Are you curious about which Facebook metrics you should be tracking in your marketing reports?
Every marketer knows the value Facebook can bring to your business. Whether you’re running paid ads or posting content from your site, Facebook is a great way to reach your target audience.
And yet, I keep seeing marketers track their social media KPIs the wrong way. They either don’t track the right metrics for their goals or, worse, they don’t track anything at all.
Instead, they simply look at their Facebook analytics for a quick glance to see if things are going “good” or “bad.”
But let’s be honest: you can do a whole lot better than just “good” or “bad.”
That’s why, in today’s post, we’re going to look at the best Facebook metrics to track in your marketing reports.
To make things a bit easier, we’re going to break things down into two categories:
- Metrics for Facebook Ads
- Metrics for Facebook Pages
That way you can be sure you’re getting the data you need to see the results you want. Let’s dive in!
The Best Facebook Metrics for Your Marketing Reports
Before we jump into which Facebook metrics you should be tracking, I want to take a moment to discuss another problem I see pretty frequently.
As the marketing world seems to add an endless number of channels to track, it can be difficult to create accurate marketing reports. This is one of the reasons why I’ve seen so many marketers get sloppy with their Facebook metrics.
It isn’t anything against Facebook, they’re just sloppy with their entire marketing report strategy. That’s one of the main reasons I built Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is the best marketing report builder on the market. That’s because I created this software to serve 2 crucial functions:
- Create marketing reports that quickly sync data from all your favorite marketing channels
- Keep things simple by sending reports directly to your team’s or clients’ inbox
With Metrics Watch, you have a drag and drop builder that lets you easily make marketing report with all your favorite tools. That means you can see the data from Google Analytics in the same place as you track your Facebook metrics.
But unlike other marketing report software, I don’t send reports in PDFs. Frankly, managing a year’s worth of PDFs can be hard enough for a small company. For agencies building reports for clients? It was just a nightmare.
And I also refused to make reports in a 3rd-party dashboard that required user roles and password sharing. Again, why bother with the extra step?
Instead, Metrics Watch gets all the data you need and sends it in a custom email with your logo and branding.
That way, you can get the data you need, when you need it. No fluff and no-nonsense.
That’s one of the reasons why onvista, a German stock trading company, decided to use Metrics Watch after testing 20+ other tools.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Enter your email below to download your free sample report today:
Now, let’s dive into which Facebook metrics you need to track.
1) Metrics to Track for Facebook Ads
Obviously, when you’ve put money behind Facebook ads (or have paid to boost your posts), you’re going to want to see a solid–and fairly immediate–ROI.
This way, you can demonstrate that the expense was worthwhile to your team.
You should also be keeping track of how your ads and other paid content perform on Facebook, so you can compare the success of campaigns and see what your target audience responds to best.
This will help you tailor future ads to generate as much revenue as possible.
Facebook gives you plenty of data to work with, but not every bit of information is necessary. And you certainly don’t want to include everything in your marketing report. Which begs the question: which Facebook metrics should you use to track paid ads?
When it comes to measuring how well your paid content is doing on Facebook, these are the main metrics to track and include in your reports:
a) Click-through-rate (CTR)
For paid content, views and likes aren’t enough. You want to know that your ads are sufficiently compelling for your prospective customer to take the next step and click through to your website.
Your CTR lets you track this – it’s the percentage of people who saw your post and were engaged enough to click the link to the next step in your sales funnel.
Not only does the CTR tell you whether your target audience responded well to your ad, but it can also help you to uncover issues further along your sales funnel. If you have a high CTR but a low conversion rate, this tells you one of two things: either your landing page needs some work, or your ads are attracting the wrong audience for your goals.
Either way, CTR is an invaluable Facebook metric to track for paid ads.
b) Cost per click (CPC) / Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Having people see your ad and then click through is great news. But you’ll also want to know how much those clicks are costing you. Facebook gives you two options for tracking this – cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM).
CPC, as the name implies, is the cost of your advert divided by the number of click-throughs. A lot of marketers prefer this metric because it corresponds to an action, rather than just the cost divided by the number of people who have seen your ad...
...which is what CPM measures. But don’t let that lead you to believe CPM is useless.
