator on another. Also available at ad and campaign levels.
In order to more accurately analyze the progress of advertising, we will make some changes to the settings for displaying reports.
To do this, click the Configure metrics button on the General performance reporting tab.
First, let’s compare the cost of the result and the cost of 1000 impressions (CPM).
For this, we select the appropriate parameters.
If you see that you have started to buy 1000 impressions more expensive than the auction price, there can be 2 explanations for this:
- Competition at the auction increased and he went up.
- The frequency of displays increased and advertising went full circle. Because of this, reactions to ads fell and the cost of an impression increased.
If you see in the statistics that the value of the result is increasing during the last 7 days, analyze the impression frequency. To do this, change the CPM filter to Frequency (summed up).
If the graph shows that the higher the frequency of impressions, the higher the value of the result (and the fewer the results), this is a signal of oversaturation of the audience. Or in simple words, advertising is shown in a circle and has ceased to interest the audience.
What to do in this case? Expand your audience to reach new users.
Another reason for the increase in the cost of the result is a sharp increase in the budget of the ad group. To check this, we change the Frequency filter to the amount spent.
If you see that on the date of the budget change, the value of the result started to creep up, and the system could not cope with the load. A safe daily budget increase of +20-30% is recommended by Facebook.
Tool: Inspector
To open the Inspector tool, click Inspector under the ad group name.
Note: The Inspector tool is available for ad campaigns with Traffic, Conversions, Lead Generation, and Program Settings.
If you’re in edit mode for an ad group, click the ad group icon.
After that, several modules opened before us. Let’s start studying them one by one.
Consider the first composite module.
This module shows the effectiveness of the selected bidding strategy in the advertising campaign.
What should be kept in mind when analyzing this module? If you’re using the Control Price, Target Price, or Limit Bid bidding strategies in your campaigns instead of autobid, once the system exhausts the number of conversions at a given price, the campaigns will run significantly slower and in some cases will be disabled.
Recommendation from Facebook experts: use autobid.
The next module in the report is Competition in the auction.
It’s a pretty interesting and useful chart that will give you an insight into the competition in the auction and whether the increased competition in the auction is having an effect on the result value of your campaigns.
If competition is falling or holding steady, it’s likely not due to increased prices. If prices rise with the competition, this can be a big factor.
Let’s move on and move on to the next module — Saturation of the audience.
This graph will give an understanding of the state of the audience, namely its oversaturation.
If your ad reach isn’t growing and your costs are increasing, it’s likely because your audience is tired of your ads.
If you see a situation like the one described above in your campaign analytics, this is a signal to expand your audience.
We continue to work with the module.
The left column shows the following indicators:
Frequency – how many times 1 person saw your ad during the entire duration of the campaign.
First View Share – The share of impressions per day to people who see your ad for the first time.
Reach – how many people saw your ad at least once during the entire duration of the advertising campaign.
The reach ratio is the proportion of the estimated audience size that has already been reached. That is if you have an approximate projected audience size of 100 people, and the audience reach ratio is 10%, then your ad was selected at least once by 10 people.
Crossing in auctions.
This module shows how often the analyzed ad group overlaps with other groups in your account. It prevents your ad groups from competing with each other in the auction.
Auction overlap occurs when one ad group partially reaches the same audience as another in your ad account. In this case, the system gives priority to the more competitive group.
If you see a lot of overlap in ad groups, merge those groups.
Assessment of creative quality
Next, we move on to analyzing the quality of creatives in your ad groups. To do this, we switch to the level of ads.
Here we see 3 parameters for evaluating creativity:
Quality Score – shows how well people are responding to your ad compared to others competing for that audience.
Engagement rate score – shows the effectiveness of your ad in terms of interactions with it (clicks, likes, etc.).
Conversion rate estimate – shows the predicted value of the conversion rate compared to other ads with the same desired result (targeted action).
The higher all these 3 indicators are, the more effective advertising works and the more results it will bring.
Facebook has published a special table that will help you make decisions about the work of creation.
How to use the tool – Facebook Ads Reports
Advertising reports can be accessed from the top menu.
After selecting this tool from the menu, you will be taken to the reports page.
Click Create report.
After that, select the project that we will analyze and press Create.
Choose a convenient way to display the report. Most often, it is a tabular view.
After that, we move on to setting up the report.
In the right menu, we have two settings options:
- Breakdowns
- Metrics.
- What data can we get?
People of which gender and age make the most conversions, and also analyze the cost of conversion for them.
Which areas are most effective for serving ads for specific ad groups?
From which devices do the audience convert most often?
Which social network and platform do advertising work more effectively?
