How to Analyze Facebook Ads Data the Right Way (The 2025 Guide)

analyzing meta ads data is well complicated in fact in 2025 many advertisers are still focusing on the wrong metrics like clickthrough rate CPM or CPC so in this video I'm going to show you exactly how to analyze Facebook ads data the right way from the beginner to expert level this way you can scale smarter and not waste your money so if you ever felt like you were missing something critical when analyzing your ad campaigns this video is for you here's our agenda here's everything that we're going to go through today first my 2025 updated column setup in ads manager and then we're going to go over the tools I use to make data different decisions like motion and triple wh then we're going to explore some Advanced Data this is actually the data that I find nearly all advertisers even experts tend to miss out on one last thing I also have a free creative reporting checklist that you guys can download in the link in the description bar below but more on that in a bit so these right here are all of the metrics that I'm going to be tracking inside of ads manager and here's exactly what it looks like so first you're going to see we have the delivery column set up this campaign ran a few months ago so the campaign is off and we also have the bid strategy and attribution setting right here now if you guys have any questions about the different types of bidding strategies or even the different types of attribution settings please let me know in the comments I'm more than happy to jam on that there or even make future videos about it but if you're just starting off I would highly suggest for your bidding strategy to do highest volume and for your attribution setting to have 7day click and one day VI and essentially what bid strategy means is this algorithm is going to go after the highest volume of conversions there's going to be a few different ones but that's definitely the one that you're going to want to start off with if you are just beginning an attribution setting is essentially saying hey if someone clicks on your ad within a 7-Day period or views it within 24 hours one day then that means that that specific ad or Campaign Will then have that purchase attributed to that specific ad now once we scroll over here we can see budget this is an ASC Campaign which is why we have adset and this is a $700 daily budget now if you're just starting off you're not going to have budgets that high of course um I would suggest starting off with at least $100 especially if you're doing an ASC campaign but now let's get to the data let's get to the good stuff now you can see here we have amount spent purchases cost per purchase and Ras now these four metrics are essentially going to show you if your campaign is working and specifically what is working everything else is going to tell you why now when I'm looking at data and ads manager I actually like to sort from highest to lowest so that I can prioritize what's working the best or at least what's getting the most most amount of spend because if something isn't working but it's getting a ton of spend that's obviously something I'm going to want to optimize and turn off next we're going to have purchases now your purchases or your cost per purchase could also be substituted for lead or cost per lead but since most of my brands are in Ecommerce and they're going after purchases that's why I have that as the primary kpi and your cost per purchase is essentially going to be how much does it cost to acquire a customer on that ad your rowad self-explanatory is your return on ad spend so for every $1 that you put into this campaign or to this ad how many dollars are you then getting back from those customers now again these four metrics are going to be your primary kpis they're going to guide everything now the next five metrics are actually going to tell you about the people you are reaching so we have frequency this specific metric is going to show you how many times on average people are seeing your ads now this was looking at the data over a one- Monon period and we were actually reaching quite a few new people with this specific campaign I actually tend to get a little worried if I see frequency numbers above five across the last s days or the last few weeks cuz this might tell me that we are starting to hit a lot of retargeting audiences so if you see those higher frequencies it might be a sign Des that your creatives are targeting the same people over and over again or your campaign is now your reach is going to show you that individual people that saw your ad whereas The Impressions is actually going to show the number of times that your ads were shown sometimes to the same people which is why I really like looking at the frequency number two because I always want to make sure that my ads are reaching new people and not just hitting the same people over and over again and then we have of course cost per reach and CPM now I'd say that CPM is probably going to be a lot more important than cost per reach but CPM is actually the number that I find a lot more advertisers talk about and this is essentially the cost per 1,000 Impressions now I know that you're probably looking at this CPM number and you're like oh mine are you know maybe a lot higher maybe a lot lower what is the average CPM and the truth is is that your CPM is highly dependent on your industry right and sometimes even specifically your product if you're curious about benchmarking data and where you should be falling for your specific product or demographic or location varos is the tool that I use to make sure that my brands are within the Benchmark essentially and then the next six metrics that I really like looking at here are your unique outbound click-through rate now this is essentially just a click-through rate but I like looking at unique outbound because this is the one that actually looks at how many individual users are clicking through in actually going through to your landing page if you look at just the average click-through metric you are actually looking at people who click on