Armed with Information, Let's Make Sense of Our Facebook Ad Data

Fourteenth in a series

Facebook Ads is loaded with reports and last time we gave a brief overview of what you’ll find. Today, we’ll look at our actual numbers and make some decisions.

While it is always important to do the research and make thoughtful plans when launching an advertising campaign, there’s a point when you have to just let it run and see how it goes. Audiences can surprise you, upending even the most careful predictions. This is the main reason for A/B tests and for running your tests long enough to generate useful numbers.

To recap our ad experiment, we started by making a Facebook Slideshow ad. We created two versions of the Slideshow using different headlines. Then we wrote two versions of the accompanying post content, one with bullet points and one with paragraphs. That makes a total of four ads and two A/B tests:

Phone Not Ringing/Paragraph (Headline 1 with Content 1)

No Leads/Paragraph (Headline 2 with Content 1)

Phone Not Ringing/Bullets (Headline 1 with Content 2)

No Leads/Bullets (Headline 2 with Content 2)

Facebook suggests letting your ad run at least four days and we like to go a little longer. For this most recent ad set offering a free SEO audit, we ran our test for seven days. Then we studied the results.

If you set up your A/B test as instructed by Facebook, they will give you the results in a nice report and tell you which one is the “winner.” There may be more than one way to “win,” however, depending on your goal. You can change which metric to use in the dropdown menu to see which version did better at Link Clicks or at Cost per Engagement, for instance.

We were surprised by several of the reports. For instance, Phone Not Ringing/Paragraph had more Impressions than the bullet version, but the No Leads/Bullets had more Impressions than the paragraph version.

While this was an interesting detail, our objective for this ad was not brand-oriented but action-oriented. If we were intent on getting our brand in front of people, we would focus on Impressions and Reach. Instead, we want people to take action and click on the ad, so the Click-Through Rate was more important to us. Here’s how each of the ad versions fared using CTR:

3.94% CTR - Phone Not Ringing/Paragraph

3.96% CTR - No Leads/Bullets

4.01% CTR - No Leads/Paragraph

5.21% CTR - Phone Not Ringing/Bullets

As you can see, we have a definite “winner” in the ad version which used the headline of Phone Not Ringing and the bulleted content. We decided to turn off the other three ads and just run this one for a while. Then we’ll look over the results again before making our next decisions.

According to AdsTargets, the average CTR across all industries is 0.9% while the average CTR for B2B is 0.78%, so we’re pretty pleased with our click-through rate. Different industries receive a wide range of CTRs. Since Facebook is primarily an entertainment platform, you won’t be shocked to learn that Apparel, Retail, and Beauty have better click-throughs than most industries. You may be surprised, however, to know that the Legal industry has the highest CTR!

There’s a whole lot to take in when analyzing your Facebook ad results and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Fortunately, you can lean on our Sprocket team to explain what’s going on and advise on the best course of action. Ready to start your own A/B ad comparison? Give us a call today to talk it over!

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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Full biography

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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