Its 2022 and Facebook marketing has changed a lot since its inception.
In the past, digital marketers had greater access to detailed targeting like specific household incomes, and greater Facebook pixel retargeting/remarketing capabilities, in addition, the content that saw success was more inspirational and less storytelling.
When evaluating your Facebook advertising strategy changes and trends will impact the Facebook ad tactics that we use.
In this post, we will cover the metrics and goals eCommerce businesses need to track to run successful Facebook ad campaigns.
Once you know the tracking framework for your Facebook advertising campaign, you will be able to evaluate any new Facebook ad strategy that comes your way.
Why You Should Care?
There are a million Facebook ad strategies that you can adopt. Ok, small exaggeration...
But in all seriousness, you can watch any number of Youtube videos, talk to any number of consultants, or read any number of blogs... hopefully, mine... and get any number of Facebook ad strategies, each promising you the moon.
Let's set up a scenario where your consultant or employee running your Facebook ads approaches you with a new Facebook advertising idea they just heard about.
Obviously, this is going to cause the growth of your business to explode exponentially and you need to get started today!
What framework do you use to determine if the Facebook ad strategy is viable for your business?
Determine Facebook Ad Strategy Before Launching The Facebook Ad Campaign
Before you talk with whoever is managing your Facebook ads. Let's establish your end goal and work back towards it.
For example, you need or want 100 leads.
What is your conversion rate from each source you collect those leads?
Moving up the funnel how many people see each source for collection?
Finally, what is the cost to get these users to your email or SMS collection source?
Working backward in this way can help us establish some rules before we start creating our next marketing funnel.
Buckets For Your Facebook Advertising Strategy
Luckily for us, there are only so many categories each Facebook ad strategy can fall into.
Generally, you will find that your Facebook ad strategy will fall into 1 of 3 buckets.
Traffic - Are you just getting started? Or looking to grow your retargeting audience. Your goal is traffic for retargeting.
Lead - Looking to grow your email or SMS list? You will want to track your email and SMS growth.
Sales - Looking to drive sales for your business. This is the objective for you.
Coincidently, the above three strategies fall into the campaign objectives provided to us in the Facebook ads manager.
Although, we could create a bucket for App promotion, engagement, or the awareness campaign objective we are not going to focus on those three objectives.
First, although some eCommerce stores may have an app to promote their items this is not generally the case so we are leaving this objective out.
Second, the brand awareness objective is generally used by established brands that are making north of 20-30 million in revenue.
Note: If you are the exception making less than 20-30 million and are seeing success from a sales perspective with brand awareness campaigns on Facebook. Please message me and let me know what your funnel is so I can feature you in my next post.
Lastly, I do not like the engagement objective. Unless you are using this objective for event responses it is very difficult to measure the impact of the engagement objective and I prefer not to use it.
METRICS! METRICS! METRICS! OH NO!
Perhaps thinking about metrics related to Facebook advertising strategies gives you anxiety.
Below we've created some rules of thumb that you can use to evaluate every Facebook ad strategy that is presented to you.
The framework we will be following is this.
An example scenario that you might encounter in your business
Facebook ads strategy goal to tackle that problem
General framework, that you can use as a baseline to evaluate all future Facebook ad strategies presented to you.
The two to three metrics that can, and should be applied to the Facebook ads strategy no matter the shape or form it takes.
If you don't know what a funnel is, it is a repeatable step-by-step process that drives sales.
An important feature of sales or marketing funnels is that the process is measured and tracked so that you can improve upon previous results.
Tracking Your Different Facebook Ad Strategies With UTM's
To track the traffic from our different campaigns we are going to use a UTM builder to build out our UTMs.
UTM's are campaign parameters that we add to the end of our link. These parameters allow tracking tools like Google Analytics to see where our traffic is coming from.
Below I added Facebook as my source, Cpc as my medium, and Traffic and my campaign name.
Scrolling down I can copy my link and use that in my Facebook ads.
Facebook Ads Strategy: Traffic Campaign Goal
Scenario: As Black Friday and Cyber Monday, are approaching you read up on how the cost to acquire new customers from Facebook and Instagram ads will increase dramatically during Q4.
Based on the number you are seeing you or a team member decide that you need to drive more qualified traffic to the site.
This will enable you to have a greater audience pool to retarget during Q4 and increase sales from new customers while keeping costs down.
