6 Facebook Data Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

Dustin Comm

Director of Media & Marketing for Good To Go Media.

So you’ve run a Facebook ad campaign, congratulations! Sometimes actually doing it is the hardest step in starting to market on Facebook. But now you are left with numbers that don’t add up, terms you don’t understand, and data you don’t know what to do with. As important as starting a campaign was, if you don’t understand what happened during the campaign, you’re missing out on great information to help you reach your target audience going forward.
 
But there are a myriad of ways to digest this data, multiple locations to find it, and sometimes it doesn’t quite make sense. What’s more frustrating, there isn’t a Facebook customer service center you can call to discuss your problem. Allow me to share some tidbits of experience to hopefully help you avoid confusion.

1. Know where to look. You might have started off looking at data on your page’s “Insights” tab, which will certainly give you a lot of great info about your page and activity. For many people, this is as detailed as they want to get. But if you’re unsatisfied with the amount of info you’re getting, make sure to check out Facebook’s Ads Manager (https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/home/) which opens up a whole new world of analytics and reporting. It’s a little more involved, but if you are needing to go deeper, it’s worth taking the time to learn. (Note: you’ll have to setup an Ad account to access Ads Manager.)
   
   
2. Set your time parameters. Can’t tell you how many times people have been looking through their data and nothing is adding up. “This can’t be right!” they say. Then they realize they are viewing reports on last week before the campaign started, or the lifetime of their ad account and the numbers are way too large. Make sure you’re seeing data from the time period you want.
   
   
3. Understand some metrics are “sampled” data. Sampling is a common practice in advertising. Instead of gathering every detail of info, sampling looks at a smaller portion and extrapolates the data out to the actual size. The smaller portion is considered to be a good representation of the larger population and provides similar results, in a fraction of the time. But if you don’t realize this and your numbers aren’t adding up, it can be extremely frustrating. Let’s say you have an ad with a total reach (“Reach” is the number of people who saw your ads at least once) of 50,000 people, but you’ve added up the numbers from each age category your ad was shown to and it comes out to 49,000. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the total reach numbers are a sample. The reason Facebook uses this method is to provide data to you as fast as possible.
   
   More info on sampling: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1691983057707189
   
   List of Facebook metrics that use sampling: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1691983057707189
   
   
4. You can’t make assumptions on definitions. As of the date of this post there are 292 ad terms in Facebook’s glossary. Some of the terms are pretty self-explanatory, while others aren’t what you think.
   
   For example, you might assume “Clicks (All)” means how many times people clicked on a link to go to your website, but it actually counts any kind of click on your ad. It might be a Like or a Love, a share, clicking a video to play sound, a Like Us button click, or any other number of clicks.
   
   This isn’t to be confused with “Link Clicks,” which counts the number of clicks on ad links to destinations either on or off Facebook. (Features within Facebook, websites, app stores, click to call, click to message, maps/directions, etc.)
    
   And muddying the waters further are “Outbound Clicks.” These are the number of clicks on links that take people off Facebook. By nature there is some overlap between Outbound Clicks and Link Clicks.
   
   As you can see, definitions aren’t always easily assumed, so make sure you’re familiar with the different variations of terms so you don’t get confused. I’ve included a smaller glossary of terms at the bottom for your reference, but here is the full glossary.
   
   
5. A “View” isn’t what you think. You see a video has 1 million Facebook views- wow! Most folks assume that means 1 million people watched the entire video. Not even close. Facebook counts a view as watching for 3 seconds. This includes videos that auto-play in a viewer’s News Feed as they’re scrolling past. A much smaller percentage of people actually watched all the way to the end. If you’re promoting a video for your church, make sure you filter the views down to more meaningful chunks, like 30-second views, 75%, or 95% views. These will tell you who truly watched your video.
   
   
6. Use a search engine. Sometimes when it’s just not making sense, you need to find people who have already struggled through what you’re going through. Very often a quick search will yield articles or forums on the exact issue you’re experiencing.

