Meta Ads offers a stable basis of fundamental metrics like ROAS and conversion price, however savvy entrepreneurs know that true optimization lies within the particulars.
Are your clicks translating into high quality visits? Is your viewers attain increasing or stagnating? These questions demand extra nuanced knowledge.
Beneath are six superior key efficiency indicators (KPIs) that Meta Advertisements doesn’t readily provide out of the field however which may dramatically elevate your paid social technique.
1. Consciousness KPI: Internet new attain
The primary lacking KPI so as to add to your Meta Advertisements technique ought to give attention to viewers attain and saturation.
The important thing query: Is your top-of-funnel method attracting folks unfamiliar together with your model?
That is essential for many companies, particularly B2B accounts with longer gross sales cycles.
With out recent prospects, you danger depleting your funnel by repeatedly focusing on the identical viewers, resulting in diminishing returns.
To reply this query, you’ll want to tweak how Meta Advertisements exhibits your knowledge.
Let’s begin with frequency. It’s the typical variety of instances every consumer noticed your advert. The components is:
- Frequency = Impressions / Attain
Frequency is a robust KPI for monitoring viewers saturation, nevertheless it comes with two main caveats:
- Frequency is a median. And identical to each common metric, it hides discrepancies that may destroy your marketing campaign outcomes. This implies you at all times must implement frequency caps. Sadly, Meta Advertisements doesn’t at all times provide such choices and you’ll need to contort your marketing campaign settings to forestall such points. However that’s a subject for an additional article.
- It’s sure to a predefined time-frame. So you might want to break it down to know its full story:
- Final 3 or 7 days for a direct snapshot.
- Final 14 or 30 days on your viewers’s current expertise.
- Final 90 or 180 days to get a smoothed-out perspective.
- And many others.
This implies Meta Advertisements may simply enhance Advertisements Supervisor by offering frequency columns with such default time frames. However you need to manually do it. Or do you?
Meta Advertisements presents an alternate metric known as “frequency (cumulative).” Nonetheless, it’s not out there as a column in Advertisements Supervisor: you’ll be able to solely get it if you happen to hover over a marketing campaign (advert set or advert) and click on on “view charts” after which “customise.”
Right here is an instance of a retargeting marketing campaign with a price range that’s most likely too large for a comparatively small viewers:

Taking a look at frequency over time, it seems OK. We’re reaching distinctive customers about as soon as a day.
Nonetheless, the general quantity ought to set off some questions: why is it so excessive (17 impressions in a couple of month)? If we change to frequency (cumulative), that is what we see:


You by no means wish to see such a frequency (cumulative) curve in most situations as a result of:
- You don’t wish to faucet into the identical viewers indefinitely, leading to a dried-up top-of-funnel.
- You wish to anticipate such a situation and keep away from reactive habits. That means, you keep away from seeing efficiency go up and down and up and down once more.
The query is: how?
Sadly, Meta Advertisements doesn’t present a straightforward means to do that: frequency (cumulative) sits on the marketing campaign stage solely, and its sister KPI, attain (cumulative), too.
Additionally, it could’t be discovered within the common knowledge exports (API, Advertisements Report, and so on.).
You’ll must create a customized KPI known as web new attain to perform this. Right here’s the components:
Internet New Attain = Attain(s→y) – Attain(s→m)
With:
- Attain(s→y) being Attain out of your begin date (“s”) to yesterday (“y”)
- Attain(s→m) being Attain out of your begin date to a center time limit (“m”)
This lets you know the way many new customers you reached who had been not uncovered to your adverts earlier than “m.” web new attain has two benefits:
- Not like frequency (cumulative), it adapts to your granularity wants as much as the account stage. You’ll be able to export its root part (Attain) comparatively simply by way of the API, the consumer interface, and so on.
- It exhibits your newest web new attain, which permits for anticipation. If it falls week over week (for instance), you already know you wish to act to keep away from saturating your viewers
Now, there’s nonetheless one caveat with web new attain. You want to make it a recurring train (weekly?) and construct a pleasant desk out of that to make it digestible. Thankfully, because it’s recurring, it means it’s automateable.
I counsel exporting Attain(s→y) weekly to your database of alternative and working a script to subtract Attain(s→y) from the earlier week’s Attain (s→y) (that’s, Attain(s→m), from the attitude of that new week).
That means, you’ll find yourself with a desk just like the one beneath, with “s” being your begin date and “y” being yesterday, the date of the information pull.


