Facebook Ads Custom Metrics

The Facebook Ads platform gives us lots of different ways to reach out to our target audience.  We can get them to engage with our profile or our posts on the platform, we can have them watch videos, they can fill out lead generation forms, or they can come to our website and fill out a lead form, make a purchase. All sorts of different stuff. Because we have all these different options, that also means there’s lots of different metrics that Facebook gives us access to in the ads interface so we can optimize our campaigns. Despite having tons of different metrics available, sometimes I still run into issues where I need a metric that Facebook doesn’t have available. But the good news is that they do allow us to create custom metrics in the platform so we can see all of the data that we want to see just by using a little bit of math and utilizing the metrics that are already in there. So today, I want to show you where custom metrics are, walk you through the builder, and give you a couple quick examples to get started. 

Hopping into the interface, I am on the campaign’s tab within Facebook ads, but you’ll be able to find this section from any of the different tabs that we have within Facebook ads. First thing that we want to do is come over to the columns drop down, where you’ll see that there are a number of preset columns and that I already have the PPC custom columns that I’ve created setup. We have a video that shows you how to create custom column saved sets in Facebook that you can check out on the top of your screen right now. 

Although it doesn’t specifically call it out, and it’s not as clear as I think some of us would like it to be for us to create the custom metrics in Facebook, we need to customize our columns and get to it from this editor. Here we have the same customized columns editor that we saw in the other video that I mentioned just a little bit ago. It’s got all the different metrics that you can see over here off to the left. You can scroll through them all in the middle here and check a box and then all the ones that I already have opted into are over here on the right, and we can customize those however we feel. 

But if we need to create a new custom metric that is going to be up here, right under this create custom metric link. Now we’re landed in a new builder where we can start to build some of those formulas that I mentioned

The first thing you can do is name your metric and I’m going to go through a couple different examples for this video. So the first one I’m going to do is average order value. And I usually truncate that name just into the three letters that we have here the acronym, so I’m just going to name it a AOV. 

Next, you can then select the format of the result that you want. It starts off with numeric and gives you an example of just 123 of basically saying this is a number that will show up. But you can also make it a percentage or a currency. Since average order value is going to be the average amount of revenue you gained per purchase, I’m going to select currency because it’s supposed to be telling me the dollar amount. But if whatever metric you want to create is supposed to be a percentage or just a numeric number, choose the format that makes the most sense for you.

You can then add a description which we’ve talked about before. Whenever you hover over any of the column names in Facebook, you will get a pop up that shows you a description of what that metric is and was trying to show you. If you want to have that little reminder to yourself as to what this metric is you can write in a description here. And you can see that you have up to 350 characters. For right now, I’m not going to do that because I know what AOV stands for. So I don’t need to do that. 

The next section is going to be the bulk of the functionality that we have with these custom metrics. This is where we’re going to build the formula that we have available. You’ll see that there’s the formula header, but then there are the different operators in mathematics that will kind of talk about how each metric is going to relate to the other metrics that you put in your formula and you can get the metrics in a couple of different ways. You can either start to type things in like clicks, and you’ll see that Facebook is bringing up a list of metrics that you have available to choose from here. Whether it’s a unique link clicks, outbound clicks, all link clicks, there are many different options that you have here. 

The other way that you can get the metrics that you want is to come over into this right hand section, and each one of these little carrots will have a drop down. You can see there’s popular metrics, performance, engagement conversions and custom conversions in this account. So if you want to go to popular metrics, you’ll see that there’s amount spent, impressions, reach, frequency, link clicks, cost per click, CPM, and CTR. So lots of the metrics that are popular, if you will. But then if you want to have other metrics, you can go into each of the different sections here for performance engagement, and add in any of the different metrics that are popping up that you want to have. Since I’m looking to have average order value, the two numbers that I need to get out of that, I need to get purchases and purchase conversion value. So rather than choosing this drop down and scrolling and trying to find the metric that I want, I’m just going to type it in over in the formula bar. I think that’s a little bit easier. 

To get the average revenue per purchase, I need to take the overall purchase conversion value divided by the number of purchases. So I’m gonna type in purchase conversion value. I got halfway there in Facebook brought it up to the top. I need to have this metric divided by so I’m just going to click on this operator and add it in. And then I’ll come back down here, get the cursor back in this box and type in purchases, select this metric, and now I’ve created the formula for purchase conversion value divided by purchases, which will give me the AOV that I’m looking for. 