These are just a basic set of settings from which you can analyze ad campaigns in general, ad groups, and individual creatives and make appropriate changes to your ad settings.
Important! You should not take the statistics from the reports as a panacea and make mass corrections to the campaign. Do everything gradually and do not make drastic decisions.
Facebook experts recommend giving the algorithm more freedom with the help of settings and not narrowing the reach and audience.
How to analyze targeted advertising using Google Analytics tools
In order to analyze the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, you must have access to a Google Analytics account. Also, the e-commerce module must be enabled and configured in the account.
For basic analysis, you will need 2 reports – Traffic Sources and Associated Conversions.
In-depth analysis will require the use of additional reports. But for daily control of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in the project, 2 of these reports will be enough.
Important! If you haven’t put UTM tags in your ads, you won’t be able to do a detailed analysis, you’ll only see summary statistics.
The Traffic Sources report
In this report, we analyze 3 main points:
- Traffic volume.
- Traffic quality.
- Commercial component.
Let’s start with the first point. We see the traffic volume data in the first part of the table.
Here we can see how many people our advertising has attracted, and we can estimate the flow of traffic in dynamics or compare it with the previous period.
If the amount of traffic has dropped, you need to conduct an analysis, try to understand the reasons for the drop, and make changes to the settings of advertising campaigns.
Let’s move on to analyzing traffic quality. The Actions section of the report will help us with this.
Here we analyze 3 indicators:
- Failure rate.
- The number of pages visited per session.
- Average session duration.
How to understand that the traffic is of poor quality:
- High rejection rate.
- Low session duration.
- Few pages per session.
Let’s move on to the analysis of the commercial component. Data on the number of orders, revenue, and transaction ratio are on the right side of the table.
This report shows the profitability of advertising campaigns. In addition to the number of orders and income, an important indicator is the conversion rate. It shows the percentage of site visits that ended in a transaction (order). It also gives insight into which traffic source is the most effective in terms of traffic quality.
How to understand which campaign and which ad brings the most revenue and is the most effective.
To do this, you need to go inside the report on advertising traffic from Facebook or Instagram ads and set the additional option Company.
Click on the name of the source.
We apply additional parameters.
After that, you will see a detailed report for each individual campaign.
Important! If you have not set UTM tags in your ads, this report will not be available.
How to set UTM tags
- In the Ads Manager advertising cabinet, at the level of ads in editing mode, go down to the bottom of the page and find the URL Parameters item. Click Create URL parameter.
- After that, fill in all the necessary fields in the pop-up window. In the screenshot, we showed the filling option, which is the most convenient for our team. With such a markup, looking at the analytics and without entering the advertising office, you will immediately see which ad, audience, and campaign bring the greatest results.
- After filling, press the Apply button.
Why Facebook statistics are different from Google Analytics
During the analysis process, you will notice that the data about clicks and conversions differ between Facebook statistics and Google Analytics reports.
This is because the systems use different attribution models and even attribution windows.
An attribution model is a model for distributing value between traffic channels. Simply put, it’s the way the value is calculated, or how the system assigns a certain traffic source to a conversion. Because the path to conversion often involves multiple sources.
The attribution window is the time between the click on the ad and the conversion. It is necessary to keep in mind that Facebook has both click attribution and view attribution. That is, the user could view your ad, but not click on it. Next, place an order on your website. Analytics will credit this conversion to the last source the user interacted with, and Facebook will credit it to itself in its analytics.
The main reason for the data discrepancy between Facebook and Google Analytics is the difference in attribution models. Because Facebook displays in its analytics all the conversions in which it participated, and Google Analytics gives conversions to the last-click sources.
How to analyze advertising in social networks, if you are a client of an agency or a marketing director
In this part of the article we will discuss:
- 3 main KPIs that the customer needs to look at.
- According to which Google Analytics reports the customer will monitor the specialist or agency.
Regarding the first point. In fact, the customer does not need to understand all the subtleties and pitfalls of analyzing the effectiveness of advertising. The executor will do this for you, and customers who try to analyze campaigns in detail and even more so tell specialists how exactly they need to perform settings and analysis, are just wasting time. Because it often does not lead to positive results.
Different types of businesses prioritize different KPIs. In most cases, the most important indicators for the customer are the following:
- A number of additions to the cart.
- A number of transactions.
- ROAS (return on advertising investment).
- Cost per transaction/click.
- Call tracking.
The first two indicators can be tracked in Google Analytics. 3 and 4 need to be calculated.
ROAS (return on investment) shows how profitable the advertising investment was and is calculated as follows: costs/income * 100%
The cost of a transaction or click is calculated by a simple formula: costs/number of orders or clicks.
And then you can see if it is necessary to strive and reduce the cost of the order.