How To Analyse Facebook Ads The RIGHT Way

I've generated more than $200 million in sales directly from Facebook and Instagram ads for our clients over the past 9 years and during that time my team and I have worked out the best way to analyze Facebook ads data to significantly improve results and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how we do it okay so let me start by showing you the metrics that we actually track what data points do we look at what matters what doesn't matter and and we will go from there so I'm in ads manager I'm in one of our Facebook ad accounts that we actually use to retarget for our own products and services this campaign specifically that we're talking about is for our Facebook ads Mastery product I'll explain more about that um in a little bit um we're going to use this as the example campaign to show you the data points um that we use and how we make decisions around analyzing campaigns that are live ads that are live and then optimizing working out uh what to do and how to improve results which is a hugely important part of Facebook ads you very much cannot get the best results from just creating a Facebook ad campaign throwing it out there and hoping the results are great you absolutely need to be digging into the data and improving things that's what I'm going to show you how to do okay so let me start by going through the columns that we actually take a look at and we've got um like a customized column preset uh here to have all the data that we like to look at um when we're going through and actively managing campaigns okay so First Column obviously other than the the name itself of the campaign the adset or ad we've got delivery um and then we've got actions actions is sort of a shortcut within the column section referring to the new opportunity score feature um so it's showing here that there are three plus available points that we could uh optimize uh within this ad set to to get better results if you want to know more about opportunity score that's not what this video is about I'll include a link in the video description to another video that shows you all the details around this new feature it's really good by the way I recommend you do it but you do want there you do want an actions column in there now that it's available because it reminds you and shows you oh there are some optimization actions that we may or may not want to take um available that meta is recommending then we've got budget you can see here it just says using campaign budget this campaign has got one adset so it really doesn't make any difference whether you're using CBO or AO whether you're setting the budget at the campaign level adset level a lot of people will tell you differently and it does matter but if you got one adset it just doesn't make any difference uh but we got budget in there cuz that's useful and then we've got amount spent um so we spent over just over £2,000 on this campaign it's been running for you know we've got the time frame set to maximum I think this has been running for 60 days something along those lines the next column is purchases now with this campaign that is what we are optimizing for we're are trying to get purchases for our Facebook ads Mastery product um but I should say that this column here doesn't always want to purchases this wants to be whatever conversion event it is that you are optimizing for after amount spent so if you're optimizing for leads put leads in here if you're optimizing for complete registrations put that in there instead okay but we've got purchases because that's what we're optimizing for here then we've got cost per purchase very useful metric to be able to see cost for purchase and when I get to the next stage and we start looking at various different components and comparing them that is one of the most important metrics possible after that we've got purchase conversion value now for some reason this isn't feeding through it was feeding through when I literally did the prep for this video it's not feeding through now and I thought about using a different example but I actually thought this was an interesting thing for me to mention because um ad manager is buggy and these things do happen I think it's quite useful for you guys going through this to be like oh every now and then that happens to me so this had purchase conversion value data there um it doesn't now but you don't really need it for the purpose of this video what I want to to just leave it in there to demonstrate that this happens but also explain what's going on here right so um the conversion value on the Facebook Master product is £97 per month right so in terms of you could get a sense for for what that's going to look like in terms of what we're paying you know would we pay £23 cost per purchase to acquire a customer that's worth £97 per month uh absolutely that's a that's a fantastic R uh when you factor in lifetime value um but yeah you want your purch conversion value in there if you are optimizing for purchases if you're optimizing for leads something else it's not really going to apply and then we've got purchase return anouncement so basically what's your row ass um and again again because this number isn't feeding through it's not creating a rows calculation uh to be fair when you've got a product like this that bills monthly the rows calculation that you see within your Facebook ad account is not going to be that accurate because it might just include the first transaction so let's say 97 on average with a 23 cost per purchase we're looking at about 4X RS but that's only on the first transaction right we know that our actual return on ad spend is way better than that you're probably looking at more like 20 xros um cuz people are going to stick around for uh a number of months uh we don't exactly know how many because Facebook as Master product is pretty new so we haven't had it live for a year or two years to see if people will stick around that long yet then we've got reach Impressions and frequency and I like to put these three together because they tell a story um of of how the ad adet or campaign um is performing so reach is simply the amount of accounts the amount of different people that your ads have been put in front of we've got 35,000 there Impressions is how many times an ad was put in front of someone so you can see how there's a difference there and then you calculate the frequency by dividing Impressions by reach and that gives a frequency of 10. 