How to Analyse Your Meta Ads

When you are creating hundreds or thousands of ad creatives, it is important to keep track of what is working in converting customers or clients, and how you can use this going forward. While you can look at the main metrics such as nCPA and purchases to see if an ad is performing well, you will need to analyse deeper - what exactly is in the ad that is working well? To do this you will want to look at many other metrics in your dashboard, as well as looking at what is in your ad that could be working with your audience. In this blog, we will explain the best way to organise your Meta dashboard, how to analyse your ads, and what to do with this information.

How to set up your dashboard

To effectively monitor your ads to help with analysing, you want to set your dashboard up with only the essential columns and metrics you want to look at. You want to set the most important, primary metrics on the left of your dashboard so that they are the first thing you see and can understand how ads are performing at a glance. You can then work through the rest of the metrics to further analyse them.

Here is the order we recommend setting up your meta dashboard and things to consider to be best prepared for monitoring and analysing your ads:

Delivery - What is the current status of your campaign? Is it live, on pause or ended.

Bid Strategy - What method are you using to bid for your ads? When analysing your ads, we recommend ‘Highest Volume’.

Attribution Setting - How are you tracking your ads and attributing a sale to them? We recommend ‘7 day click and 2 day view’ to make sure that you are getting the best data on your ads performance.

Budget - How much are you willing to spend each day on an ad campaign. To start seeing results, you are likely going to need to spend at least £100, and can increase when you start to hit performance goals.

Amount Spent - How much have you spent on this campaign in a specific time frame? The higher the spend the more meta is recommending it.

Purchases - How many sales have been completed and attributed to this campaign, based on your attribution settings?

CPP (Cost per Purchase) - Based on the amount spent on the campaign, and how many purchases have been made, how much is it costing on average to gain a sale?

ROAS - What is your return on ad spend? For every dollar you spend on ads, how much are you getting back in sales? Anything below 1 means you are spending more than you are making.

Frequency - How often are people being shown the ad on average during this time frame?

Reach - How many individuals have seen this campaign at least once?

Impressions - How many times in total has your ad been seen across the platforms?

Cost per 1000 - How much does it cost for your ad to reach 1000 different people?

CPM - How much does it cost for your ad to reach 1000 impressions?

UOC (Unique Outbound Clicks) - How many people have clicked on your ad? UOC only focuses on people who have clicked on the ad and gone through to the landing page.

CPC - How much are you paying on average for each click through to your landing page?

Hook Rate - What percentage of people watch at least the first 3 seconds of your video creative? This will need to be added as a custom metric as it is currently not an option in Meta’s columns.

Hold Rate - What percentage of people watch at least the first 15 seconds of your ad? If your ad is shorter than 15 seconds, it will focus on how many people watched the whole thing.

Average Play Time - On average how long do people spend watching your ad? This helps to show at what point people tend to scroll on.

Post Shares - How many times has your post been shared by someone?

Primary data vs Secondary data

When it comes to analysing your data, there are two sections that you should be looking at: the primary and the secondary. The primary data will show you if an ad is performing well, but the secondary data can help tell you why. By looking at both, you can increase the amount of winning ads you produce, and reduce the amount of spend being wasted on underperforming creative.

Primary Data

Looking at the primary data of your campaigns will show you how successful they are, and which are underperforming. The primary metrics that you will be looking at are Spend, Purchases, CPP and ROAS. By looking at these metrics, you can see how much is being spent on ads, and which ones are getting the most or least spend. You can then use purchases and ROAS to see how effective they are at converting a purchase, and if they are meeting the benchmarks, you are set to run profitable ads.

While this data will show you how the ads are performing, it will not give you much indication of why they are performing this way. For this you will want to look further into the secondary data.

Secondary Data

The secondary data will focus on the remaining metrics that we have set up on the dashboard, and will help you decipher what is causing the ads to perform the way they are. These metrics will look into how often people are seeing the ads by looking at Frequency, Reach, Impressions and CPM. It will also show you how they perform in compelling people to click on your ad by looking at Unique Outbound Clicks and Cost per Click.

If you ad is a video, looking at Hook Rate, Hold Rate and Play Time, will show you how effective your ad is in different parts of the video and what point of the ad people are scrolling on. Post Shares will show how interesting your ad is that people want to share it to their friends and family.

By analysing this data you will be able to see what types of ads perform the best, and which are underperforming. But to greatly increase the performance of your ads, you will need to dive into the qualitative data and look at what is in the ad itself, and test different aspects until you find the formulas that work best for you and your target audience.

Content data

To really understand what it is in your ad that is converting to sales, you are going to want to look at what is actually in the ad itself. What is the format of the ad, what is the messaging and intent, who is in the ad and where are they there? By analysing your ad in this way, it will allow you to run further tests and iterations to really nail down what combination can give you the best results.

