KPIs to keep an eye on:
Cost Per Action (CPA)
This is the most important metric you should pay attention to. Don’t be afraid if your CPA is a bit too high on the first day as you just started your campaign. Always let campaigns run for a few days (minimum of two to three days), because Facebook needs data to optimize your campaigns. Just carefully calculate how much you can afford to spend on one purchase to break even or be profitable. This is a crucial part in making your business profitable. If you are not using ‘Automatic’ bidding (which I would recommend for you) you should check your bid daily to make sure it didn’t go too low. Facebook gives you the lowest and highest bids numbers as a guideline to stay competitive.
CTR
Keep an eye on this metric, especially when your campaign is running longer than two weeks. When your CTR starts to go down this could be the indication that your audience starts to skip your ad scrolling through their News Feed. The easiest way to solve this problem is to change the image of your ad. If your CTR is lower than 1% you should start to pay attention to that ad, monitor it closely for the next day. If this ad doesn’t bring any conversions turn it off. If it’s only converting a bit, you should change image of the ad. Also, this is a good metric to measure an ad’s performance even if there is no conversion. Keep in mind that you would get much lower CTR with Right Column ads, so you can keep them running even if CTR is 0.8%. Mobile News Feed ads are getting quite the same CTR as Desktop News Feed, so the same rules apply here as on the Desktop – if your CTR get’s lower than 1% closely monitor those ads and keep those ads, which CTR is greater than 2%.
Frequency
Frequency tells you how many times your ad was shown to the same user. If your campaign’s frequency is higher than 3, you should broaden your audience or try changing your ad’s image. If the frequency keeps getting higher (because your audience is quite small) you should change the deal you are promoting. Your customers/potential customers could get frustrated because you are showing them the same ad too many times. In this graph, you can see the correlation between frequency and your cost per result:
Ad Creation Tip: Don’t use ‘Automatic Placements’ or ‘Audience Network’ placements while creating your ad set. It is still being developed so you don’t have much control when targeting ads in these placements.
