Facebook Marketing For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon
After you create an ad with Facebook, you want to keep tabs on that ad’s performance. Facebook’s Ads Manager is your personalized hub where you can view all your ad activities and edit ad campaigns.

On this screen, you see how Ads Manager is organized. It has four tabs:

  • Account Overview: This tab gives you a big-picture look at how all your ads are doing.
  • Campaigns: At the campaign level, you can see how a particular campaign is performing.
  • Ad sets: The ad sets level shows you a summary of the performance of your ad sets (the ads you grouped together).
  • Ads: This tab shows you how a specific ad is performing.
In the top-right corner of this page, you can select the date range for which you’d like to view data. You can also pause the ad, edit the budget, or change the dates for the ad in the top-left corner of this page using the icons on the right.

Looking at your Facebook account overview

Click the Account Overview tab. (You have to scroll down to see all the screens in this view.)

In the upper-right corner, this screen shows you the overall ad performance based on the time frame you chose.

Here you see charts for four measures. In this case, the measures are Link Clicks, Reach, Amount Spent, and Impressions. If you click each section, you see a drop-down menu that lets you choose other options related to that measure. In this way, you can choose exactly what metrics you want to see, giving you an easy way to customize your data.

As you scroll down to the next screen, you see an accounting of your ads by objective. As you may recall, when you set up your ads, you had to select an objective. This screen gives you a good idea as to how well you reached your objective based on the money you spent.

To see more data about each objective, click the link under each objective.

Next, you see how your ads performed with regard to age and gender. You can also see age and gender separately broken out. Notice that the drop-down menus allow you to change the measures by which you analyze this data.

To the right of the age and gender charts, you see a time analysis that tells you what time your metric occurred. Note that you can click the two drop-down menus to select other measures to track on a timeline.

Next, you see data broken out by location. You can use the radio buttons to select data by the categories of Country, Region, or DMA Region (Designated Market Area regions, which are used by Nielsen to map U.S. regions based on television viewing). This data gives you a very clear idea of where in the world your ads are viewed.

Viewing performance data on Facebook

You can view your data for each campaign. Facebook does a good job of balancing the Ads Manager’s ease of use with powerful sorting features.

The Campaigns tab features the most important data on your ad’s performance. You can view the following information:

  • Campaign name: The name you created for your ad(s).
  • Delivery: Tells you whether the ad is running.
  • Results: The number of actions as a result of your ad. The action will be based on the objective that you choose.
  • Reach: The number of people you can reach.
  • Impressions: The number of times your ads were shown.
  • Cost per Result: The average price paid for each action based on your objective.
  • Amount Spent: The estimated total amount you spent on an ad.
  • Ends: The date your campaign ends.

Viewing Facebook campaign details

To view campaign details, simply click the chart icon under the campaign name. On the resulting screen, you see graphs and other details about that campaign.

You have to hover your mouse over the campaign name to see the chart icon appear.

What you see on your screen will vary depending on the ad sets you have created.

On the left side of the page, you see the Performance data in the following categories: Link Clicks, People Reached, and Amount Spent. Clicking the Demographics link shows you your audience with regard to age and gender. Note that you can click the drop-down menus to view other metrics categorized by age and gender.

If you click the Placement link, you see what platform the ad was shown on. In this case, the ad was shown on Facebook. To the right of the screen is a drop-down menu that shows you the device type your ad appeared on.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Stephanie Diamond is a marketing thought leader with 20+ years of experience building profits for both small business and multibillion dollar corporations. She is the founder of Digital Media Works, Inc. John Haydon owns Inbound Zombie, a consultancy that provides nonprofits with strategic training about Facebook.

This article can be found in the category: