03May

Facebook’s Metrics Now Make More Sense

Have you ever looked at a Facebook analytics report and had to take the time to carefully decipher its results and ultimately meaning? In an effort to make Facebook’s analytics a bit more digestible, the platform has cleaned out 20 metrics that social media managers, marketers and business owners have found to be redundant or confusing.

In order to provide more clarity to those viewing their business page analytics, Facebook has also decided to provide clearer labels, for example some metrics will be labeled “estimated” or “in development.” This means that “estimated” metrics are based on sampling because they may be hard to precisely measure. For example, the estimated ad recall lift, which means number of people likely to remember your ad in two days. Additionally, “in development” means the metric is being tested or rolling, which means the results may change as Facebook changes their methodologies used in the metrics.

Below is a list of the top five metrics Facebook removed that might be relevant for you:

  1. Actions, People Taking Actions, Cost per Any Action: The Actions metrics are a mix of various actions and events, such as engagement, clicks or conversions. As Facebook introduces more actions that people can take on an ad, this metric becomes a less relevant signal for measuring business outcomes.
  2. Amount Spent Today: Facebook recommends using their dynamic date selector to see results for Today and compare results across different date ranges instead of using the Amount Spent Today metric. Select “Today” for the date range and use the Amount Spent metric to see how much money you’ve spent on your campaign starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) today.
  3. Button Clicks: The Button Clicks metric shows the number of times people clicked the call-to-action button on your ad. Button Clicks is redundant because these clicks are also either reflected in the Link Clicks metric or other distinct metrics like the Event Responses metric and the Offers Saved metric.
  4. Page Mentions, Cost per Page Mention: Page Mentions and Cost per Page Mention are outdated metrics and are not indicative of either positive or negative sentiment towards your brand. Facebook doesn’t recommend using Page Mentions to evaluate campaign performance. Instead, they recommend using the Page Likes metric or the Page Engagement metric, as those are more indicative of the success of a Page Likes campaign.
  5. Social Reach, Social Impressions, Social Clicks (All), Unique Social Clicks (All): Social metrics (Social Reach, Social Impressions, Social Clicks (All), Unique Social Clicks (All)) are outdated metrics that show the number of people who saw an ad when displayed with social information. The Social Reach metric isn’t vastly different from the Reach and Impressions metrics and the insights provided aren’t actionable, since advertisers don’t have control over when ads are/aren’t shown with social information. Facebook recommends using Reach instead of Social Reach, and using Impressions instead of Social Impressions to evaluate campaign performance.

To can view a full list of Facebook’s recently removed metrics here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelsey Fritz
Kelsey is the Marketing Coordinator at Commercial Web Services where she monitors the latest marketing advancements to better educate dealers on marketing trends that can further their business goals.

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