Let's take a look at 10 of the most common Facebook ad terms and what they actually mean below.
10 Facebook Ad Terms for Absolute Beginners
Impressions
Having one ad impression means that your ad is seen by someone once. Keep in mind that an impression only refers to views and no engagements - no clicks, no checking comments, liking the post or anything else. Just a view.
If your impressions column show 12,582, that means that your ads were seen 12,582 times.
Cost per Mille (CPM)
CPM refers to the costs associated with impressions. If your ad performance report shows a CPM of $3.20, it means that Facebook is charging you that cost for 1000 impressions.
That's having your ads seen 1000 times for only that price!
Reach
While impressions refer to the times that your ads are shown, reach calculates the number of unique people who sees your ads. You might have an ad impression of 10,000, but your reach could be only around 9,723.
This means that your ads reached 9,723 unique individuals, but some of them may have seen your ads more than once.
Ad Frequency
The lower the number of ad frequency is, the higher the number of unique individuals you can reach. Your ad can be seen three times in the past week by person A, while it is only shown once to person B. An ad frequency can be numbers such as 1.5, 2.34 or other values with decimal points.
You can calculate your ad frequency by dividing your impressions by your reach. Having an ad frequency of 1.5 means that your ads are shown between once or twice to the same person.
Amount Spent
This term is as direct as it gets - how much have you spent out of your allocated budget? Your budget may be set as daily budget or total budget, but the Amount Spent column will show you how much you have spent in the timeframe you selected.
Your amount spent could be $15 in past 5 days, but $150 in past 30 days, as an example. This will depend on your total budget and campaign duration.
Engagements
How do your ad viewers engage with your ads? Do they click the like button, comment on it or share it? These are all engagements. Your post engagements can also be button clicks - Shop Now, Call Now, or other buttons you have added to your ads.
Watch out for bad engagements - some viewers may also opt to hide your ad because it's too repetitive or for other reasons.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
If your ad has a button underneath it - Message, Learn More, Shop Now, Book Now etc - then your ad impressions could generate clicks. Interested viewers could click on your ad following your call-to-action buttons.
Think of the CTR as how often your ad impressions lead to clicks. Having 10,000 clicks and 20,000 impressions would lead to a CTR of 50%.
Cost per Click (CPC)
When you divide the total amount spent by the number of clicks you get, you will have your CPC.
As an example, if you have a total campaign budget of $20 and you have spent $15, gaining 150 clicks, then your CPC would be $0.10.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
The CPA metrics tell you how much you spend to acquire your client. CPA metrics are more commonly used on lead generation campaigns to get form fills, sign ups and more. We will explore more about the types of campaigns in a later post.
Ad Relevancy
This used to be referred to as the relevancy score until March 2019. Your ad relevance is a score between 1 to 10, and the higher the score is, the better your ad is. Think of your ad relevance as a mixture of how good your ad text and visuals are when paired with your target audience.
If you have a short and sweet ad with popping visuals relevant to your products & services, attracting your target audience to engage with it, then you can expect to have a high ad relevancy.
That's it for the basic terms on Facebook ads! You can also check out some of our other posts related to Facebook marketing and advertising in the suggested posts below to learn more with us at PanPages TRINITY!