your ad go nowhere click on your ad and end up going to the profile or click on your ad and don't actually make it to the landing page this is the purest click-through rate which is why I really like to follow this one and again if you're looking for that type of benchmarking data to know what is a good click-through rate that's something that varos can really help out with and then I have CPC now there isn't a CPC for Unique outbound click through rate essentially so I look at the next best one which is cost per link click which is just essentially going to tell me hey for someone to click on the link that goes to the landing page what's the average cost of getting someone to click on that link then after that we're going to have the hook rate now this is actually something that is not already inside of ads manager you actually have to add this as a custom metric I am going to show you the exact formula for that later on in this video but essentially What The Hook rate shows us is hey when looking at video creative only what percentage of people actually watched the first three seconds of that video now this can really help show if you are targeting the right people by using the right type of messaging and creative and visuals inside of the first 3 seconds of your video ads so we can see here that we actually have a few differences right and of course we don't have data for this top one because that was actually an image ad there is no equivalent unfortunately for a hook rate or a hold rate for image ads the only thing that we have really is click-through rate and your click-through rate isn't always going to be an amazing indicator of great performing creative because now that the targeting on meta ads is primarily Broad sometimes you were going to see lower clickthrough rates because we were just hitting a much broader audience instead of the more concentrated audiences where we would see those more inflated clickthrough rates so your whole rate is similar to your hook rate and it's going to tell you one of two things it's either going to tell you the percentage of people who watch the first 15 seconds of your ad or if your ad is under 15 seconds long it's going to show you what percentage of people actually just watched the entire thing now I like being able to look at hold rate and then also cross analyzing that with the video average play time because often times that I will find that if we just look at one or the other if you have really long video ad creatives like you have you know maybe ones that are a minute or a minute and a half versus ones that are 30 seconds sometimes your average video play time will look a lot longer I find that it's a much purer metric because we're really able to zero in in on ad creative that retained people past 3 seconds instead of just looking at that average video play time which again can be conflated now the last metric that I really like to look at is post shares which just essentially says hey how many times was this ad shared organically now the reason why I like to track this is because on the organic social media side meta has actually said multiple times that the number one metric that they have for success is sharable content so how many people are sharing that piece of content to stories or even sharing that in the DMS so that's something I also really like to track on the ad buying side and that's my dashboard setup I really like to keep this as simple as possible I really just want to look at the metrics that are most important to number one being able to determine what is working and two why potentially it is working but more on that in a bit so I'm going to be honest I actually do a lot of my analysis inside of motion MO is the creative strategy tool it's what I use to analyze all of my creatives and honestly build reporting that helps me get my Brands to the next level in fact there's a brand that I work with that spends millions of dollars per month on meta ads and we have several creative team members and departments and so many moving pieces and motion has really been imperative to our success and sharing data that actually moves the needle for instance every single week I look at this report that shows me the top top performing creatives for the week automatically this is something that I also share with the broader team now I am going to spend the next few sections of this video inside of ads manager but if you want to take a look at the advanced reports that I'm using inside of motion be sure to skip to this part of the video it's really advanced stuff and worth even beginners looking at okay let's get into it how to analyze data inside of ads manager now step number one is actually a mind shift change that I need everyone to get on the same page for so a mistake I often see is that people try to optimize and analyze at the same time but really the analysis needs to be done first before you start tweaking things so take a deep breath and focus on one thing at a time and I'm going to simplify this especially for the beginners when you are looking at all of this data inside of your ads manager you are actually only trying to answer two questions number one what is working what is working inside of your ad account what creatives are working what campaigns are working what's working and number two a little bit more complicated but why is it working these two questions and the answer for these two questions will ultimately guide every single thing that you do inside of ads manager and that brings us to step number two which is going to be analyzing your primary metrics versus your storytelling metrics so all of your metrics are going to fall into one of these two categories now your primary metrics are are going to tell you what is working and these are the only metrics that you should be using to optimize your account so these primary metrics are going to be things like your amount spend your purchases your cost per purchase and even your Ras and if you're doing lead generation of course then you are going to swap those results around for cost per lead or number of leads now these are the only