43 now that means that of the people that have seen ads within this ad set um they've seen an ad just over 10 times which might seem like a really high amount but this is a retargeting campaign a retargeting ad set for one of our offers we know the people in this audience are very much engaged with my stuff they most of them will have watched uh my content for a long time so we can get away with a higher frequency in general if you're operating to cold audio is I don't like to see a frequency above 2. 5 which obviously much lower than that that's to cold audiences um if you're advertising to warm audiences you can usually get away with significantly higher frequencies than that but most businesses you don't really want to go above say a six to an eight that sort of range um but there are cases like with me where we can go up to a 12 we've been up to 16 frequency before and that's absolutely fine and and as we go through this and I will talk about frequency metrics that is a secondary metric that is not one of the things we will optimize for first we will optimize for that after we factored in other metrics that we'll uh that we'll go through but it's really important to keep an ey eye on frequency because if you do see an ad perform really well and then it starts to drop off and that coincides with the frequency going up okay you've probably got ad fatigue you need to introduce new creatives and there's things you can do to go about um tackling that okay then we've got cpms that's cost per thousand Impressions now this is the metric that's typically used to describe how expensive it is to advertise so we're paying a uh CPM of £73 which is really very good part of that is because we've got engaging ad creative in there unsurprisingly we know how to do that um and also it's to my warm audience so people are interested in my stuff um most businesses nowadays particularly advertising in the countries we're advertising in UK US Etc are going to see higher cpms than that cpms is again a secondary metric and I'm get I'm going to break down these more in a minute and how we might um interpret the data and apply it to campaigns but it is not something that you want to be stressed about or optimed in for it's more a metric of how expensive is Facebook and Instagram advertising over time how is the CPM changed over time and also how expensive is my industry certain industries is going to cost way more than others if you're advertising something in the the health and fitness space it's usually going to cost a lot less in terms of CPM than if you're advertising something that's B2B for example okay but we we'll dig into that a little bit more in a bit then we've got hook rate now hook rate is a custom metrics this is one that we've actually created and when I go into I'll show you how to set up your columns in a second I'll talk about cust metrics so the hook rate if I hover over it we'll be able to see what this is It's 3 second video plays divided by um the number of Impressions and then expressed as as a percentage so basically what percentage of people that saw our ad made it past 3 seconds watch 3 seconds of the video um effectively they were hooked uh now an 8.

38 across the ad set is decent in my mind anything above a 10 is is really quite good anything below a five is is quite poor so that's sort of typically what you're working with you will see massive variation and there's all sorts of um variance between Industries and things along those lines again B2B like what we're advertising 10 to be on the Lower Side other things tend to be be significantly higher I do like to have a look at video average play time uh that is not a custom metric that's one that's preset from meta and that is useful you do need to factor in the length of the video because you might think oh 2 seconds is terrible but in a lot of cases here we're advertising very short videos so it's like well actually if you think about it it's kind of Okay and like if you're having a really long video you would expect to see just longer average view time cuz some people are going to make it all the way through and that's really going to lift your average um so that's actually not such a useful metric for this campaign specifically but sometimes it is very useful for like take a look at things then we've got link clicks now it's really important that we've got link Clicks in there and you can get more specific with outbound link clicks or unique link clicks um I'm quite happy with link clicks um but what you don't want to be analyzing is clicks there's a difference between link clicks and clicks link clicks is clicks on the link that the that the ad is taking people to they they took the action that you most likely want them to take um clicks is going to include any click on the ad so if someone unmutes it if it's a video ad that's going to count as a click if someone clicks to see more button on Facebook in order to be able to see all of the primary text that's going to count as a click and these are things that you don't really want to be uh monitoring or optimizing for so we've got link clicks there to see how many people have actually clicked through to where we want to send them I always like to stick landing page views next to that to see the discrepancy rate between link clicks and landing page views um so you know we're looking at what 3,100 versus 2,300 20% maybe slightly more discrepancy between the two that's fine sometimes you'll see more than a 50% drop off between link clicks and landing page views and just explain the difference between the two link click is someone that actually clicked on a link landing pages they waited until the landing page loaded up um so if you do see a big discrepancy there there are all sorts of things you can read into that like is our landing page too slow to load are we getting a lot of accidental clicks which might be because you're running a traffic campaign and ads are showing on the Audience Network these are things that you can fix and knowing this sort of data is very useful then we've got CPC cost per click um sort of the the base metric of all digital marketing digital advertising has become far less important as the platforms have got more sophisticated but it's still a useful metric no again when you're entering in CPC make sure you get the cost per link click not the cost per click and then the same applies to click-through rate um you need to get the link click-through rate not the click-through rate because I have I get questions people all the time being like I've got a 4% click rate is that great I'm like well that's fantastic but it won't be link clicks that could include if you're running a carousel ad that could include people moving between it includes all sorts of uh various clicks uh and in general for link clickr rate anything above 1% is considered really quite good um 8. 