Benard Kiplangat How do you know if your Facebook marketing strategy is profitable? That is if you are wasting your money and time on it.
Precisely, to get your answers, you should measure the impact of your Facebook Marketing Strategy. But how? That’s exactly what this article is all about: the five simple steps to assess your marketing strategy.
But before we dive deep into the specifics of these questions, let’s take one step backward and ask ourselves: why should we track our marketing strategy in the first place?
Why should you measure your Facebook Marketing Strategy?
Why is it essential to identify the finer details that show how your strategy is performing?
Every company has that strategy that they believe will do wonders. However, few can explain why or what makes it tick because they can’t measure it. Why?
Because when you know the details, you know where to put more effort and what to tweak to guarantee more success in your campaigns.
How to measure your Facebook Marketing Strategy
Assessing the impact of your Facebook Marketing Strategy is crucial for your campaigns to succeed. And to measure your strategy, follow the five steps below:
Step #1: Identify your strategy’s core objectives
The first step to take to measure your Facebook Marketing Strategy is to understand the core objectives that you aimed to achieve from your strategy. That is, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the main reasons you are running these Facebook campaigns?
Generally, profit-making is often considered the primary aim of any business. However, it is not the sole objective that your company may have to justify its existence — and especially why you are doing your marketing on Facebook.
Typical goals of a company may include:
- Get more traffic to your site
- Build brand awareness
- Reach out to more prospects
- Increase conversions
To know your progress towards your goal, you should understand where you are heading. If your objective is to achieve more profits for your company, you should measure the number of customers you gain from your strategy. If you need more users, your objective can be to increase your user base, and so on.
Many of your objectives are probably unique to your company. Therefore, identify them before measuring your marketing strategy because they determine what to measure.
Step #2: Understand the metrics for tracking your Strategy
Knowing which metrics to track and assess your progress towards the goals of your Facebook marketing strategy is the second step to measuring its performance.
Your key metrics or performance indicators for your Facebook campaigns will vary depending on your campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to increase conversions at a minimal cost, your key metrics may include click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.
There are several Facebook marketing metrics that you can track:
Reach
Post reach is another critical metric that you should measure in your campaigns. It is the total number of users who saw your content. The more you reach more people, the more you can gain prospects who you can turn into customers.
While many social media analytics tools can give you a comprehensive breakdown of your Post Reach, you will find your Reach data for each of your posts on Page Insights on Facebook.
Impressions
Often confused with Reach, Impressions are the total number of times users saw your content on Facebook. A user might see your ad three times, meaning your Post Reach will be one while the Impression is three.
Engagement
Post engagement on Facebook refers to the number of users interacting with your content. Interactions include clicks, reactions, shares, comments, and more on your Facebook posts.
Facebook often provides engagement metrics on the insights tab. However, if you need to calculate the engagement rates manually, here’s how you can do it:
- Get the number of interactions by adding up all the likes, comments, and shares of all the posts you want to measure.
- Next, divide interactions by the total number of your posts. Then divide it by the total Reach of the posts.
- Finally, multiply the results by 100 to get the percentage.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR on Facebook is the rate at which users click on links on your posts each time they see your content. It is measured by calculating the total number of clicks divided by the total impressions on the posts you want to measure and multiplying by 100 to get percentages.
Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Cost per thousand Impressions, or Cost Per Mille, is another essential metric you should measure closely, especially for your brand awareness campaigns.
CPM is the amount you pay for your Facebook advertisements when 1000 users view your sponsored content.
Cost per click (CPC)
Most of the campaigns you will run include finding leads for your business, getting more website visits, more app installs, etc. The cost of that single click to your site is the Cost Per Click.
CPC varies depending on what you want to accomplish with your links, so you should optimize your ads to get the most conversions at a pocket-friendly cost.
Step #3: Pick the right tools to measure your Strategy
Another crucial step you should not overlook when evaluating your strategy’s success is choosing the right tools. A tool can make or break your Facebook marketing evaluation. If you pick the wrong tool, you may get inaccurate results that lead to misinformed decisions.
And if you make wrong decisions based on inaccurate metric results, you pave the way for your business to fail. Consequently, you will lose the time and money you invested into the campaigns.
Facebook provides a set of tools that makes it easier for you to measure your performance. For example, you can use Facebook insights to view most of the metrics that we discussed above in your marketing campaigns.
Marketing APIs for reporting on Facebook are also available to help you track and measure your ad’s performance, statistics, and insights. If you do not need to dive into the technical aspects of APIs, third-party reporting tools can help you pull your Facebook data to your preferred destinations.
For example, Dataslayer provides an easy-to-use interface for tracking your Facebook marketing campaigns with 40+ other sources in Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, BigQuery, and Business Intelligence tools, like Power BI and Qlik.
Step #4: Visualize your Facebook Marketing data for effortless interpretation
With the new Meta ads reporting feature, you can interpret your marketing easily with visualizations on Facebook. This feature allows you to use your ads data to create trends and bar charts for analyzing your ad performance while increasing efficiency in the process.
Visualization in ads reporting on Facebook is still new and may not yet be available for everyone to use. It is also not yet perfect for streamlining your reporting workflow. Therefore, you still need to export your marketing data to third-party tools like Google Data Studio and Power BI to visualize, save, and share your visual insights with clients or stakeholders.
Data visualization can help you to understand and communicate your Facebook marketing data and insights. It allows you to see a clear picture of your target audience, see the trends that lead to success or failure, and assist you in identifying possible errors in your campaigns.
That way, planning, executing, and improving your Facebook marketing strategy becomes much more effortless.
Step #5: Incorporate the insights into your marketing strategy
The last step, which is the reason behind measuring your strategy, is to take action based on the evaluation insights of your Facebook marketing strategy. Assessing it allows you to see if performance objectives are met or not.
You get the evidence to know when your campaigns are heading in the right direction or if the campaigns need improvement. Then, based on the insights, you can decide if to discontinue your marketing strategy or improve it for better results.
Taking action that aligns with the changes or improvements that you should make will ultimately guarantee more success and reduce failures from your strategies.
If a campaign is doing well, you can increase your budget, extend campaigns to other marketing platforms, or apply the success factors to other underperforming campaigns.
But when your Facebook marketing strategy does not measure up to your expectations, you can take actions to discontinue it or those that can improve it. For example, to improve a campaign, you can analyze your audiences to ensure that your strategies offer the right benefits.
Start measuring your Facebook marketing strategy today with Dataslayer
Evaluating your Facebook marketing strategy is not as complicated as you might have thought. Nonetheless, it requires considerable effort to get it right. And that’s why Dataslayer is here for you: to automate your marketing reporting and make it easy for you to achieve your marketing goals.
Dataslayer allows you to centralize all your marketing data in Google Sheets and helps you to visualize your Facebook data with 40+ other marketing data sources In Google Data Studio.
