What are some good KPIs in Facebook?

Getting started with Facebook marketing? Are you currently advertising with Facebook Ads?

It’s a potentially powerful platform to grow your business. I’ve managed a $100K advertising budget, and saw first-hand what it could do.

When starting out, you'll want to define your organization's KPIs. Think of them as guideposts for the success of your campaign.

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. It’s easy. It gives an indicator of your performance relative to an objective.

By tracking your performance, you get better at hitting your targets. Agree?

What are some good KPIs in Facebook?

Here are some good KPIs for Facebook:

• Followers
• Engagement
• Reach
• Cost per action
• Ad frequency
• Impressions
• CPM
• CPC
• CTR

As you set out to establish your Facebook KPIs, it's important to heed the wisdom that Mari Smith, arguably the world's leading authority on Facebook marketing, shared with my colleague:

"Marketers throw good money at Facebook ads... And yet they are not clear on their goals and KPIs."

Common challenges to your Facebook KPIs

Engagement is more than posting content. You need to incorporate Facebook into your business model. Build your audience by integrating closely with your website. Make it easy for web visitors to follow you on Facebook and share content they find on your site.

Engagement rules the roost. Check out this article from Garett Sloane on the value of cross-platform marketing.

Best practices for Facebook KPIs

You kind of have to have eyes in the back of your head. Facebook is humming with activity as much outside your business hours as within.

Tracking your response rate is critical to maintaining top grades with your Facebook audience. Nothing kills a conversation like a 2-day time lag between messages.

Engagement rate is a potent measure of your audience’s health. It effectively measures your ability to spurn users to action. In a recent post, Michael Leander offered these benchmarks:

• Above 1% engagement rate is good.
• 0.5%-0.99% is average.
• Below 0.5% is poor.

Creating conversions through conversations

People don’t want to hear about your products all the time. Start by listening.

What does your audience really want to hear about? When they see your stuff, is it just more stuff cluttering their Facebook feed?

First, seek to prompt conversations. Ask questions, post photos, and be authentic. No sense in putting up a false first impression.

Second, post at the right times. If your audience is part of the morning coffee crowd, post early.

Third, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to save time and boost productivity.

Easy peasy, now to track those KPIs

First, it's important not to be afraid to experiment with Facebook. It may or may not be the right fit for your marketing efforts.

Certainly many businesses find success marketing on Facebook. I suspect you can, too, provided you adopt a data-driven approach.

This begins with defining your social KPIs. But it doesn't end there. Once you've done the work of figuring out which KPIs matter most, you'll need an accurate and real-time way to track them. Learn more about how Klipfolio can help with its Facebook Analytics reporting tool.

If you're not sure where to get started, try out the Facebook Engagement dashboard below. It’s pre-built, and an excellent starting point for monitoring your Facebook KPIs.

Get this dashboard