86 here is okay anything below say a 7. 65 is is is normally pretty poor um so yeah so that those are the the data points that we are tracking and I'll show you how they Stack Up um in a minute the way by the way you can put together the exact same columns as I've got here and and so you have the exact same data that' be useful for you is you just come in here on columns and you can see I've got this called best column setup um which is uh what we're using as a default but there are like set what presets that you can use that met have put together performance engagement Etc I'd recommend creating your own what you do is you just come down you click on customize columns and then you can literally go through and you we've got 90 in here you can go in delete columns you can search for them uh on the left hand side you can just search at the top and and add those in or you can do this you can create a custom metric so remember how I mentioned that the hook rate was a custom metric so we're dividing 3 second video views by Impressions you can come up with all sorts of ones and get really sophisticated and there are case studies where we will do that because certain businesses need different things and we will look to implement this sort of thing so you can just go ahead and have a little play about with that but that very much is um an optional extra now in a second I'm going to show you how we use this data uh to make optimization decisions and improve results before I do that I want to quickly let you know a little bit more about Facebook ads Mastery the the example campaign that we're that we're talking about here so the Facebook ads Mastery product is my new course with community so it's brand new course material neverbe seen stuff that's not available um on YouTube or or anywhere else that me and my team have put together we're literally using it to to train on new staff we're we're very happy with the quality of the content and and think it's uh really good stuff I think you find it very valuable and the people who've been through so far have given us great feedback about it uh but it also comes with with a full community so we're using School we've got over 700 members in there already fantastic place where you could connect with like-minded Facebook advertisers Instagram advertisers business owners trying to do things me and my team are in there all the time answering questions we do live calls we do live trainings live q&as um there's all sorts of stuff so if you're interested there is a link in the description you can click on that hopefully I will see you on the inside with that said let's get back to the video okay so all the data that we've gathered here it does have its place that's why we're bothering to to track these metrics in the first place right but in the first instance so so for for the most part the two that I want you to base most of your optimization decisions around is either your cost per conversion or your return on ad spend and which one you use depends on your business so if you are optimizing for purchases and you have the return on ad spend data we would be basing our decisions around return on ad spend so if we've got one ad that's producing a 4X return on ad spend and another ad that's producing a 3X return on ad spend the 4X return ad SP ad is the one that we're going to want to put more budget behind we might turn off the one that's got a 3X return on ad Bend and that is irrespective of if the 3x Rell on ad spend ad has a better click-through rate or a better cost per click like the those are secondary metrics that don't matter anywhere near as much we want to optimize for return on ad spend the most important thing or if you're not optimizing for purchases and you're optimizing for say leads or complete registration or something like that um then you want to optimize for your cost per result there you know the best cost per lead the best cost per complete registration if that's as far down the sales funnel as you can accurately track those things matter the most when it comes to comparing various elements and a huge part of optimizing Facebook ad campaigns is just literally taking a look at the various elements you've created and going this is performing better than this I'm going to turn off this and I'm going to learn from this one and I'm going to create ads or ad sets to some extent that are similar to this one to test again and see if I can beat this one and get better performance over time that's a huge part of analyzing data optimizing and it's very simple very uh very sort of top level but there does a point where you want to dig into the metrics a little bit more and take a look at the secondary metrics and the reason why is to understand why so you know I said we're going to decide between add a and add B based on return on ad spend or cost per conversion but let's say one does have a 4X return on ad spend and one has a 3X Turnal ad spend uh we want to know why this one has a 4X Turnal ad spend so that we can uh make ads that are more like it we can work out what's worked and what doesn't and use that information to improve results over time now what we look at here Will depend on the business it will depend on the typee of ads we're running so I'm going to run through some examples that I've prepared of of the sort of logic that we might use um and examples of data so that you can understand how we would improve things and things like that okay so let's start with hook rate now in this campaign we're running video ads hook rate remember is the number of the percentage of people that watched at least three seconds of the video so how well were they hooked in the first place only really applies um to video ads So within this ad set we ran ads that were videos and hook rate might be one of the things that we look at to try and work out why are some ads performing better or worse than other so let's go ahead and and click in and we can see the various six ads we can see the data on what was spent purchases generated cost for purchase all that if we scroll over uh we get to hook rate we can see some big differences so firstly with hook rate just discount these two ads here with the really low hook rates they're both carousels um so it's not going to it's not comparing apples for apples in comparison to the other three that we have data for that are all ads and we can see here that we've got quite significantly different hook rates we've got a 10.

