Three Key Metrics to Understand Ad Performance

My fellow digital marketers – before we talk about Facebook performance metrics, please complete this short survey.

Question: Why do you create new Facebook ads?

1. Out of pure habit.
2. Our creative team never has enough work to do.
3. Because ABT – “Always Be Testing” – amiright?
4. It’s in the contract! We promised our client X new ad creatives per month!
5. We let our performance data be our guide.
6. None of the Above
7. All of the Above

If you selected “F” above, then congratulations! You’re a super-evolved digital marketer! Or…you’re just pretty good at kidding yourself. In reality, most of us are probably doing some combination of these different scenarios. 

And for good reason. Today’s digital agencies face the same age-old issue as the traditional Mad-Men agencies of yore: their media and creative teams are siloed. 

Too often, the media team will lob a request for “better” creative over to their design team without communicating why previous ads are (or are not) performing well. The creative team spends countless hours generating fresh new creative only to see that 99% of the time, the Facebook algorithm prefers the old, stale creative that was running before. But without an understanding of the performance, the feedback loop is never closed, and the creative team remains in the dark.

Bridging the Media-Creative Divide with Data

It’s time to bridge the divide between the media and creative teams, my friends. And – you guessed it – the material we’re building our bridge with is pure, raw, glorious data. It’s time for the media team to take the lead in the creative design process. Don’t worry – this doesn’t mean brushing up on Photoshop. This means leveling up your Facebook analytics skills!

Across the board, digital channels like Facebook are taking more and more optimization controls away from us advertisers. This means the creative design is becoming more important than ever before. Indeed, it may soon be one of the only optimization levers we have left as digital marketers. 

Three Key Facebook Metrics for Understanding Ad Performance

Here’s the good news: Facebook’s reporting metrics are now more sophisticated and insightful than ever. To name a few, here are three key Facebook metrics that will help you understand your ad’s performance. Collectively, they are known as Ad Relevance Diagnostics.

• Quality Ranking – Facebook wants its users to have a high-quality experience across their platform so they’ll return again and again and hang out for a while when they’re on Facebook. This goes for ads, too. Quality Ranking is Facebook’s measure of the perceived quality of your ad compared to other ads serving the same audience. In other words, if your ads aren’t giving Facebook users a high-quality experience, your ad impressions will fall (or may never gain volume in the first place).

• Engagement Rate Ranking – Essentially, Engagement Rate Ranking is how much engagement Facebook expects your ad to get, including clicks, reactions, comments, and shares. If Facebook believes your ad will get lower engagement compared to ads competing for your same audience, then they’ll be less inclined to serve your ad, resulting in fewer impressions and results.

• Conversion Rate Ranking – The Conversion Rate Ranking is a prediction of how likely someone is to complete your desired conversion goal after clicking on your ad compared to other ads competing for the same audience. If your landing page is slow, irrelevant or otherwise poor,  and your historical conversion rate is very low, then you will likely see a lower Conversion Rate Ranking. Facebook perceives a conversion as a sign that your customer has had a positive and useful experience after clicking on your ad. Therefore, Facebook will reward advertisers that achieve a high Conversion Rate Ranking by preferring and serving their ad more often.

In Facebook Ads Manager, you can pull all three of these metrics right into your performance dashboard at the ad level.

Source: Facebook Ads Manager

So, What’s Next?

If you want to learn how to put insights from these and other metrics into action, join me on Day 2 of Hero Conf. 2022. I’ll be presenting my session: Why Your Shiny New Facebook Creative Isn’t Performing and How to Fix It. 

I’ll show you how we go beyond the surface-level Facebook reports here at Effective Spend. You’ll learn how to analyze key Facebook performance metrics and how to translate your analysis into effective creative optimization. Here’s an overview of what we’ll cover:

• Perform platform and placement analysis to identify creative performance gaps
• Pull the right creative levers to boost key metrics like CTR, CPM, and CVR 
• Combat ad fatigue, increase ad relevance, and engagement
• Translate your data analysis into a sound creative optimization strategy 

Final Thoughts

With better creative analysis, direction, and testing methodology you can increase the ROI of your designer’s time, with a more predictable creative design process that has a higher success rate. 

Hope to see you in Austin on February 1st!