If you are looking to grow your brand awareness over driving sales, CPM might be more relevant. It depends on what the main goal of your ad campaign is.
Either way, you can find the information in Facebook’s Ad Manager.
CPC or CPM are worth tracking because they tell you 2 important things:
- How much your new leads or clicks are costing you
- How relevant your ads are to your target audience
A low CPC/CPM is a good indicator that your ad is relevant and engaging to your target audience. Facebook wants to keep its users happy, so it rewards relevant ads with a lower CPC/CPM rate and penalizes irrelevant (or bad) ads with a higher rate.
c) Conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of the people who arrive on your website from your Facebook ad who then take the action you intend – whether that’s buying a product, booking a call with your sales team, or signing up for a free trial.
This is important in measuring the success of your Facebook ad campaign for a few reasons.
First, it is a good metric to track your ROI – if you’ve paid to reach more people, you want to see that returned in sales. You can pretty much guarantee that any budget holders are going to want to see the conversion rate included as a metric in your marketing reports.
Second, the conversion rate tells you whether your landing page is converting potential customers effectively or if you need to make tweaks.
Finally, it indicates whether you are targeting the right audience for your products and services or not. If your conversion rate is low, but your landing page has previously performed well, your Facebook ad might be aimed at the wrong group of people.
Calculating your conversion rate successfully requires you to be able to track what people are doing once they arrive on your website.
The best way to do this is to use Google Analytics. Set your goals depending on your desired outcome, and then add UTM tags to the links you use for your Facebook ad campaigns. That way, you can track the success of each campaign against that goal.
2) Metrics to Track for Facebook Pages
It’s well known that Facebook isn’t a big fan of letting brands reach their audiences organically. They’d much rather you hand over some money to get your content in front of potential customers.
To be fair to Facebook, they’re running a business, not a charity. And they do at least provide marketers with some comprehensive tools to set up and manage paid content.
Even though your organic content may not reach as large a chunk of your following as you would like, that doesn’t mean that you should only post paid-for content. Brand awareness and engagement are still important, and you never know when one of your posts might inspire a new customer to sign up for your business.
Free content isn’t really free though – it still comes at the cost of your time, which means it costs money, too. So, it is important to keep track of these metrics to ensure you are making the best use of your limited resources.
a) Reach
Reach refers to the number of people who actually see your post. Sadly, this won’t be your full audience since only a small percentage will actually see what you post.
You can track your overall page reach but comparing the reach for individual posts also helps your see which content performs best. And comparing the reach for individual posts also helps you monitor the best time and day to post.
Facebook breaks down reach by organic or paid, so you can monitor reach for your paid content too. You can find it in Facebook’s Insights.
b) Engagement rate
Engagement is any kind of interaction users have with your post – that could include reactions, shares, comments, or click-throughs.
You can find the breakdown of your engagements per post in Facebook’s Insights. But as a raw number, it isn’t that useful. Instead, you can use engagements and reach together to work out the engagement rate for each post.
This means dividing the total number of engagements for the post by the total reach to discover what percentage of the people who saw the post actually engaged with it.
Engagement rate is a useful metric to discover trends in what your audience enjoys. And the more you know about what types of posts your audience responds to, the more you can tailor your content to them in the future.
This can be useful data when planning ad campaigns or deciding which posts to boost. If you know what works as organic content for your audience, you can create ads that really connect with them.
c) Click-through-rate (CTR)
Yep, we already covered CTR under ads. But it’s an important metric to track for your organic content, too. Posts with a high CTR are great news for your bottom-line, as you haven’t had to put money behind the posts to attract potential customers to your site.
Arguably, CTR is also a stronger indicator that your content is catching your audience’s attention than the overall engagement rate.
It takes just a second for someone to leave a reaction and often less than a minute for them to leave a comment. But clicking through is a good sign that they found your post compelling enough to want to know more.
Not every post will necessarily include a link. But for those that do, keeping track of the CTR lets you tweak your content to suit your audience.
You can discover how many people have clicked each post in Facebook’s Insights.
And that's it! These have been the Facebook metrics you need to track for paid ads and organic posts.
I hope you found this article helpful. If you did, you’d probably want to check out the following resources, too:
Those articles will have everything you need to improve your social media report building to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
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