What Are Good Facebook Ad Metrics?

You’re running Facebook ads, your budget is active, and the impressions are climbing - but do you actually know if your campaigns are working? Trying to figure this out inside Facebook Ads Manager can feel like you’re staring at an airplane cockpit with a thousand blinking lights. This guide cuts through the noise to show you which metrics actually matter, why they matter, and how to use them to make smarter decisions about your ad spend.

It's Not About More Metrics, It's About the Right Metrics

The single biggest mistake marketers make is getting overwhelmed by a sea of data. Facebook gives you hundreds of metrics, from post reactions to video plays at 95% completion. But obsessing over all of them is a fast track to analysis paralysis. More data does not automatically lead to better results.

The secret is to ignore almost everything and focus ruthlessly on the few metrics that align with your specific campaign goal. The numbers that matter for a brand awareness campaign are completely different from the ones that matter for an e-commerce sales campaign. Before you even look at a single number, you must be crystal clear on what you’re trying to achieve.

Tying Metrics to Your Campaign Objective

Every great advertising campaign starts with a goal. When you create a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, it forces you to choose an objective like Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, or Sales. This choice should be your North Star for measuring success. Let's break down the key metrics for each primary goal.

Objective: Brand Awareness & Reach

You’re not trying to sell anything directly here. Your goal is simply to get your brand in front of as many relevant people as possible, as cost-effectively as you can. You're building familiarity and staying top-of-mind.

• Impressions: The total number of times your ad was shown on a screen. This metric is all about volume.
• Reach: The number of unique people who saw your ads. This is arguably more important than impressions because it tells you the size of your audience. If your impressions are high but your reach is low, it means the same few people are seeing your ad over and over.
• CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): This is your efficiency metric. It tells you how much it costs to show your ad 1,000 times. A lower CPM means you're reaching people more cheaply. What's "good" varies wildly by industry and audience, but comparing CPM across your own ad sets can show you which audiences are more affordable to reach.
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad (Calculated as Impressions ÷ Reach). For an awareness campaign, a frequency of 2-4 per week is a reasonable target. If it gets too high, people may develop "ad fatigue," where they start ignoring or even getting annoyed by your ad.

Objective: Traffic & Lead Generation

Here, your goal is to pull people from Facebook or Instagram over to your property, whether it's a blog post, a landing page, or a lead magnet sign-up form. Simple clicks aren’t enough, you care about quality clicks from people genuinely interested in what you have on the other side.

• Link Clicks: The number of clicks on links within your ad that led to destinations on or off of Meta technologies. This is the most straightforward indicator that your ad is doing its job of driving traffic somewhere else.
• CPC (Cost Per Link Click): The average amount you pay for each link click. This helps you understand the direct cost of driving a visitor. Monitoring CPC helps you determine which ads and audiences are most efficient at generating clicks. A lower CPC is generally better, as it means cheaper traffic.
• CTR (Link Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked the link (Link Clicks ÷ Impressions). A higher CTR signals that your ad creative and messaging are compelling to your target audience. A standard CTR is around 1-2%, but this can vary. A low CTR is often the first sign that your ad creative isn't landing.
• Landing Page Views: This is a critically important, but often overlooked, metric. It measures how many people actually waited for your landing page to load after clicking the ad. If your Link Clicks are much higher than your Landing Page Views, it could point to a slow-loading website or people clicking your ad by accident. You're paying for those clicks, so you want to be sure users are actually seeing your page.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): If you’re running a lead generation campaign, this is your ultimate bottom-line metric. It tells you exactly how much you’re spending to acquire each new lead (Total Ad Spend ÷ Total Leads). This is what you should be trying to optimize for.

Objective: Sales & Conversions

This is where the rubber meets the road for most e-commerce businesses and performance marketers. Your goal is direct, measurable action that impacts revenue, such as purchases, subscriptions, or demo requests. These are the sharpest-end metrics and typically where you should focus most of your analytics effort if your business relies on direct sales.