General Framework For Tracking Facebook Traffic Campaigns
Every Facebook traffic campaign will use a variation of the framework above.
Revenue: First, set your revenue number for the month.
Facebook retargeting ads Conv. Rate: If you are not running remarketing ads to existing users or retargeting ads to potential customers, start that and get the Conv. Rate from retargeting potential customers.
Audience Pool: You can find your total audience pool by going to Audiences and looking at the estimated audience size.
If you haven't already be sure to create a Facebook custom audience for retargeting purposes. If you haven't created a custom audience yet. Here is a short guide on how to create a retargeting audience.
Your audience pools and retargeting revenue will determine the traffic you need to get to the site.
If you drive in visitors from your Facebook ads and you find you can scale your retargeting spend, this is a good signal to dive into the Facebook advertising strategy being used and scale it.
Traffic to site: For tracking visitors to your site, you can use Facebook or Google Analytics. Some people like taking the traffic number from the Facebook platform so that it aligns with their ad spend, while others prefer using Google Analytics so that they have similar numbers across different channels.
Traffic to site CTR: For the traffic that is coming from your Facebook campaign, we need to determine its CTR.
This is the percentage of people who click from your ad to your site.
Impressions: The last number we need to track is the impressions. Impressions are the total number of people who see your Facebook ad.
Metrics For Traffic Facebook Ad Campaigns: CPC And Facebook Retargeting Frequency
The two most important metrics to track when running a Facebook ads campaign for traffic are your CPC and Retargeting Frequency
CPC: Your CPC tells you it cost X to get one click to your site.
Comparing CPC Facebook ad performance from different ad campaigns is a good way to see which campaign is driving the cheapest traffic.
Keep in mind to also watch the revenue that comes from your Facebook ad campaign as the cheapest traffic doesn't always drive the most revenue.
Focusing your Facebook ad spend on the traffic that is bringing in visitors to your site at the cheapest cost is a key metric to track if you want to have success when creating your Facebook ad campaigns.
Frequency: Frequency can be found within your ads manager.
Watch your Frequency to see if by using the same budget your retargeting ads are being seen more or less by the new customers you are targeting.
If you see a higher frequency your audience pool is shrinking as your budget has fewer people who fall into your custom audience.
If you see a lower frequency your audience pool is growing as your budget is not covering your audience pool and is being stretched.
Ideally, you are looking for a frequency of between 3-4.
Facebook Ads Strategy: Lead Campaign Goal
Scenario: When looking at your marketing reports Email and SMS are your most profitable channels.
If x amount of emails or SMS drive x amount of revenue then growing your email or SMS list by 10% should increase the revenue from email or SMS by 10% as well.
To grow your list you decide to run a Facebook lead generation campaign using Facebook lead ads and test this against a landing page.
If you would like to learn more about lead ads you can read our guide on what Facebook lead ads are and how to create them.
General Framework For Tracking Facebook Lead Campaigns
Every Facebook lead strategy will use the following framework or a slight variation of it.
Sign Ups: First, we determine the total number of leads you need to collect from Email or SMS.
Landing Page + CTR: Then if you have a landing page(s) where you are collecting these leads figure out the conversion rate for this landing page or pages.
Facebook Ad CTR: Determine the CTR of the traffic coming from Facebook ads. Your CTR is the percentage of your target audience who see your Facebook ads and click on them.
Impressions: The number of people who see your ad.
Now we know how much traffic our Facebook ads need to drive to hit our sign-up goal and ultimately our revenue number.
You may use different Facebook ad strategies, like lead ads which would remove the landing page from above, or a thank you page, which would add another page to the above framework.
If this happens, you would track the additional page/step and the CTR.
The framework of removing a step is the same remove the page/step and the CTR.
Metrics For Facebook Lead Generation Ad Campaigns: CPC, Total Subscribers, And RPS
CPC: We've discussed the CPC metric already, we want to know how much it costs to get visitors to the site so that we can compare this to our revenue per subscriber (RPS)
Total Subscribers: By looking at total subscribers by channel I can get a good idea of which channel is bringing in the most subscribers.
This is helpful if you combine Facebook ads with another channel like Google ads.
You may find that Facebook ads bring in less traffic but the traffic ends up signing up to your email or SMS list at twice the rate of traffic from Google ads... or vice versa.
