So you got a lot of Reach on your ad. Who cares? Thoughts on true ad performance.

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With $100 you can reach thousands of people. That’s pretty amazing, right?

The marketing tools of today are within a click’s reach, and they boast incredible numbers. With Facebook, $50 and a click of that “Boost” button, you can reach thousands of people. And, you know what, tThere is something pretty cool about that.

It’s definitely not like the old media where your ad success meant you hoped a lot of cars drove by your billboard. You anxiously hoped a lot of people read the newspaper column where your ad appeared.

Ad Reach isn’t fake. And it’s not something you should entirely ignore. But, it’s ultimately meaningless without one fundamental key – the equation of converting goals requires much more than reach.

Reach is an important piece. But, it can’t be considered everything. In fact, reach can be a bad thing. If you don’t convert any real, measurable conversions while reaching a lot of people, you have a problem.

Let’s create a hypothetical ad campaign.

Say you’re a non-profit raising money to support Pneumonia outreach for needy children. You hope on Facebook, design a beautiful ad, designate a target audience and launch the campaign with a $1,000 budget over the next week.
Awesome. The ad came back. The results are in. What happened to that thousand bucks?

You reached 25,000 Facebook users.

That’s a lot of people. But, let’s be honest, you don’t really know if your ad actually made an impact. Did you accomplish a real result on the ad investment?

How can you know?

Well, to answer that question, let’s go back to the beginning.

Before you run an ad you should already have a conversion-type goal in place. This sort of goal is more complicated
than most people think.

In the scenario above, let’s say the non-profit has a good website with the capability to take donations. Our goal would then need to be created with something like this in mind: Dollars raised per dollars spent on ads.

In order to track this goal, you’ll need to have a fairly sophisticated setup. Here are your 2 basic challenges.

How do you know the ad actually drove donations, and other traffic to your site?

How can you track dollars spent from users who came from the ad?

These are the questions you need to answer before you even begin to know if you got results during your campaign.
Reaching 25,000 people on a Facebook ad means very little if you don’t properly answer these questions and integrate your campaigns properly to track conversions.

Do you have questions about ads, measuring your ad campaign or something else? Email me: joshua@staging.expiodigital.com