6 hook rate 13. 6 and 16. 2 now this is going to vary massively between businesses but I think if you've got a hook rate over 10% you're normally doing reasonably well anything below 5% is really quite poor um and then in between is is okay but again there are going to be businesses where those metrics are way way different but that's often what what I I might look to look at so what we can do now is we can take a look at these three video ads and be like well this one down here that is hooking people better in okay great so that hook works better than the hook for the other two video ads when we create new video ads let's start with the one we're using here now interestingly though when you scroll over and we look at the cost per purchase this ad is not actually performing as well when it comes to cost of purchase it's it's £28 versus 25 for this one up here and and 19 for this one here although that only generated three purchases just not much data so what that might tell us in this sort of scenario is okay this ad here is doing the best job of hooking people but this ad and this ad are doing a better job of getting people to convert so why don't we take this ad up the top the meat of the ad and pair it with the hook that we've got in this ad and then we might be able to benefit from the better performing elements in both that might be one of the things that we look at when it comes to hook through rate and that's an example of digging into the data and coming up with an actionable um Step that we could now take with a reasonable expectation of improving results we can also look at hook rate in conjunction with video average playtime now in this scenario because these are short videos this video average play time I don't think is very useful um but we might see for certain ads for example that the hook rate is nice and high like let's take this one at 16% but the video average play time would be significantly lower than the other video ads in which case that would really show us that either the hook is a little bit misleading and not connected enough to the rest of the ads or that the meat of this ad so after the hook the main the main content of the ad um is not as engaging it's not keeping as people there for longer so this is where when we dig into the into the secondary metrics we can start to pair them and start to put together a a picture and an understanding of what's going on here and combining both hook rate and with the end result and then hook rate with video average play time can help do that these are really short videos so the video average play time is all really low um and that's fine but in some scenarios you will get more uh interesting and more revealing data in these two columns if we running video ads we will also take a look at hook rate and combine that with the clicky rate link clicks remember okay so if we scroll over to our CTR and we see that certain ads have a better a really good hook rate but say a lower CTR so let's say they' got a hook rate of over 10% but a CTR of lower than 0.

5% which is really quite a low CTR um for link clicks then that might tell us that the ad is engaging it's grabbing people at the beginning but people aren't convinced enough to go ahead and click once they've watched the video ad so there might be two fixes for that either you just need to improve your Auer like the ad got their attention they were interested it was engaging but they got the offer they understood what it was and they were like I'm not really interested in this that could be a possibility or it could be that there's just not enough proof that you can deliver on what your promise is so if we ran an ad for our Facebook advertising services for example and we put something really engaging in the front and got a really good um hook rate but we weren't getting a lot of clicks it might be like okay we're putting this in front of say cold audiences they don't believe that we can deliver the results that we're talking about therefore we need to show more proof in our case we need to show more testimonials screenshots of client accounts things like that so that might be another way to fix it so you can diagnose okay we've got people to this stage but if they're just not clicking through they're not they're either not interested enough in the offer or they don't believe we can deliver on the promise well enough so that's what we then need to address in the next video ads that we create try and put in more proof or try and improve the offer so we can increase that click-through rate that might be something that we look to to diagnose in this scenario we've got decent click-through rates um on all three of these video ads it's not as um revealing in fact the click-through rates correlate somewhat with the hook rate so that doesn't really indicate that this is a problem in this scenario but I'm just trying to run you through example scenarios of what might happen there and when we might make that change so leaving hook rate behind um another metric that we might look at in conjunction with how everything's performing would be clickthrough rate so if we take a look at our clickr rate and we see it's good anything above 1% is decent if you're getting over say 2% you're doing really well remember this is link clicks not um all clicks uh because of very different things so let's say we're getting a good clickthrough rate a 1. 5 click-through rate or something for something really solid um but we're not people aren't actually converting so let's say we're advertising an e-commerce uh business we're advertising products directly and we're getting a conversion rate from people who have clicked to be able to convert that's like .