So, you’ve shelled out some money to make a Facebook Ad for your practice. Nice one — about 2.8 million people use Facebook every month, so you have a huge number of users to build your audience from.
But, if you’re new to social media advertising, managing your Facebook Ads can feel overwhelming at first. Facebook Ads Manager has tons of tabs and columns that show valuable data, but what are you even supposed to do with those numbers.
Let’s start with a simple yet powerful Facebook Ads stat that you can use as a baseline for your ad performance — click-through rate (CTR). We’ll explain the importance of CTR and how to check it in five easy steps.
What Is Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Why Does It Matter?
Click-through rate (CTR) is an advertising metric that represents an ad’s ratio of clicks to impressions (views). It comes in the form of a percentage showing the portion of people who received your ad that clicked on your call-to-action (CTA).
Advertisers keep an eye on CTR because it suggests how effectively an ad convinces people to do what it tells them to. When you have a higher CTR, you have more people who thought you have something worth selling because of your ad.
Facebook measures CTR using a formula that doesn’t skew numbers based on random clicks or refreshes. It measures only the people who click on your ad’s main link, as opposed to any kind of click. The formula also uses impressions, or the number of unique views, rather than views in general. This math leads to a more accurate number to use in your analytics.
Find Your CTR in Five Steps
You can take a look at your CTR in Facebook Ads Manager by following these five steps:
1. Log In to Facebook Ads Manager
First things first — log in to Facebook Ads Manager. If you’re already logged in to Facebook, you’ll go straight to the Facebook Ads Manager page from that link.
2. Go to the Ads Tab
Facebook Ads Manager has five main tabs — Account Overview, Campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads. Let’s go to the Ads tab.
3. Choose Your Timeframe
Facebook will show the average CTR for the time range you set in the drop-down menu right above the Ads tab. Pick a timeframe that matches your analytics style.
For example, you can set the timeframe for your ad’s entire lifespan to understand its overall performance or month-by-month to compare monthly performance. Try different options until you find something that helps you crunch your ad numbers.
4. Set Up Your CTR Column
By default, Facebook Ads Manager doesn’t show the CTR column. Let’s fix that by going to the Columns dropdown right below the Ads tab and choosing Performance and Clicks.
5. Find Your CTR
Scroll right until you see the CTR (All) column. You’ll find it between the Clicks (All) and CPC (All) columns.
