Casey Cheshire

Facebook advertising is hyper targeted and as a result is often much more expensive than the Google Content network.  It’s important to have solid reporting in place so you can make sense of which campaigns are winners.

Facebook has gone through substantial growing pains as they develop their ad network.  From reporting errors to actually doing away with website based conversion reporting (it was too much to support)- it’s not your grandma’s ad network!

There are new social actions that can take place on Facebook ads such as a Like or an RSVP.  The resulting advertising performance report is a mish-mosh (yes, I said it) of trendy new terms that can both overlap and exclude adjacent stats.  It’s then left to us to translate the results into business speak.

The final bit of challenge is that until recently, not everyone at Facebook knew exactly what each stat was or how they were related.  So I’d Google Search the heck out of the situation- coming up with less than helpful docs, like the Facebook Ads Report.  No offense to FB but the thing was definitely created by someone who’s never had to calculate a CPL for a Facebook ad campaign.

There is a help file that gives the run-down of *most* terms in your Facebook Advertising Performance Report. Go there for definitions of things like Impressions & Spent. Just in case you didn’t know.   To their credit they do label Social Conversions- which we’ll expand on in a second.  Conversions, though, is neglected- leading everyone to wonder which conversion this column refers to…

Facebook has a new feature! (gasp) And this time it’s for all of us digital marketers out there utilizing Facebook Advertising.  The new feature, which is still in Beta, allows you to know if the really expensive Facebook traffic you paid for actually converts.

The implementation is simple, and if you’ve already set up your Google AdWords for conversion tracking (and you should!) then it’ll look familiar:

<script src=”//ah8.facebook.com/js/conversions/tracking.js”></script><script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
FB.Insights.impression({
‘id’ : 123456789,
‘h’ : ‘abc123abc123′
});
} catch (e) {}
</script>

This will enable you to track contact conversions within the Facebook interface.  Even if you have your web analytics set up to track Facebook conversions this will put the information all in one place and save time on report generation.

There is also a handy guide to using Facebook Conversion Tracking.  They’ve done a great job detailing just about everything- except a pesky thing called a “Conversion Rate.”  (Oh boy!)

Facebook & Conversion Rate

A conversion rate can really look at any two factors, depending on what KIND of conversion you’re tracking.  It’s typically calculated with the number of successes divided by the number of attempts.  Within Facebook reporting, a conversion rate is the number of times the desired action (purchase, signup, etc) occurs divided by a modified number of impressions- or times your ad was shown.

It’s not simply Conversions/Impressions.

Believe it or not, Facebook adds in “Basis Points” to your Conversion Rate calculation.  They do this because simply dividing your 10 purchases by the 800,000 impressions is going to give you a crazy Conversion Rate of: 0.0000125

Rather than make room in their reports for at least 5 zeroes, they modify the number of impressions by DIVIDING it by 10,000. The result on your 800,000 impressions divided by 10,000 is now a manageable 80.

Facebook then calculates: 10 / 80 = .125 or 12.5 %

While it seems sketchy at first glance, they’re really only making the report a little easier to read.  Just remember you DON’T really have a 12% conversion rate!

Happy Converting!

If you haven’t been advertising on Facebook, you should definitely test it.  I’ve seen it work both really well, and pretty miserable.  There are a lot of factors, but one thing is sure- you won’t know how your audience responds until you start testing it!  At least now you can see how those pricey, highly targeted Facebook ads are performing within their interface!

Found this project through AnalyticsPros blog Analytics Prose and it pointed me to this blog post on Yoast.

It’s a quick little Google Analytics project that shows you what page your site was on when someone clicked to your site from the natural search results.

Image via CrunchBase

So someone searching for “Casey Cheshire” would find CaseyCheshire.com on the first page and in the first position.  Google Analytics won’t be able to tell you position, but with this filter setup, it’ll show you what page you were on.  Testing on your own will give you different results because Google has personalized search.

Step 1: Create a new profile. (Always do this so you don’t screw up your main profile. Once data is filtered, it cannot be reversed.)

Step 2: Create a filter that Includes only Organic traffic. (Instructions here.)

Step 3: Create a filter that Includes only Google traffic. (There are fixes to include Yahoo and MSN, but you’ll need to already be properly tagging this traffic with custom utm data.  It get’s more complicated, but is doable. ) (Instructions here.)

Step 4: Create a filter that does the Magic (…grabs the page result from the url).

Click here for a photo of what the filter should look like.

An important fact about what you’ll see in the results.  If you don’t see a result it means it was on the first page, 20 means it was on the third page.  Below is the page number & what result will show up in results.

1. no result
2. 10
3. 20
4. 30
5. 40
6. 50

Not perfect or Apple iPhone user friendly, but provides a glimpse into the SEO effect on your organic search.

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