Success With Facebook Ads: How do You Measure it?

So you’ve gone ahead and launched a Facebook ad campaign – wonderful! You built an audience, selected your keywords, and chose your marketing objective. So what’s next? Now it’s time to look at the results and figure out if the ads were a success or not.

This is where trouble can arise because we each have our own vision of what success is and looks like, Luckily when it comes to the ads being placed, Facebook has their own definitive definitions that steer us in the right direction.

As we have discussed before, each marketing objective has its own set of purposes, and these purposes are what Facebook uses to measure success. Let’s take a look at the categories one more time.

Within each category are the subcategories that also have more targeted purposes. That’s the catch with Facebook ads – you need to be organized and know what you’re looking for or else you might get lost in the details. For this example, let’s examine the Traffic subcategory.

• Traffic
  •  Used for website traffic
  • Targets people most likely to click on links
  • Targets people most likely to interact with a website
  • Used to help increase overall website performance

If, for instance, your goal is to acquire more patients, this option is a good place to start. It allows people to take a look at your website, familiarize themselves with the brand, and eventually click that “make an appointment” button. 

When you’re running an ad campaign with a focus on Traffic, Facebook will look for link clicks and overall cost-per-click (CPC). This is how Facebook measures the success of the ads. If you placed $100 on a Traffic ad campaign and acquired 200 clicks, the overall CPC would be $0.50, meaning for every $0.50 cents spent, someone clicked on your ad. That is a great result to have! However, will that mean 200 individuals made an appointment? No, it won’t.

Ads take a while to build audiences. Running ads for one month won’t mean you will acquire many more patients, and neither will spending $1000 immediately. Ads and audiences take time to mature, but they are almost always worthwhile. The longer your online presence is consistent and strong, the higher the likelihood for attracting new patients and brand recognition becomes.

If your end goal is more patients, that’s great, but recognize you’ll need to set objectives to reach that goal. Facebook measures ad success via objectives, and this is how you should as well.

Look for how many people clicked on your link, how many people were reached, and how well your audience is doing. Finding success in those numbers will then aid you in reaching your ultimate goal of gaining more patients (if that is your main goal). It all takes time!

Looking for more info? Be sure to reach out to our Social Team and ask about our Facebook Ad service! 

—Adrian Vargas, Social Media Ad Specialist, Sesame Communications