Revenue Per Subscriber (RPS): Knowing revenue per subscriber is important.
To find your RPS divide your total revenue by the subscribers from that same time frame.
RPS provides you with high-level insight into the value of each subscriber to your business.
By tracking your RPS and CPC you now have a grasp on if your revenue is greater than your costs.
Facebook Ads Strategy: Sales Campaign Goal
You need to hit your monthly revenue goal and decide to run paid ads to drive sales.
You decide to do this through paid advertising.
General Framework For Tracking Facebook Sales Campaigns
Every Facebook sales strategy will use the following framework.
Track this number to help you know your Facebook ad conversions rate to purchase, in addition to the percentage that goe on to add to cart.
Facebook CTR: Percentage of people that saw your Facebook ads and clicked to visit your site.
Product Description Page (PDP) Views: How many website visitors did you receive from your Facebook ads?
Track this number to help you know your Facebook ad conversion rate to purchase, in addition to the percentage that goes on to add to cart.
PDP CTR: What percentage of visitors who visit your site from Facebook ads add to cart.
Add to Carts: How many people added your product to their cart and thought about buying it?
ATC CTR: What percentage of add to carts from Facebook ads purchased?
Purchases: How many total purchases came from Facebook ads?
If you are interested in running a traffic campaign, your PDP views and add to carts, are excellent Facebook custom audiences to create for retargeting purposes.
Metrics For Facebook Sales Ad Campaigns: CPA, RoAS, And LTV
The metrics you should focus on for your sales campaign is a hotly debated topic.
The three metrics I would choose are CPA, RoAS, and LTV.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): You can find your CPA by dividing your total cost by your total sales.
Compare this to both your Average Order Value (AOV) and your Lifetime Value (LTV) to see if and when your ads are profitable.
Return on Ad Spend (RoAS): You can find your RoAS by dividing your total revenue by your total spend.
RoAS tells you if your ads are profitable. If you combine Facebook ads with other channels in your strategy you may find your RoAS is higher or lower based on the impact of the other channel on your Facebook ads.
Lifetime Value (LTV): Find your LTV by taking the total conversion value of your customers over a specific timeframe usually 30 or 60 days.
This metric is helpful as you may find that the CPA from Facebook ads is too high. However, when looking at your Facebook campaign results over the last 30-60 days the LTV revenue makes your Facebook ads RoAS scalable.
Note: You could use any of these numbers across your entire business or a specific channel. We are looking for channel-specific metrics.
We are looking to measure the results of our different Facebook campaign strategies, not the entire business results.
Facebook Ad Strategy Trends For 2022
Now that you know how to evaluate new Facebook ad strategies that are brought to you.
Let's dive into a couple of Facebook advertising strategies you can use to scale your Facebook campaigns.
Tell Your Story
One Facebook ad trend digital marketers are seeing today is a move toward brand storytelling. This is especially true with video ad content on mobile devices.
In the past marketers could get away with posting inspirational content to their Facebook page or on Instagram with ad copy that connected and could expect to see great results.
Today the rise of Tik Tok has changed the expectation for video content and hence your video ads.
Facebook users have come to expect the same storytelling they see on Tik Tok on other platforms.
This means that your mobile ads should be following the same format Facebook users are used to seeing on Tik Tok.
Changes In Facebook Privacy
Facebook is getting strict on the target audiences they allow you to target with detailed targeting in the ads manager.
There are two Facebook strategies for getting around this.
One is to use third-party tools to increase the targeting available to you when you go after cold traffic.
The second is to use shared custom audiences to create your target audience.
You can do this by collaborating with like-minded brands and having them share an audience from their business manager to yours.
This information is all protected, and no personal customer information is being shared.
If you would like to learn more on how to do this you can follow Facebook's guide.
Dive Into New Facebook Advertising Strategies With Confidence
You are now ready to hear another Facebook strategy pitch.
Remember the following.
The strategy I'm hearing will fall into one of my four campaign goals, which one does it fall into?
Based on the campaign goal which framework and metrics are important to track as a result?
Once you have the above figured out you can move forward with your strategy and build out the tactical pieces related to your ad creatives like determining your ad placement, creating ad copy, and building your actual Facebook ads.
Looking for help evaluating your Facebook ad Strategy? Feel free to book a time with me.
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