Buying Facebook engagement ads can be a great way of improving brand awareness through Social Media. Measuring the success of your Facebook engagement ads can be quite tricky, especially if you’re trying to determine the ROI or Value of your engagement ads.
This blog will tell you how to measure your Facebook engagement ads properly, what to look for and how you can use contextual insights to get the most out of your data.
Facebook engagement ads – why should you buy for engagement?
Because Facebook will optimise your ads to maximise the amount of engagements you get from your target audience, they can be a great way of landing a key brand or product message.
If your ads are generating more Facebook engagements (Likes, Comments, Shares) then there’s a higher chance they will be seen by the friend’s of your target audience.
This will increase the reach & visibility of your Facebook ads.
Getting more engagements in the first group of people who see your ad will also determine your Relevance Score. This is a score your Facebook ads get after they’ve reached 1,000 users. It determines the relevance of your ad to your target audience which has a big impact on how expensive your ad will be to run.
It sounds obvious but making your Paid Facebook content as engaging as possible is really important and isn’t just about ensuring you have loads of Likes each month.
How can I improve my Facebook engagement ads
If you understand how to measure your Facebook engagement ads, you can improve them.
When measuring the success of your Facebook engagement ads, you need to be sure that you’re looking at the right data.
Measuring your Facebook engagements is best done when you remove video views from the equation. We’ll be writing a separate piece on how to measure video views so don’t worry if you’ve heavily invested in video content recently.
Fortunately, there is a very easy way to just measure Facebook engagements. If you head to Business Managerand then Ads Manager. You will need to add “Post Engagements” to the data that you’re looking at.
To do this:
- Click customise columns
- Click Engagement on the left hand column
- Tick the “Post Engagements” box
- Click apply
Post Engagements on Facebook ads measures the total actions that have been taken on your ads without measuring views.
While video views are important, they can often dominate and skew comparisons with non-video ads. So Post Engagements can be the best metric to use when measuring the effectiveness of your Facebook engagement ads.
That way you can see how engaging your ads were as a total, as well as the breakdown of these engagements through metrics like (well) Likes, Comments, Shares and Clicks.
Applying context to Post Engagements
Measuring Post Engagements and elements such as Comments & Likes are important. However, so many advertisers make a big mistake of just measuring the total number going up & down.
Aka this post got more/less engagements than this one; this month’s posts got more/less engagements than last month etc. etc. etc.
When you bundle up your Engagements into one number or use a metric like an Engagement Rate (Engagements / (Impressions/100) you lose all sense of who those engagements were created against.
This is why it’s so important to add context on to the ads and campaigns you run.
Context is king
Observe
Campaign A targeted existing customers and generated:
- 100,000 Impressions
- 10,000 Post Engagements:
- 8,000 Clicks
- 1,000 Likes
- 500 Comments
- 500 Shares
- 10% Engagement Rate
If you bundle these stats up like the above, can you determine whether the campaign was a success? Can you tell what you should do differently to improve? Should you do it again?
The answer is of course uncertain. But what if you were to add a bit of context to this data?
Campaign A targeted existing customers and generated:
Men
- Impressions – 35,000
- Engagements – 6,500
- Clicks – 5,500
- Likes – 500
- Comments – 250
- Shares – 250
- Engagement Rate – 18%
Women
- Impressions – 65,000
- Engagements – 3,500
- Clicks – 2,500
- Likes – 500
- Comments – 250
- Shares – 250
- Engagement Rate – 5%
A tiny bit of context can show you that men engaged in higher volumes than women. Women indeed were shown the ad nearly twice as much as men but engaged 12% when shown it.
So looking at the questions above:
- Was the campaign a success? Yes, if engaging men was the objective
- What should you differently? Increase spend towards men and create more male focused content
- Should you do it again? Yes, if men are your target demographic. If women are, you might need to rethink the approach
Without too much effort, your data now generates insights that can show you how to improve your Facebook engagement ads and ads in general.
All thanks to a little bit of context.
Please contact us for help with Facebook engagement ad campaigns.