As soon as that desk is prepared, you solely must graph web new attain and/or analyze it weekly to know whether or not you might have a top-of-funnel saturation problem.
Within the desk above, for the reason that web new attain is far decrease than attain (s→y), it signifies that we’re not bringing in sufficient new customers to our top-of-funnel ways and/or have a disproportionate price range in comparison with our viewers dimension.
Dig deeper: B2B audience targeting: Meta Ads as an alternative to LinkedIn
2–3. Engagement KPIs: Hook and retention charges
One other space the place Meta Advertisements may do higher is the engagement stage of the funnel.
If you happen to ask me, with regards to engagement, crucial objective is to catch customers’ consideration in a crowded feed or string of Tales and Reels. What they do subsequent (from leaving a remark to buying) is as much as the subsequent phases of the funnel.
When your advert is catchy sufficient, it provides you an opportunity to:
- Ship your message.
- Push your viewers to finish the motion you need them to take.
These two objects will be calculated very simply utilizing Meta Advertisements’ customized metrics:
- Hook price: Decide in case your advert is catchy sufficient to cease customers from scrolling and seize their consideration.
- Formulation:
- Hook Fee = 3-second video performs / Video performs
- Formulation:
- Retention price: Verify in case your advert is well-crafted to ship its message and encourage customers to behave (although this primarily ties into CTR and conversion charges).
- Formulation:
- Retention Fee = ThruPlays / 3-second video performs
- Formulation:
Utilizing these two metrics, you’ll be able to decide whether or not to enhance your advert’s hook or physique. This may show you how to create better-performing belongings at a decrease price because you’d solely want to regulate one half.
Nonetheless, Meta Advertisements doesn’t provide the identical depth of uncooked KPIs for pictures as for movies, which is unlucky. Regardless of utilizing it internally, a metric like dwell time may simply resolve this situation, however Meta Advertisements has but to make it out there to advertisers.
Within the meantime, I don’t see an answer apart from utilizing CTR to find out whether or not a picture engages properly.
4. Site visitors KPI: High quality go to price
Just like the engagement stage, the visitors stage of the funnel may benefit from extra KPIs.
As soon as your advert grabs customers’ consideration, the objective is to immediate them to take motion. Whereas Meta Advertisements offers numerous click-based KPIs to measure this, they are usually pretty shallow.
Meta Advertisements doesn’t let you know whether or not that click on was priceless: Did these customers bounce? Did they devour your content material in-depth?
You’ll not know except you might have sufficient typical conversions (purchases, leads, and so on.).
In these circumstances, how do you assess efficiency? The excellent news is that you’ve all the pieces you want to take action, and simply!
Your first objective needs to be to outline what’s a top quality go to. A method to take a look at that is to contemplate customers who, as soon as they reached your web site, did a number of of the next actions:
- Visited no less than two pages.
- Scrolled all the best way right down to the underside of your touchdown web page.
- Spent greater than 30 seconds in your touchdown web page.
- Performed a video in your touchdown web page.
With these easy triggers, you’ll be able to arrange a customized conversion in Meta Advertisements. This lets you optimize your campaigns with the brand new KPI and consider your touchdown web page’s efficiency utilizing the standard go to price.
Right here’s the components:
- High quality Go to Fee = High quality Visits / Touchdown Web page Views
I like to recommend utilizing touchdown web page views to filter out clicks that weren’t tracked on account of points like cookie consent or advert blockers. This manner, you’ll have a dependable KPI on your evaluation.
Dig deeper: 3 powerful micro-conversion strategies for paid social
5-6. Efficiency KPI: Lifetime worth and advantages
Whereas these KPIs might look like a stretch because you usually want an analytics or CRM resolution to entry that knowledge, it’s disappointing that Meta Advertisements doesn’t absolutely leverage its integrations with instruments like GA4, HubSpot and Salesforce to showcase its true enterprise worth.
Nonetheless, I imagine each PPC ought to periodically overview these metrics. Listed here are the formulation you might want to calculate:
- Lifetime Worth (LTV) = common order worth x complete transactions / distinctive prospects
- Lifetime Advantages (LTB) = LTV x revenue margin
I wrote a whole article on this precise subject, so be at liberty to test it out and dive deeper into LTV.
Meta Advertisements presents a sturdy set of KPIs for marketing campaign administration, however advancing your measurement and optimization capabilities requires the creation of extra subtle metrics.
KPIs comparable to web new attain, hook price, retention price, and high quality go to price, together with extra advanced metrics like lifetime worth, present deeper insights into marketing campaign effectiveness, permitting for extra knowledgeable decision-making past simply ROAS or conversion charges.
Hopefully, Meta will acknowledge the worth of integrating these metrics immediately into Advertisements Supervisor. Within the meantime, savvy PPCs can leverage these superior KPIs to remain forward of the competitors.
Dig deeper: Here’s why PPC now looks more like paid social and what it means
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