• Purchases (or your primary Conversion Event): The total number of purchases (or sign-ups, etc.) attributed to your ad campaigns. This is the raw output you are aiming for.
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition/Purchase): The most important efficiency metric for any sales campaign. It measures the average cost to generate one sale (Total Ad Spend ÷ Total Purchases). You need to know your CPA and ensure it’s well below your product’s profit margin to be profitable. If you sell a $100 product with a $50 margin, any CPA above $50 means you’re losing money on that sale.
• Conversion Rate (CVR): The percentage of people who clicked your ad and then completed the desired action on your site. For example, (Purchases ÷ Landing Page Views) * 100. This tells you how effective your landing page and offer are at turning traffic into customers. A low conversion rate often signals an issue with your website experience, not necessarily your ad.
• ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): This is the holy grail metric for performance marketing. It measures the total revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising (Total Purchase Conversion Value ÷ Total Ad Spend). A ROAS of 3x (or "3") means you made $3 in revenue for every $1 you spent. A good ROAS is entirely dependent on your profit margins, but a common benchmark for e-commerce is aiming for 3x-4x to be healthily profitable.

Diagnostic Metrics: Figuring Out the "Why"

Simply knowing your main KPI (like ROAS or CPA) isn't enough. When a campaign isn't working, you need to use "diagnostic" metrics to figure out why. Think of yourself as a doctor: your ROAS is the patient's temperature. If they have a fever, these other metrics are the symptoms that help you find the cause of the illness.

Is Your Ad Creative the Problem?

If people aren't clicking, nothing else matters. These metrics tell you if your ad creative and copy are grabbing people's attention.

• CTR (Link Click-Through Rate): As mentioned before, a low CTR (under 1%) is a huge red flag that your ad isn't interesting to the audience you're targeting. Either the image/video is weak, the headline is boring, or the offer is unappealing. Test new creative immediately.
• Video Metrics (ThruPlay, Average Watch Time): For video ads, these are gold. Are people watching past the first 3 seconds? If your Average Watch Time is very low, it means your hook isn't working. If they watch but don't click, your call-to-action might be missing or unclear.

Is Your Audience or Targeting the Problem?

Sometimes your ad is great, but you're showing it to the wrong people, or you're paying too much to reach them.

• CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): If your CPM is skyrocketing, it could mean you've chosen a highly competitive audience. You're paying a premium just to get your ad seen, which will drive up your CPA. Try a different, broader audience to see if you can find cheaper impressions.
• Frequency: If Frequency is climbing above 5 or 6, you might be annoying your audience. This can lead to negative feedback, causing Facebook to show your ad less and increase your costs. Your audience may be too small, or your budget too large for it. Time to refresh the creative or target a new audience.

Is Your Landing Page or Funnel the Problem?

If clicks are high and cheap but sales are low, the problem likely isn't the ad itself - it's what happens after the click.

• Track the full funnel: Compare Landing Page Views to Add to Carts, Add to Carts to Initiate Checkouts, and Initiate Checkouts to Purchases. Where is the biggest drop-off?

Final Thoughts

Tracking the right Facebook Ad metrics transforms your marketing from a guessing game into a growth engine. It’s all about focusing on the numbers that directly reflect your campaign objective - be it awareness, traffic, or sales - and then using diagnostic metrics to understand why you're seeing those results. With this approach, you can stop feeling overwhelmed and start making educated decisions that drive real business impact.

One of the biggest reporting headaches we hear about is the time-wasting, manual work of jumping between Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and your sales platform (like Shopify or HubSpot) just to get the full story. We built Graphed to kill that spreadsheet drudgery. You can connect all your data sources in a few clicks, then just ask questions in plain English, like "Show me a comparison of Facebook Ad Spend vs. Shopify Revenue by campaign for the last 30 days." Graphed instantly builds you a live dashboard, so you can spend your time finding insights instead of exporting another CSV file.