things that you should be using to optimize your account so if you see oh this cost per purchase and these number of purchases are profitable for me I should increase the budget not looking at your secondary metrics now your secondary metrics are going to help illuminate potentially why something is working right so this is going to be your frequency your CPM so all of these metrics potentially could illuminate why potentially an ad creative is working or not working if you have a high CPM potentially that's saying hey this creative is costing too much to deliver which is why ultimately we're not able to get the type of costs that we want right maybe you're saying that your click-through rate is too low and your CPC is too high so people aren't ultimately clicking on that ad to go through to the landing page now what I will say is very often the most important storytelling metrics often comes down to video creative because we have a lot more data when looking at video creative right we're able to see hey how good did this creative do at actually hooking our audience or how good did this video do at maintaining and retaining that viewership and also ultimately on average how long was someone viewing that data so what I will say is video hook and video hold aren't automatically inside of ads manager this is a custom metric that you have to add in but I do have the formula right here for you so that you can add those in and again the the thing that's you know sort of frustrating is this is only going to be available for your video creatives not necessarily your images but I do have more data that we can look at later on in this video that are going to help illuminate a lot more as to why certain creatives worked or didn't work but again this isn't necessarily data that you're going to get inside of ader but more on that in a bit so let's put all this data into action right and analyze a campaign that I worked on a few months ago okay this is an ASC campaign that we ran a number of months ago and I do want to point out actually I've seen a lot more success with ASC campaigns in the recent months if you have a lot more ad creative inside of them I've actually heard that the minimum number you should have in an ASC campaign for Optimal Performance is 20 so something to consider there now when I'm going into ads manager and I'm going to start analyzing things the first thing I like to do is actually sort highest to least amount spent so that I can really prioritize what is getting the most amount of spent and for this specific ad campaign we can actually see wow there is something that is very very clearly winning but let's take a step back for a second right let's first look at this ad campaign as a whole and this is something that you can do as well looking for the account level right so we can see that the amount spent was about 11k 525 website purchases 21. 9 cost per purchase so that's how much it was costing for us to acquire a customer and 525 purchases overall with a average row as of a 2. 77 and for this specific brand just looking at these internal ads manager metrics this was actually doing really really well for us so just looking at those metrics alone I would say hey this definitely qualifies for us to increase spend on this you know if we have already been increasing this steadily over the last 2 to three days by 20% maybe we can try increasing it even a little bit more but overall this campaign is working out pretty fabulously but most of it is being attributed to one ad right so we want to zero in on this specific ad and really get to the heart of why this is working right so we can see that this has spent well and llarge the bulk of the spend right so that's going to be about 75% we have a really strong cost per purchase of about $21.

50 and the purchase throw as is also within our Striking Distance we really want to see and scale anything above a two when looking at internal metrics now let's try and understand the story of potentially why this is working right we see the outbound clickthrough weight which honestly is pretty average for the account so there's not something super spectacular with the specific clickthrough rate sometimes I will see oh a specific ad creative is working really well because it has a high click-through rate but to be honest click-through rate isn't always a reliable metric to gauge performance on because a lot of times the audiences that your campaign or even just specific ad is targeting can be really broad so sometimes a low clickthrough rate is actually not a bad indicator of it being successful or not successful it could actually just be speaking directly to the right people and getting them to act instead of everyone else to act right and yeah when we're looking at the specific campaign this specific ad creative has definitely inflated the average but actually what we had saw in the ad account previously was the average hook rate was around 30% and the average hold rate was anywhere from 7 to 8 so this was almost double that which is an indicator of a really really strong creative now the real heart of why a specific ad creative performed or didn't perform that type of insight generally isn't in the data itself it's going to be in the ad creative right it's going to be in the messaging in the type of visuals and even the format that you're using now a question that I often get with people who are new to meta ads is they will look at ad creatives like these three right here that have better cost per purchases and even higher row ases and they'll ask me Dar why isn't meta putting more spend to these more profitable ads now this is actually something that meta has written about multiple times in the past called the breakdown effect now essentially what this means is that meta has determined through its algorithm that if it would push more spend to these specific ads that it actually wouldn't be as profitable sometimes media buyers trust this sometimes they don't to be honest I've tested it multiple times for myself in the past by trying to throttle more spend to these ad creatives and typically they don't