A Guide to Facebook Reports
Published: October 5, 2012
Author: Clark Sioson
There’s been plenty of discussion about the merits of various Facebook ad metrics and plenty of speculation about which metrics the platform will target for optimization (CPA, anyone?) going forward. But let’s back up a step and make sure everyone’s familiar with the reports that show those metrics.
Advertising Performance
This is the default Ads Manager report that includes metrics like impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), page likes, actions, social reach, and spend.
Responder Demographics
This report contains demographic information about users who saw and clicked on your ads. The information is arranged in buckets by gender, region, and age range and breaks down the % of impressions and clicks for each
This report will assist in identifying relevant audiences and geos.
Actions
This report shows the number of actions arranged by the impression time of the Facebook Ad or Sponsored Story. An action is categorized by the length of time (e.g. 0-24 hours, 1-7 days, 8-28 days) between a user’s view or click on the ad/sponsored story and the action taken.
This report is especially helpful to identify engagement – content likes, comments, and shares by ad type – as well as other actions such as link clicks, photo views, and video plays.
Inline Interactions
The Inline Interactions Report will help you understand the engagement on Page Post ads.
The report includes standard metrics like impressions and clicks, but it is really helpful to identify actions such as likes, photo views, and video plays that occurred directly from your ads.
Many actions can be taken with a Page Post ad, as seen in the example below. This report can help you track these actions.
News Feed
Facebook has recently included this report to supplement the expansion of options for ads placed in the news feed.
It includes impressions, clicks, and CTR. The report also contains the average position of your ads in the news feed.
Facebook states that the Average News Feed Position is where your sponsored story was inserted in the user’s news feeds. (Position 1 indicates the top of the news feed, as seen below.)
With the rate Facebook’s been releasing new platforms and ad types, this post may need updating within a couple of weeks. But hopefully we’re all on the same page for now.
– Clark Sioson, PPC Associates