The last option you have for each custom metric that you make is who can access that metric. Right now it’s set up to only me, meaning that my personal login to Facebook is the only one that will be able to see this AOV metric that I’ve just created. But if you wanted to have this be something that is business wide, if you want anybody within your business to be able to access this metric, you can choose from this drop down to set the sharing setting to everyone with access to this business. So I’m going to go ahead and do that because I think this is a valuable metric to have whether or not you’re in this specific account, it can be valuable in other accounts as well. So it’s easy to just create it once and then utilize it across all the different accounts that are within this manager. 

Once we’re finished, we’re just going to click create metric and now you’ll see that this customized columns selector has changed just a bit. There’s now an AOV option up here at the top, and it’ll show up just like this. It shows that it was created by me. It has purchase conversion value divided by purchases. So it does show you the formula specifically and it has the name. If I would have put a description that also would have shown up here, but you’ll see that you can also hover over and edit this and go right back to the builder that we were just in. 

But this is very easy to add this custom metric to the columns that we have chosen on the right. Once you create a custom metric, you just have to check the box next to it just like you would any other metric, and it will show up all the way down here on the bottom right. You can then order it however you want to just in the way that you would any other metric in Facebook Business Manager. 

The last thing that you’ll see here is that there is now a new section over here off to the left. Rather than having performance at the top there is now one that has custom metrics. And you can see that everyone with access to this business has the option below. Now you’ll see that it popped us right back up to the top of the selector here and AOV is the one that shows up. 

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to go through a second example. So we can have a couple different ways that we can see things here. So I’m gonna come back over to create custom metric and another metric that I like to have for my ecommerce accounts is I like to know the purchase rate. I want to know the number of times that somebody clicked on the link and came to the website and then eventually made a purchase. It’s effectively conversion rate, but it ends up being something that depending on how you have your campaign setup, it’s not always going to be the results. Right? Because you might be optimizing toward Add To Cart or some other optimization action. 

So I’m going to create purchase rate. So now I’ve given it the name that I want, now I need to pick the number format and this is going to be percentage, because it is the number of purchases divided by link clicks to my website. So I’m gonna choose percentage. This one, I’ll give a description just so we can see what that looks like once we get finished with it. 

And now we’ll set up my formula. As I mentioned, this is going to be purchases divided by link clicks. So again, I’m just going to type in the metrics here so they’ll show up a little bit easier, add in my operator, and then add link clicks. Now for this one, although I think that this is a very valuable metric that we can use in lots of different accounts and I think anybody in my business manager can use it, for the sake of this video, I’m going to leave this one as only you for the access access because I want to show you how that will show up differently in the column selector that we have later on. 

So now I have this all set up the way that I want it, I’m just gonna click create metric and now we can see just like before, we do have a new couple of options here. You can see now that there’s purchase rate that is up here, it still has the same thing. And now you can see that there is the description of conversion rate of users who clicked through to the website, which is what I typed in. So now you can see what that looks like. 

But then you’ll also notice that this is a nice separate section. It’s now an only you section compared to everyone with access to this business and under custom metrics, just like you can navigate to page post verse messaging verse media under engagement, you can now navigate to only you metrics or everyone with access to this business manager in this section over here. So you can click on either, obviously, we’re right up at the top, but you’ll see what I clicked on everyone with access to this business. It then scrolled past the only you metrics and now it’s showing me only the AOV metric that I’ve created. Just like with the AOV metric, all you have to do is check the box next to it and it’ll show up in the column selectors off to the right, and now we’ve got them just in the way that we want. 

So I’m going to go ahead and apply these columns and you’ll see them showing up all the way over here to the right. And you can see that this one is showing up as the percentage because I created it that way. And this one is showing up as a numeric value coming in. 

Overall, custom metrics are very easy to set up and they are highly customizable for what you want to see in your Facebook Business Manager on a day to day basis. So if you’re not finding the metrics you want, hopefully this video has given you the confidence to create those metrics rather than trying to utilize Excel or something like that. You’ll be able to see them now right within the interface. A couple of options that I showed you today are relatively easy metrics to set up. But if you have a more complex metric that you would like to see how to put it together, or if you have other suggestions for metrics that you think would be useful to all of the followers of the Paid Media Pros channel, please feel free to share and leave a comment below. 

Written by Michelle Morgan