Facebook offers many ways of measuring the results of your ad campaigns, but what if you need custom metrics? What if you have specific goals and you cannot use any of the standard metrics to measure whether they are achieved? This was one of the issues for many marketers and business owners and the Facebook Team decided to provide a solution for it.
Therefore, you can now create several custom metrics in the Facebook Ads Reporting panel. Of course, you cannot create an unlimited variety of metrics, but more on this aspect later.
Custom Metrics Help You Make Sense of Your Facebook Ads
As digital marketing strategies become more complex, so do the KPIs you need to measure. Otherwise, you will never know whether you are losing money from your campaigns until you have a significant hole in your budget.
Therefore, here is how you can define your own custom metrics using Facebook Ads Reporting:
1. Go to the Business Manager Page
The starting point is your Meta Business Manager page. Here, you will see four main sections. Go to the “Analyse and Report” section and you will find the Ads Reporting option.
2. Find the New Custom Metrics Option
In the Ads Reporting panel, you will find the Metrics menu on the left side of the page. Click on it to access the drop-down menu and select Custom Metrics. You will get a pop-up window where you will create your metrics.
3. Define Your Specific Metrics
Now we get to the nitty-gritty. You start by specifying:
- The name – maximum 100 characters;
- The description – maximum 350 characters;
- The format – numeric, currency or percentage.
Also, you can choose to use the new custom metric for the specific report you are preparing now or for all the reports for Facebook ads.
4. Create the Custom Metric Formula
Here, you need to be very careful and understand clearly what you want the new metric to measure. The Formula section for the metric contains the following symbols you can combine in various ways:
- +
- –
- X
- (
- )
Now, look at the right side of the pop-up window. Here you will see the four objectives from which you can choose elements to create your custom metrics. They are:
- Performance
- Engagement
- Conversions
- Custom Conversions.
Each of them is clickable and opens a drop-down menu from which you will select the specific KPIs. You combine them with the symbols to define simple mathematical formulas for your custom metrics.
At the end, click on Create Metric and you’re done!
A Few Examples of Custom Metrics You Can Create
Now, it may all seem complicated at first, but the more you play with these new metric creation formulas, the faster you will learn. However, we decided to help you out by showing you how to create a few simple formulas for useful custom metrics.
- ROAS (return on ad spend) – this useful metric shows you how profitable your Facebook ads are. The formula for this metric is: LEADS VALUE / SPEND;
- CR (conversion rate) – this is the formula you need to create if you want to know how many clicks resulted in a purchase: WEBSITE PURCHASE / UNIQUE CLICKS;
- Inverse ROI – here is another way to calculate the return on investment for your Facebook ads: SPEND / WEBSITE PURCHASE VALUE.
These are just a few examples, but we are sure that you will soon discover more useful and relevant formulas for custom metrics to measure the results of your Facebook ad campaigns. Good luck!