How to Tell if Your Facebook Campaign Was Actually Worth It

As of March 2017, Facebook had 1.28 billion active users each day, and over 85% of those users were outside of the U.S. and Canada.

With such a large portion of the world using Facebook, marketers everywhere know Facebook is an ideal place to reach and engage new audiences.

You’ve probably heard these stats before. After all, Facebook is a no-brainer for marketers. And if you’re trying to reach new audiences, you probably know paying for Facebook Ads is a great way to do that.

That said, knowing a channel is effective is far different from creating an effective ads strategy for your unique brand. With more and more marketers advertising on Facebook each quarter, its harder than ever to build a strategy that will stand out from your competitors and generate the return on investment (ROI) your brand needs.

But if you’re ready to start putting budget behind your Facebook advertising strategy, it’s important to fully understand how your ads efforts affect your business’ bottom line. Otherwise, how else do you justify your ad spend?

Fortunately, with help from Socialbakers, a global leader in social media marketing analytics, we put together a data-packed report and how-to guide to help you build a better Facebook Ads strategy, benchmark your success, and improve the ROI of your ad spend.

First, we’ll teach you how to calculate your paid social ROI so you can benchmark your ad spend against your industry and region. Then, use your calculations and compare them to the benchmarks in the full ebook. We’ll also help you create a strategy for your Facebook ad campaigns along the way.

Ready to set a killer Facebook ads strategy and get the latest industry data on social ROI? Get the full-length guide now.

How do you begin measuring social media ROI?

Why measure your ad spend ROI? It’s pretty simple. If you want your ads to make an impact on the rest of your marketing funnel, you have to measure what it’s driving and how much of a return you’re getting, which will ultimately frame where marketing dollars are best spent for future campaigns that drive the best results, leads, conversions, customers, etc.

Let’s look at an example. Say your cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is typically $100 per customer. Your boss wants you to run a Facebook ad campaign to generate new customers and gives you a budget of $1000. You run your first campaign and generate eight new customers from it. Was it worth it or not?

How to Measure ROI:

Measuring return on investment is pretty simple. You simply take the amount you spent (cost) and divide it by your returns*.

*The “returns” you’re measuring will vary based on your ad objective type. If your goal is to generate more leads, you divide your costs by the number of leads you generate. The same is true for customer acquisition ads, app install ads, website clicks, etc.

For example, say you spent $1000 on an ad campaign which generate eight new customers. To calculate ROI, take the amount you spent ($1000) and divide it by the number of new customers your generated (8). That would mean you acquired eight new customers at a cost of $125 per new customer. If your boss tells you your typical CAC is $100 per customer, you know that the return you got from that ad campaign is higher than your typical CAC.

ROI = Total amount of the investment / total return

If your ad campaigns are generating a lower return on investment than other strategies, it likely means you need to optimize your strategy to lower your costs. You can do this in a number of ways, like optimizing your ad copy or focusing your targeting strategy. Get more tips in this full-length ebook.

The example we just used assumed that you already know a benchmark to compare your campaign results to. But what happens if you don’t already have that information?

In this Facebook Ads Optimization ebook, we have brand new data that details typical ad spend by campaign type and region to give you a starting point for benchmarking the success of your ad campaigns.

Ready to get started? Download the ebook, “How to Use Data to Optimize Your Facebook Strategy” now.