If you haven’t run an ad campaign yet, don’t let all this discourage you. Truly the best way to learn is to actually do the work and experience it for yourself. And with the support you have here, you can do it! If you have any mistakes you’ve made or lessons learned make sure to share below!

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Key Terms:

• Ad - A specific advertisement
  
• Ad set - An ad set is a group of ads that share the same budget, schedule, delivery optimization and targeting. Specific ads may differ slightly within the ad set to test variations.
  
• Audience - An audience is a group of people who can potentially see your Facebook ads. When choosing a target audience for your ad set, you can either create a new audience or use a saved audience.
  
• "Audience Network" - This is a network of mobile app and mobile web publishers who've been approved by Facebook to show ads in their apps.
  
• Button Clicks - The number of times people clicked the call-to-action button on your ad.
  
• Campaign - Contains ad sets and ads
  
• Clicks (All types) - The metric counts multiple types of clicks on your ad, including certain types of interactions with the ad container, links to other destinations, and links to expanded ad experiences. It includes: link clicks, Page visits, post reactions (like, love), comments, shares, clicking on the video/photo, campaign buttons (visit us or Like us)
  
• Conversions - Conversions are customer-completed actions, like purchases or adding to a cart on a website.
  
• CPC ("Cost Per Click" - All types) - The average cost for each click (all).
  
• Data Sampling - Sampling may be used on unique metrics. Most unique metrics also contain the word "unique" (ex, unique link clicks), which makes them easy to spot. Using sampling on these metrics allows our system to surface ad reporting metrics as quickly as possible. Sampling isn't used on non-unique metrics like impressions or clicks.
  
• Impressions - The number of times your ads were on screen. This may include multiple impressions per person.
  
• Link Clicks - The number of clicks on ad links to on or off Facebook-owned properties. (Websites, app stores, click to call, click to message, maps/directions, etc.)
  
• Objective - The objective you selected for your campaign. Your objective reflects the goal you want to achieve with your advertising. (Video views, website traffic, etc.)
  
• Organic Reach - Organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.
  
• Outbound Clicks - The number of clicks on links that take people off Facebook-owned properties. There is some overlap between Outbound Clicks and Link Clicks.
  
• Page Engagement - The total number of actions that people took on your Facebook Page and its posts, attributed to your ads. Page engagement counts interactions with your Facebook Page and its posts attributed to your ads. Page engagement can include actions such as liking your Page, loving a post, checking in to your location, clicking a link and more.
  
• Post Shares - The number of shares of your ads. People can share your ads or posts on their own or friends' Timelines, in groups and on their own Pages. The metric counts shares of your ads while they were running. It doesn't count engagement with the post after it's shared on another person's or Page's timeline.
  
• Potential Reach - Potential reach is an estimation of how many people are in an ad set's target audience. This estimation is a unique calculation by Facebook and isn't intended to align with third party calculations or population census data.
  
• Total Reach - Total reach is the number of unique people who saw your posts, regardless of where they saw it. If your post reaches a person organically and through an ad, that person will be included in organic reach, paid reach and total reach. Keep in mind that the sum of post reach won't equal total reach because Pages can reach people through content other than posts.
  
• 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. This metric is calculated using sampled data.
  
• Reaction - A Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry.
  
• Results - The number of times your ad achieved an outcome, based on the objective and settings you selected. (i.e. video views, link clicks, app downloads, etc)
  
• Social Impressions - The number of times your ads were viewed when displayed with social information. Social information shows when people's friends have engaged with or responded to your business content. This kind of reach can act as word-of-mouth for advertisers. Example: If 3 people each see an ad 2 times that shows 4 friends like a Page, it counts as 6 social impressions.
  
• Targeted Audience - Targeted audience is the number of people your targeting can reach. You'll see an estimate of this, like the estimate you see while creating an ad.
  
• Video Percentage Watched - The average percentage of your video that people watched.