You’ve spent hours in brainstorm sessions, dollars on Facebook ads or third-party tools, and you’ve put on your creativity hat more times than you can count! Sounds like your campaign  has run its course -it’s time to take a step back and evaluate the success of your team’s Facebook campaign. Here we’ll focus on the 8 most valuable metrics for Facebook marketers. 

#8 Total Fans

This figure is the total number of “Likes” that your brand’s Facebook page boasts. You can measure the momentum of a campaign by recording fan growth that occurred throughout the duration of a campaign. For example, your page may have 5K Likes and grow to 20K Likes after a successful campaign. There are tools that promise to acquire a large number of fans or “Likes” quickly, but doing so often results in getting fans that are outside of your target demographic (gender, age, location). We recommend growing your Facebook fan base organically through your most influential customers, so that your following stays engaged overtime.

#7 Engagement

On Facebook, a brand’s total engagement is tallied up under the number of ‘people talking about this’. The number of people ‘talking about this’ changes on a day-to-day basis, much more frequently than a page’s total number of “Likes”. It is driven by fans actively engaging with your brand’s Facebook content through comments, likes, and shares. If the number of ‘people talking about this’ grows during your campaign – you have proof that your fans feel a connection, and of loyalty to your brand.

#6 Earned Media/User-Generated Content

Marketers can also calculate the number of user-generated posts that are created- including status updates, photo posts, and status shares. These are precious for two reasons. They maximize your marketing dollars, and they can quickly become viral among friend groups, growing your brand’s organic reach. Findings show that user-generated content is 35% more memorable, and 50% more trusted than other media. UGC can also be repurposed for a future campaign.

#5 Organic Reach vs. Paid Reach

Reach speaks to the number of individual people that saw your content. Organic reach is the number of unique people who saw your brand’s post in their News Feed or on your company page, without you paying for them to see it. This includes people who saw it from a story shared by a friend, or when that friend liked or commented on your post.Paid reach is the number of unique people who saw your post through a Facebook ad or a promoted post. Organic reach is what you should be striving for since brand loyalty will be earned, instead of bought.

#4 Impressions

Now, don’t confuse impressions with reach! An impression is the total number of times a brand’s message is seen, whether it’s clicked on or not. For example, if your message is seen by 100 different people and each person views the message 3 times – it results in 300 impressions for your campaign.

#3 Clicks

Clicks on Facebook are measured when a person interacts with a post in ANY way. An individual’s click is counted on Facebook when he/she likes it, comments on it, shares it, or clicks on a link within the post. A steady and high number of clicks is a sign that your content has traction and is propelling forward. Keeping track of clicks overtime is a key metric to measure success once your campaign has wrapped up.

#2 Click-Through-Rate

The CTR, or click-through rate, is the ratio at which people click your content compared to how many times they’ve seen it. This click can lead viewers to your website, a product purchase page, or a blog post. Ultimately, the CTR is a measurement of how well an your post (preferably an organic one) drives action. To get a quick calculation of the CTR of your campaign to date, you can divide the number of clicks by  the number of impressions your campaign efforts have driven. Recent studies show that the average Facebook display CTR is 0.04%, and the average  Facebook Newsfeed CTR is 2.09%.

#1 Conversions

The important thing to do here is to define what a conversion means for you and your brand. This is necessary so that you have a tangible baseline to measure against once your campaign ends. It could be a sale, an install, or a form completion. Regardless on what type of conversion you settle on, conversions are ultimately the metric that will turn into dollars and drive your business. Measuring conversions can be tricky, especially when your customers can find you in so many ways. Luckily, there are several third-party tools to help.