Is Facebook Advertising Really Worth the $$$? How to Measure Success.
How do you know that the money you are spending on Facebook advertising is worth it? Of course, the answer depends on your goals. But there are tools to help you find out, whether you are a bricks and motor store or an online-only service provider.
Go Beyond the Basics if You Are Advertising on Facebook
Whether you are doing your own FB marketing or paying a third party to do it for you, you can monitor performance of your ads, pages and posts. The basic metric for Facebook is the number of likes received, and you can see that on the Facebook page itself. But if that like doesn’t convert to a sale, or at least some type of engagement such as a share, what is it worth? Granted, it could be said to improve brand awareness, but simply counting likes does not really tell you whether your strategy is succeeding.
Likes: What are other ways you can measure your success on Facebook? If you use the metrics in the Facebook Insight section of your business account. It tells you about your ad’s performance, even showing you more information about the number of likes. You can see whether the number of likes is increasing or decreasing. You can learn whether that increase is new viewers or repeat viewers. Although people liking an ad are not necessarily going to buy anything, they have at least agreed to receive updates from you about your products and services.
Reach: Basically, this metric measures the number of times viewers share your ad or post, making it available to viewers beyond your original criteria. Not only does this signal engagement, but it also shows you what types of material are succeeding. Is the highly successful ad a link to your blog post, a graphic, or a share of a relevant article from a third party? Can you see a trend in subject matter? Do more of what works, and reduce or eliminate that which does not get shared.
Engagement: This important metric measures click-throughs to your actual website. Viewers want to learn more about your business, about you and about the products and services you are selling. It shows that they trust your ad, and by extension your business. You have spent a lot of time and effort developing your web site. It’s great to see that people visit it.
Competitive analysis: One FB administrators’ tool shows how competitors’ web sites are performing. If they have a page that shows great engagement, you should think about developing a similar page. If it is working for someone else in the same business, it will probably work for you!
Get Help With FB Marketing
Monitoring your Facebook performance takes time—time you could spend on running your business. Figuring out whether money spent on Facebook is the best way to further your goals takes even more time. Get help from a digital marketing company that truly understands FB marketing.
Sources:
http://blog.getresponse.com/is-facebook-advertising-really-worth-it.html; http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/01/25/does-facebook-advertising-work; http://moneynation.com/paying-facebook-ads-worth-money/; https://www.digitalhill.com/blog/metrics-measure-success-facebook-marketing/
