Having a Facebook page for your business these days is essential to promote your products or services. When you create Facebook ad campaigns, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Having the right target audience;
- Having visually-pleasing images or videos;
- Creating engaging copy;
- Choosing the right landing page.
A major incentive to advertise on social media, particularly Facebook, is the chance to tap into these platforms’ audiences and potentially bringing as many of them to your website to buy your products, book your service, or even just read your new blog post. Facebook has around 2.6 billion monthly active users, so creating a Facebook ad campaign could potentially prove very successful.
But as you may know, most of your success comes from targeting. But how do you know if the people you want actually click the link you’ve provided? Can you even see who clicked on a Facebook ad?
Let’s get to the bottom of it.
Facebook Ad Reporting 101: You Can’t Access Everything
Facebook will not provide you with a list of users who’ve clicked on your ads. Nowhere in your Facebook Ads Manager will you see a column with all the people who’ve seen and click on a link, that’s just not how their tracking system works.
Of course, Facebook does have this information, but it just doesn’t provide it to advertisers to protect the privacy of their users. Think of it from your perspective. Would you want Facebook to give every single business whose ad you clicked on the link to your profile? No, you’d legitimately ask why they would do that.
So if you want to check and see if John Mitchell from Canberra clicked on your link, you can’t. They can, however, like and comment or even share your ad if the content is appealing to them, but that’s an action they choose to take to make themselves visible, not Facebook disclosing who he is.
But fear not because Facebook does provide plenty of information on your ads, even if you can’t see who clicked on them. The secret is to look into this data, draw conclusions, and leverage all this information in order to improve future Facebook ads, and hopefully get better results.
Below you have a step by step guide on how to view Facebook ad results.
Viewing Results for Facebook ads
Every campaign, ad set, or singular ad run on Facebook is tracked by the advertising service. If you go to your Facebook Ads Manager, you can see different types of results based on the campaign level you want to view.
For the ad itself, Facebook can you information on:
- How many people saw the ad;
- How many people clicked on the ad;
- How much money you spent on the ad.
You can click on View Charts to open the insights panel and see a graphic of your ad performance. Here, you can view the results by:
Performance
This is the number of clicks on your ad, the number of people you’ve reached with it, and the overall cost for running the ad.
Placement
If you choose different placements for your ads, such as Instagram or Messenger, this is the section where you can see how your ad performs in different placements.
Delivery
This chart shows a comparison between the predicted and actual value for reach, impressions, and the amount of money spent. You can see if your ad is performing well, or if it needs to be optimised.
You can also customise the exact types of columns you want to view, such as mobile app installs, or website conversions, but this will still provide just the number of people that took part in these actions, not who they are.
Now, if you’re thinking is a fairly broad tracking on ad performance, don’t worry. There is another tool you can use to get more information regarding who is clicking on your ads.
Using the Breakdown option
While still on the ad in Ads Manager, you can click on the ‘Breakdown’ tab to see more information regarding delivery, action, and time.
By Delivery
Provides information about who the ad was delivered to in terms of:
- Age
- Gender
- Business location
- Country
- Region
- Device used
- Placement
For instance, if you select the gender breakdown, you can see if your ad was more popular among men or women. The results may show you should optimise your ad to suit your target audience.
By Action
This category shows what actions were taken as a result of your ads, such as:
Conversion device
Post reaction type
Destination URL (if you’re running a carousel ad with multiple links)
Video view type, etc.
By Time
This category shows when your ad is performing better, and when it’s stagnant by day, weeks, or months.
You can take all the information Facebook provides regarding who interacts best with your ads (in terms of their demographics), and split them into smaller audience sections. Then, you can create your ads to cater to the needs of these smaller sections, which will bring you better results.
Creating a Custom Audience
Facebook tells you how many clicks your ad got, but it doesn’t tell you who the people who did it are. Again, it’s a privacy thing, and while it would have been a lot easier to have a breakdown in terms of who clicked the ads, you can still use a lot of data to improve your Facebook ad campaign. And one of the best strategies here is to create a custom audience.
If you create your ads with the purpose of lead generation or have a generous list of customers, you can use that list to make a custom audience with the contacts you’ve gathered. Then, it takes just a few clicks to create a lookalike audience that will target people similar to the audience you already have, reaching an even wider target audience.
Ad campaigns with custom audiences often generate the best results, since it’s people who already know your brand. Then, you can take the Facebook marketing effort to the next level by creating the lookalike audience to give your business an even wider reach.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, even if we know for a fact Facebook tracks a lot of user activity on its platform, some of this data will remain a mystery to us. Who clicks on an ad link seems to be one of these mysteries.
But it’s not to say Facebook doesn’t present many opportunities for businesses to get closer to their target audience. Knowing the ins and outs of this advertising system is key to ensure your campaigns’ success.
If you need some help in this department, we are happy to lend a hand. Book a free 30-minute strategy session with Australian Internet Advertising today to find out more about what you need to do to improve your Facebook ad campaigns.
