5 Meta Metrics You Shouldn’t Neglect As An Advertiser

If you’re working in the paid ads space, you no doubt spend a big chunk of your day sifting through the columns of your meta ad accounts, determining how to best optimise results based on a few key metrics. And if you’re not, well, this is awkward…👀

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When it comes to advertising metrics for e-commerce businesses, most ads managers get into the habit of checking their website purchases and ROAS on the regular. However, there are a few other ‘golden nugget’ metrics that often get overlooked, that can provide highly beneficial insights into how your ads are performing. 

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Familiarising yourself with these metrics is going to be what sets you apart from other advertisers, and inevitably make you an indispensable marketer. We’re not in the business of gatekeeping so, without further ado let’s get into these golden nuggets. 

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1) Video Hook Rate

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First up, let’s discuss video hook rates. Like the name suggests, this metric provides intel on just how effectively your video ads hook viewers in.Determining the video hook rate requires dividing your 3-second video plays by overall impressions. When it comes to goal setting, you ideally want to be aiming for a video hook rate of about 40%. 

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With people’s attention spans shrinking more by the day, it’s never been more important to grasp people’s attention in the first 3 seconds of your video. Plus, if they stick around for the first 3, they’re more likely to listen to what you have to say, which inevitably leads to a higher number of purchases. 

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As for how you should be starting your video ads off, well, there’s plenty of ways to hook people in, but our personal favourite at the moment is definitely the negative hook (e.g. ‘This is why your coffee tastes terrible’).  

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2) Click Through Rate

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CTR for short, this metric represents the number of people who click on your ad after seeing it. In other words, the number of clicks, divided by the number of impressions. When it comes to goal setting for this metric, it once again depends on various factors such as the competitiveness of the industry you're situated in.

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Take the beauty and apparel industry, which sits at an average CTR of 1.16-1.24% vs the employment industry which sits around 0.47%. As a business owner and advertiser, it can be highly beneficial to familiarise yourself with the CTR benchmarks to make sure your ads are achieving said averages and beyond. If they don’t, this likely suggests that there’s something about your content which is putting them off interacting with your ad.This is where you need to ask what changes you can make to your content to encourage them to click through to your website. For example, could you do a better job at addressing the pain points? Or maybe your copy doesn’t quite align with their level of awareness. 

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Sidenote, it may also be worth digging into your targeting to see whether your ads are delivering to an audience who are going to be interested enough in the product to click through to the website. 

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3) Cost Per Acquisition 

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Now this one may seem fairly obvious, but believe it or not we often have clients walk through the door only to tell us that their previous agency reported back on ROAS and purchases alone. Don’t get us wrong, these 2 metrics are crucial. However, keeping track of your client’s cost per acquisition is going to be how you determine whether your paid advertising efforts are running at a profitable rate for their business. We hate to sound like a broken record, but once again there isn’t a universal target CPA brands should be striving for. Instead, your CPA goals are going to look completely different depending on variables such as your industry, average order value, shipping costs, profit margins, the list goes on. So, this probably needs to be a broader conversation with your client to determine what success looks like. That said, vaguely speaking, the more you’re able to drop the average CPA, the better! 

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4) Average Order Value

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While the average order value is often a metric you’ll find in Shopify analytics, adding it as a custom metric to your Meta ad account can be beneficial for various reasons. If you’re not familiar with this metric, it essentially takes your overall website purchase conversion value from ads, and divides it by the number of website purchases attributed to ads. Looking at this metric 

allows you to gain valuable insights into your customers’ buying behaviour, including how many products new time customers are likely to purchase after clicking on an ad. If your ad AOV is looking a little too low for your liking, perhaps it’s a matter of shifting focus to ads that promote and link to more expensive products in your offering, such as bundles. 

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5) Frequency 

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Lucky last we have frequency, which refers to the number of times people see the same ad. When it comes to this metric, it’s all about finding the sweet spot. Too low a frequency and you risk customers forgetting about you, but too high and you’ll end up grinding people’s gears. The ideal frequency is also going to be dependent on the type of campaign you’re running. For example, if you’re running a top of funnel campaign targeting cold audiences that have never heard of you, you’ll want to make sure they’re seeing your ad at least a couple of times over a 30 day period vs going after a retargeting audiences who are already familiar with your brand and product and don’t need as much convincing. Overall, advertisers should be aiming for the 4-5 range. So, if you notice your ad performance beginning to drop, make sure to scroll on over to the frequency column and check where it sits. If it’s too high, your performance has probably dropped off due to ad fatigue meaning it’s time to get some new creatives up and running. Alternatively, think about whether you can beef up your audience in some way to go after more people, thus reducing the frequency. 

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There’s plenty more metrics where that came from but for now, make sure to add these ones to a customised column. 

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