perform as well for whatever reason meta has really determined that the actual winner for this specific campaign is this one so really it's going to be better for you to analyze what is happening at the ad creative level versus what is happening at these and what I will say what was interesting about our top performer is it was a pure educational play and it was actually just giving information about the specific product now my guidance for you is to not dwell a ton on what's working and why isn't it working I would actually suggest hey focus more on trends that you're noticing in your ad account specific m messaging and visuals and even ad formats that really seem to be moving the needle for you and figure that out and double down and pressure test those theories on things that seem to be working you don't need to know exactly why every single ad creative didn't work especially in the early days next up let's talk about using first party data right so your triple wh your North beams and Beyond so a question that I very often get is okay do I need triple wh do I need northbeam in order to advertise on meta ads and the simple answer is no but there are times that it's really worth it in fact a brand that I work with does use triple will to help optimize their campaigns I'm going to explain how they do that in a bit so ultimately my take on this is first party data tools like triple whale and northbeam are really only good for Brands who are starting to scale up quite a bit but to be honest many Brands don't need them at all and if you're just starting off then I absolutely would not recommend it ads manager is going to be sufficient enough for you the question you ultimately have to ask yourself is is attribution actually an issue for you or are you just primarily using meta ads to drive customer acquisition if that's the case then you don't need these tools I don't find that triple whale magically unlocks insights on a creative level unless a brand truly has multiple attribution channels that they're using and by multiple attribution channels I mean like are they investing into TV are they inves ing into podcast or influencer or even Google and I will say yeah with a brand that I work with we do use triple will because we have those multiple channels that we are investing into again though many Brands don't need it as manager alone is often enough to make solid optimization decisions and first- party tools are really only the most valuable when you're managing larger budgets and need Precision across multiple data sources so if you're feeling overwhelmed by the data my advice is to first Master ads manager and then you can begin to layer in tools like triple whale or northbeam when you start to scale up your budgets especially if you are starting to invest in additional channels okay now let's talk about how I am using motion for those bigger creative swings again motion isn't just a creative Analytics tool it's a tool for overall creative strategy it quickly helps me identify what works to spot patterns and iterate effectively and honestly just gives me the confidence that I need to take much bigger Crea swings that ultimately scale so here are a few of my favorite reports like we talked about the top performing creatives report I like to look at this on a weekly level but I'm also looking at it monthly to do those creative Retros with the brands that I work with also if I'm doing individual creative tests for Brands I like to create a motion report just for those individually so I can really zoom in and analyze what's working or not working about a specific creative test I also like to conduct a format analysis where I am looking to see at a high level hey what type of creative diversity does this account have and do we need to potentially invest into more images or more video or even carousels or catalog ads and then of course I like to dive into a more secondary format analysis so sometimes this can be Statics right we want to see what types of creative strategies are really working for Statics specifically if it's more testimonials or US versus them or even before and after or celebrity or Creator Statics same for videos we really want to zoom in and understand hey what types of video ads creative templates or formats are working so that we can easily recreate those especially when we're doing a new product launch or we're trying to make iterations another analysis that I really like to do is looking at agency partners so I work with a really big brand where we are actually managing multiple agency partners so we like to compare across agencies which agencies are actually moving the needle for us and sometimes we'll invest more in the agencies that are doing better for us increase scope increase retainers or even decide hey we want to move on from a certain partner and start investing in someone new we also like to take a look at what types of creators are working the best for us sometimes with certain brands I'll look at you know the celebrity programs and just see what types of celebrities we should reinvest in again or certain influencers or even down to ugc creators this type of comparison analysis is incredibly helpful so that we can look and see hm who should we invest in again or who should we find that is similar to the types of creators that are working for us of course you can make these types of reports inside of ads manager but I find that it is so much easier not only on myself to make these reports automatically in motion but also to share across teams that maybe are a little bit intimidated by ads manager okay now let's dive into some Advanced analytics and what we're actually going to zoom in on is specifically how I am analyzing creative for bigger impact in what I've noticed is that most people actually analyze their creatives the wrong way here's an example of how people will often analyze a creative test for me right so we'll look at something like this and say okay you know what version B was the winner it had a 1. 2 row as with a 1. 64 clickthrough rate the hook rate was about average at 21% hold rate also was average at a 7.