5 Facebook Ad Metrics Every SaaS Company Needs to Follow

FB-SaaS-MetricsDid you know that Facebook provides you with 203 different metrics to analyze your Ad Campaign. You obviously won’t be able to follow them all, and will need to choose a few that will show you what’s working and what’s not working in order to optimize your campaign in the most efficient manner. Over the past few years here at ZammoDigital we have managed hundreds of Facebook Campaigns for SaaS companies and would like to shed some light on the 5 most important metrics for a SaaS company in particular to follow.

Before I get into the details, let’s quickly go through what a vanity metric is (and why you want to avoid them). A vanity metric simply is an impressive sounding statistic that doesn’t provide all that much true value to the company. The best example of a vanity metric is the number Facebook fans you have. If the fans aren’t engaged with your brand, then they aren’t of any real value are they? It’s equivalent to a person who owns a clothing store in a mall that brags about how many people came into his store, yet sells none of his clothes.

Here are the 5 most important metrics your SaaS company needs to be paying attention to…

1. Registrations (Conversions)

Registrations show you the number of people who clicked on your ad and then went on to sign up for an account on your site. Registrations are by far the most important metric for a SaaS company. You will need to follow up on these registrations outside of Facebook to check the quality. Are these people actually using your product and going on to upgrade to your premium product or are they signing up and dropping off.

Be sure to segment your leads to track the quality of new signups from different audiences and ad creatives.

Pro Tip – Place the conversion pixel on the LP (landing page) that someone is transferred to after a sign up or purchase on your website. This will help you make the Lookalike Audience that has helped us find a significant amount of new sign ups for our SaaS clients.

2. Cost per Registration (Conversion)

Cost per Registration (CPA or cost per action) shows you how much you are paying for each signup. Before you start your campaign you should make a clear goal of how much you’re willing to pay for a registration, as well as a maximum amount that will be a red flag for you too make a serious change or cancel the campaign. This range will be a guiding compass for your campaign showing you when to make a change like increasing the budget if the CPA is low, and when to cancel or change your campaign when the CPA passes your maximum limit.

When setting a target CPA, keep in mind that the Long Term Value (LTV) of leads from different marketing channels can vary dramatically. As you move forward, you should track the LTV of leads from Facebook and update your target CPA accordingly.

3.  Clicks and Website Clicks

Website Clicks show you clicks on your ad that lead the person off Facebook (ex: someone clicks Sign Up on your ad and goes to your website).

Clicks show you Website Clicks as well as clicks on other parts of your ad, any type of click you can think of (ex: someone clicks like, clicks on the image, comments, shares).

Since Clicks include Website Clicks, your ad may report more Clicks than Website Clicks. However, if someone sees your ad and doesn’t click it, but then navigates to your website via a link elsewhere on Facebook within the attribution window for view-through conversions, Facebook will register a Website Click, but not a Click. In this case, your ad may have more Website Clicks than Clicks.

Thus, Website Clicks count the total number of times your ad is influencing traffic to that URL. The reason Facebook measures Website Clicks this way is to show the full impact your ad has had.

4. Click Through Rate (CTR)

The click through rate shows you the percentage of people that click your ad out of all the people that saw your ad. CTR is a good indicator of whether people are interested in your ad or not. The primary variables effecting it are the creative and audience. A low click through rate means that the people seeing your ad are not interested.

If you’re seeing a super low CTR and think the problem is your creative and not the audience you can run A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t.

5. Impressions and Frequency

Impressions show you the number of times your ad was displayed.

Frequency show you the average number of times your ad was shown to each individual person.

If frequency gets too high, then people might start getting annoyed that they see your ads too much. For newsfeed and mobile, you shouldn’t let frequency get above 2. For right column ads, it shouldn’t be a problem to let it go as high as 10-20.

Now that you have the top 5 metrics to follow for campaigns go ahead and start analyzing your results with confidence!

We’re always wanting to learn more so if you have any thoughts or disagreements about our list of 5, please share them below and maybe we both will learn something new.

Good Luck!

This is a guest post by Sam Schubert.

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