Talent

When looking at who is in your ad or the creator who made it, you want to start broad and pin point your way in. Start by looking at the basic demographics, what is their gender, their race or their age? By testing different combinations of this you can start to work out which will work best for that style of ad or product.

You can then look at who the creator is. Are they a celebrity, an influencer, a founder or a customer? If they are a celebrity or influencer, what field are they in, and who are they likely to connect with?

When you have tested these, you should be able to see what type of person best represents your brand and connects with potential customers to convert sales.

Format

There are many formats that you can use across your ads, and while you can look at them broadly to see if they are a video, static ad, gif, or carousel, by looking at the content format you can start to analyse which are most effective.

If your ad is in video format, it could be a customer testimonial, UGC, celebrity endorsement, product explainer, unboxing or a founder story. All these formats have different appeals and intent, so by analysing which produces the best results, you can see what is convincing customers to convert.

When producing a static ad, these usually involve examples like us vs them, feature call outs, headline ads, press, before and afters, or listicles. There are many others, but by categorising it into a design format, you can test various methods to see if any stand out, or if any fail to produce results.

Messaging

While it is important to test different formats and talents within your ads, you also want to be testing different types of messaging. By testing and analysing your messaging, you can start to discover what drives a customer to purchase from you and how new they are to your brand.

The first thing you will want to analyse is where the messaging falls along the user journey. Have they ever heard of your brand or your products? Are they familiar with what you provide? And are they aware of a problem that your product can help with, as well as being familiar with the solution? When you find out which stage of messaging is having the most impact, you can put more focus into this, as well as tweaking the others to try and find a balance to bring in new customers and keep the ones you currently have.

You will then want to look at the messaging from a desire perspective, what are you trying to connect with within your messaging? There are many human desires that you can relate to, whether it be romantic, social acceptance, family or intelligence. By analysing and testing these you can discover what emotionally hooks people into buying your products.

The last thing you will want to analyse in regards to messaging, is what is the ad trying to say? Is it asking a question or is it a statement? Does it include statistics or social proof? Is the ad comparing your brand or products to a competitor, answering negative comments or showing the values of your brand? After testing these various intents, you can see which performs best and iterate your ads until you find what draws your customers into your ads.

Imagery

As well as analysing the format of your ads, you want to look further into what is actually in your ad. What is the quality of the creative? Is it a high quality professional video or photo? Is it lit properly, or low-fi? And is it filmed on a mobile or using professional cameras?

The location and setting can also impact an ads performance and needs to be tested to see which works best with your brand. Is it being filmed around the home, in a car, at the office, on the street or at a specific location? Experimenting with various locations can not only show what matches your brand best, but also the types of content your potential audience is watching.

The final thing you will want to analyse, is how the ad creative has been edited. Does it use subtitles that are added in the app, or have they been added to match your brand? What is the pacing of the ad? Is it quick cuts and fast talking, or does it allow the information to sink in? And are there any techniques like split screen, green screen or animations used?

Comparing with competitors

While analysing your metrics will help show what is working with your creatives, you will also want to see how your best performers compare to your competitors.

To gain a good idea of how your campaigns are performing, you will want to compare the primary metrics to the best campaign you have previously ran to see if they are matching their results. You can then see if there are any similarities between the ads in regard to imagery, messaging or format, to check if there are any common elements.

When comparing to your competitors, you will not only want to be looking at what is in the creativity of their best performers, but also what changes they have made to them. If there are any common things amongst their best performing ads, you can see that they might have tested their ads until they have found a winning formula, which you can use to influence future campaigns that you run.

Finally, you will also want to see how your ads perform in regard to current trends, both in your industry and on the platform you are promoting on. Do your ads match any of these trends, or can you tweak your ads to fall more in line with what consumers are looking for currently?

Analysing customer feedback

While you can look at the metrics we have mentioned previously to see what is working in your ads, another way to find this out is by looking at your customer feedback. You can look at the comments to see if people like the content, have any questions, or have anything negative to say about it. What positive things are they saying about your products or brand that you can use in your future messaging? Or, what are they saying negatively about the ad, that you can address in future ad creative, or negative marketing campaigns?

As well as the comments on your ad creative, you will want to look at customer reviews to see if they mention what it was that convinced them to purchase. Was it solving a problem for them? Did an influencer they follow recommend it? Or was the price point appealing?

Using what your customers have to say can and should greatly influence your future ad creatives to create content that will connect with your potential audience and convert purchases.

How to use this data

Now that you know what you need to do to really analyse your ad creative, and what to look for, you will need to use this to influence your current and future campaigns.

You can keep running your winning ads, whilst testing variations to see if you can improve the performance, and increase the chance of conversion. You can also reevaluate the failed ads to see what you should avoid doing in the future, and any opportunities for tweaking the design and content to include some of your winning formula.

Contrast is an eCommerce marketing agency that specialises in creating effective ad campaigns, landing pages and emails campaigns to increase your sales. To find out more, get in touch