Facebook and Instagram are the leading social media platforms used by marketers worldwide. If you’re running ad campaigns on these networks for your brand, it’s crucial to understand how to analyze them in Meta’s continuously evolving platforms. How can you tell if they’re paying off, or if they’re eating away at your marketing budget without any of that all-important return on investment (ROI)?
While social media advertising is a powerful form of online marketing with potentially high ROI, many business leaders carry misconceptions about the value paid social ads bring to their digital marketing strategy. The obvious benefits of social media campaigns are increased exposure and improved traffic. It’s knowing how to properly measure the performance of your social media ad campaigns that can then provide valuable insights for achieving results like lead generation, direct sales or bookings, and driving revenue.
So, how do you assess if your Meta Ads campaigns are earning their keep? Let’s dig into the “before, during, and after” of analyzing your Facebook and Instagram ad campaign strategy.
Before, Part 1: Understanding Your Meta Ad Campaign Objectives
As digital marketing expert Neil Patel puts it, success with social media advertising comes down to intent. And here’s where those misconceptions can come in again, because he’s not talking about a business’s intent to immediately capture lots of revenue off a social ad. Campaigns must align with the intent of the target audiences to be effective. For instance, someone who has never heard about your brand before is unlikely to convert when they come across a campaign running a discounted offer. As every marketer knows, you can’t send audiences straight to the bottom of the marketing funnel!
This means that when you’re outlining your objectives for your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, you need to start by asking yourself two questions:
- What do you want out of this campaign? Decide which phase of the marketing funnel to focus on: awareness, consideration, or purchase.
- Who is this campaign for? Think about your audience persona and the traits of your ideal customer who would engage with that marketing funnel stage.
Once you’ve determined these key factors, the rest of your Meta Ad campaign set-up should align with your answers. This includes selecting which metrics to track, audience targeting, and setting specific and realistic milestones to be your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It also includes your Creative, meaning the actual design of your ad such as format (photo versus video, for example), visuals, and messaging like your call-to-action (CTA).
Pro Tip: Really, your campaign should include all of these twice, since it’s recommended to be A/B testing your ad configurations for future campaign optimization. As we like to say here at Go Getter: “Always be testing!”
Expert Tip: When setting up your ad campaigns, Meta Ads Manager will ask you if you’d like to enable Meta AI’s help in making decisions around settings like creative design, daily budget, audience targeting, and placements (Instagram versus Facebook versus other Meta platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp). While Meta AI can be a helpful tool to assist your manual configurations or as an A/B test ad, we’ve found that it often just doesn’t understand your intentions well when letting it drive the campaign itself. In our experience, it’s best used for campaigns with goals around brand awareness and least useful for campaigns with sales objectives. Part of the reason for that is that the AI will try to keep users on Meta rather than optimizing for off-platform conversions like website visits. After all, as the property of a for-profit business, it’s ultimately programmed to benefit Meta, not you.
Before, Part 2: Audience Targeting for Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns
It’s all well and good to have your ad campaign’s audience persona outlined, but then you need to make sure your ad is actually reaching those audiences. Social media offers a broad market with over 4 billion users worldwide, of which more than 300 million are in the United States, so attracting users who will convert is more than simply putting an ad out there and hoping the right ones will find it.
You need to create custom target audiences of people for Meta to serve your ad to, beyond inputting just basic demographic data like location, age, and whether they’re already following your business’s Facebook or Instagram account. What are the interests and behaviors of your campaign’s audience persona that would make users more likely to resonate with your messaging and engage with your offer? There are options in the Meta Ad Manager for both on-platform and off-platform activity, like if they’ve ever watched one of your Instagram Reels or subscribed to your email newsletter from your website.
Pro Tip: Be mindful of any national or industry regulations overseeing your brand’s online operations, as there may be rules around audience targeting specifications such as age or gender, or if you’re allowed to enable AI features on your ad. Some common examples of affected industries include real estate, healthcare, finance, and beauty retailers.
During: Measuring Your Meta Ad Campaign Performance
From identifying your ad campaign objectives, you’ll be monitoring certain metrics to determine if your ad is performing well. We can break these metrics down into three categories regardless of which objectives you’ve outlined:
- Reach. Is your ad getting seen?
Now, “reach,” “views,” and “impressions” are all included in this category, as Meta defines them differently and sometimes changes which one their algorithms prioritize for different ad types. You’ll also want to look at more specific analytics, such as the demographics of those seeing your ad, in order to assess if your audience targeting configurations are too narrow or too broad.
- Engagement. Are people interacting with your ad?
Review which actions your campaign’s audience is taking on the ad. Inspect the ratio of users who look at your ad but scroll past versus those who both look and engage. Are most of the interactions following your CTA, or are most of them doing something different? There are many metrics you can learn from in this category about the implications of your campaign configuration choices.
- Conversions. How is this ad campaign working?
Track if your KPIs are being met. Check back in with your CTA results, and if those converts led to any other decisions from the user that you can track. For example, if your goal was to grow your social media follower base, did that happen and did those new followers also reshare the ad or click on the link in your profile to visit your website? These metrics will not only help you prepare more realistic benchmarks for similar campaigns in the future but can also tell you the story of your campaign for your analytics report.
Pro Tip: Measuring your ad campaign’s performance isn’t just something you do at the end of its scheduled runtime. Be checking on it throughout its lifespan so that you can tweak settings as needed, plus gain valuable insights into factors such as placement priority, run length, and daily ad spend.
After: Determining If Your Meta Ad Campaign Is Profitable
At the end of the day, you do need to justify your ad spend on a social media campaign. There are several metrics that can help calculate campaign results to determine its profitability. Common examples include:
- Purchase conversion value: This refers to the value of purchases made due to your advertising. It’s calculated as follows: Purchase Conversion Value = Number of Items Sold x Cost of Item. This value guides you in calculating the return on ad spend.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): This refers to the revenue you generate for every dollar you spend on advertising. It’s calculated as follows: ROAS = Revenue ÷ Ad Spend. If the ROAS is greater than one, this means the campaign was profitable.
- Earnings per Lead (EPL): This refers to the revenue generated from every lead and is calculated as follows: EPL = Revenue ÷ Number of Leads
- Cost per Lead (CPL): This refers to the amount spent to generate a lead. It’s calculated as: Cost per Lead = Ad Spend ÷ Number of Leads
- Cost per Purchase: This is the amount of ad expense for every purchase. Cost of purchase can be used to calculate ROAS and profit margin as follows: ROAS = Purchase Conversion Value ÷ Cost per Purchase; Profit Margin = Product price – Cost per Purchase
Just remember, your Meta ad campaign “paying off” may not be about fiscal earnings. It all depends on your objectives, both for the short term of the campaign and your long-term digital marketing strategies. Spending money on a Facebook or Instagram ad campaign can reap many different benefits such as elevating your business’s reputation, growing your brand’s community, and yes, generating leads. Plus, all the education about your audience and strategy you’ll gain. It’s like we always say here at Go Getter: “Always be leaning!”
By implementing paid social media ad campaigns, your brand can maximize visibility and encourage leads to become lifetime customers. And with Meta’s Ads Manager system, it seems like running paid ads on Facebook or Instagram should be easy – there are billions of users, and they make setting up an ad simple. But without a robust strategy and reasonable expectations behind it, a Meta Ads campaign can start to drain your social media advertising budget.
If your brand needs more help to maximize your social media advertising spend with data-driven campaigns that deliver measurable results and growth, please Contact Us. At Go Getter Marketing Group, we offer Paid Ads creation and management services as well as Marketing Workshops & Trainings curated to empower your marketing team’s knowledge and skills.
