How to Get Started with Meta Ads Reporting

Ads Manager reporting is your primary measurement tool to understand the performance of your advertising campaigns and help you determine how your ads are contributing to your organization’s goals. Reporting can help you evaluate metrics such as reach and cost per actions, which will ultimately help you make informed decisions to optimize and improve your strategy.

When you open your reporting dashboard, check your date range first to ensure you’re looking at the appropriate time period. Then take a look at these key metrics, which will appear as default, and are important to assess for any campaign that you run:

• Results: The number of times your ad achieved an outcome, based on the objective and ad delivery optimization you selected.
• Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once. Reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people.
• Impressions: Measures how often your ads appeared on screen for your target audience.
• Cost per result: The ratio of total amount spent to number of results. This indicates how cost-efficiently you achieved the objectives you set in your ad campaign.

TIP: It’s important to note that for paid advertising, engagement metrics such as likes, comments and shares don’t predict these metrics or outcomes aligned with your campaign objectives and goals.

There are many more metrics than these available for all ad campaigns, so explore your options and customize the columns in your dashboard to see insights that may be more relevant for your analysis, such as:

• Estimated ad recall lift: An estimate of the number of additional people who may remember seeing your ads, if asked, within 2 days. This metric is only available for assets in the awareness and engagement objectives, and can help you understand if you should adjust your ad creative to make it more memorable or more easily associated with your organization and call to action.

• Video view metrics
  • Video average play time: The average time a video was played, including any time spent replaying the video for a single impression. This can help you understand if people made it far enough into your video to capture the main takeaway, and if you need to consider moving that message to earlier in the video when considering future creative development.
  • Video plays to a percentage of the video: The number of times your video was played to a certain percentage of its length. These will give you an idea of the drop-off rate at different points in your video, including 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95%, which can help you understand where your content may be losing people’s attention and if you should reconsider your video composition during future development.

• Landing page views: If your ad has a destination, this displays the number of times a click on an ad resulted in the successful loading of the web page. This helps you understand if your creative is compelling people to click through to learn more information or consider taking the intended action.

• Conversions: If your ad campaign goal is to drive fundraising donations or sign-ups to programs and initiatives, then you may be interested in the conversions metrics. These metrics can be tracked as standard events, custom conversions, or custom events, and their definitions fully depend on how you have configured your dataset. Once they are set-up to track the actions you care about, evaluating them for all of your campaigns will help you understand how people are interacting with your organization after they click on your ad.

TIP: If your creative is a video, look at the video metrics even if you aren’t optimizing for video views since those metrics can give you insight into overall effectiveness, which can help you to decide how to produce future videos in aiming to reach your goals. Similarly, look at all of the conversion metrics you are tracking through the marketing funnel, even if you aren’t optimizing for all of those events since those metrics can give you insight into where people may be dropping off in a post click experience to help you optimize the user flows to drive more conversions.

Breakdowns customize the way your information appears in reports. You can select:

• Levels, such as campaign name, ad set name and ad name.

• Time, including more detail by day, week, two-week and monthly periods.

• Delivery, including demographics, such as age, gender, country, region, and other details such as placements, which devices someone used, time of day by ad account, and time of day based on a viewer's time zone.

• Actions, such as conversion device, carousel card, reactions, video view type and video sound.

• Settings, such as objective, and also dynamic creative assets to see different images, videos, and call to actions.

TIP: Beware of the “breakdown effect,” which refers to the misinterpretation that our system shifts impressions and spending into underperforming ad sets, placements or ads. In reality, the system recognizes which placements may get more expensive if delivery there continues, and then pivots and shifts the budget to other placements in order to drive a more efficient average cost per result for the duration of the campaign. When using multiple ad sets, placements and ads, the best way to measure the efficiency of your campaign is by evaluating your results at the aggregate level.

There are a variety of features that make reporting data easier to manipulate, analyze, and share.

• In the top right of your reporting table there is an export button that allows you to export your current table view to .xlsx or .csv.

• With that same button you can also create a schedule to email exported campaign table data to yourself or others for easy and automated sharing.

• In the top right of your reporting table there is also an ads reporting button that will navigate you a UI where you have more options to visualize your data with different layouts including a pivot table, a trend line chart or a bar chart.

Spending time in Ads Manager to get familiar with the multitude of metrics available will enrich the insights you’re able to glean from this tool and empower you to make decisions to drive even greater performance for your organization from your Meta advertising campaigns.