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When someone comes to us for first-time social media advice, a question we often hear is, “How do I know if it was worth it to promote my business with Facebook ads?”
Our response, “Did you run a Facebook Ad Campaign or did you only boost posts on your timeline?” Boosting posts for reactions, shares, and comments is fine, but if you want to increase sales or conversions from your Facebook ad efforts, then you need to offer up something so ‘well-priced’ that it’s practically a no-brainer for your target market to respond. Or, if your strategy is to increase awareness or website visits, you have to rely on great creative, copy, or a combination or the two to engage your market.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s move on to how to determine whether or not your Facebook ads really worked.

Facebook Ad Set Up

Setting up your Facebook ads can get kind of confusing. If you were in Power Editor thinking to yourself, “How does this even work?” you aren’t alone. Now, if you find yourself now asking, “What is Power Editor?!” don’t worry, you aren’t alone in that respect either.
Power Editor, if you haven’t used it, is where serious advertising happens. Power Editor lets you create custom audiences, advertise on Instagram, and test different versions of the same ad. You can customize your audience to include/exclude users based on age, location, relationship status, interests, page affinities (e.g. the user “likes” other pages similar to yours), occupation, income and so much more.
You don’t need a giant budget to advertise on Facebook either. Once you learn the ins-and-outs of creating target audiences, and A/B testing ads you can improve your accuracy—this results in lower costs per action (an indicator of a user interacting with your ad in some way).
Facebook makes a lot of money on amateur advertisers blindly using the ‘Boost Post’ function. Learning to use Power Editor can result in a much more effective use of your Facebook advertising budget.

Tracking and Measuring

To best track your Facebook ads and make changes based on performance, you really need to understand some key performance indicators Facebook provides through Ad Manager. For example, your CPC (Cost Per Click), Link Clicks, Reach, and Impressions are all great performance indicators, but there is so much more that are available to you. You can even create custom reports, evaluate by ad, compare certain ads, and change the dates for which you are analyzing. It’s very beneficial to take advantage of any online tutorials or courses to best help you maximize your ability to evaluate ad performance.
Beyond this, Facebook even allows you to install a tracking pixel on your website, if you are ultimately trying to drive traffic to your site or make sales. You can even take advantage of platforms such as Google Analytics to further track conversions and traffic to your website via Facebook and Instagram ads.

Final Result

You can really see how your ads performed by first going back to what type of ad campaign you were running. Facebook offers many different types of ads which all have different goals. For example, there are Traffic Ads, Conversion Ads, Lead Ads, etc. It all depends on what your original end goal was, which would lead you to select a specific ad or campaign type.
Next, try to work with a timeline. For example, let’s say you were running a Facebook ad campaign to get users to like your Business page. Your ad ran for two months—from August 1- September 30. What was your benchmark (starting number of Page likes on August 1)? How many likes did you have on October 1? If you saw a significant increase in the number of page likes (and you were running no other marketing campaigns intended to drive traffic to your Facebook page) then it’s likely all of these page likes came from your ad campaign.
Ultimately, the success of your Facebook advertising efforts will depend on your commitment to learning Facebook Power Editor and best practices (or partnering with an experienced agency that already has these skills). Interested in getting the most out of your next Facebook ad campaign? Contact Liquified Creative and leave your Facebook advertising in great hands. Marketing isn’t just one thing. It’s everything!