When it comes to running ads in Facebook Business Manager, you want to be able to easily see if your campaigns are working. Different campaigns will have different goals, and success can be measured in a number of ways, but when it comes to eCommerce one of the most basic questions to ask is ‘are my campaigns making more money than they’re costing?’

To get a really quick snapshot, you can customise your columns in Facebook Business Manager to show a variety of different metrics. Watch this short video as I show you how to set up your default results to show the things that matter the most to you; in this example purchase conversion value, purchases and return on ad spend.

Start by visiting Facebook Business Manager and logging into your advertising account

When you first log in, the default display is based on performance, showing how much reach and impressions your ads have had. If your campaign is a conversion campaign it will display purchases as a default, but only if that’s a measure of success within the campaign. No matter what the campaign, you really want to see how many orders the Facebook campaigns have driven, or helped to drive. It’s also really handy to see demand (or Purchase Conversion Value as Facebook calls it) and ROAS.

ROAS (or Return on Advertising Spend) is a basic calculation to help you understand the value of your advertising spend. If you spent £100 in one month, and during the same month these campaigns generated a revenue of £500, then your return on advertising spend would be:

£500/£100 = 5:1 or 500%

A return on advertising spend of 5:1 indicates that for every pound spent on your ad, you get £5 in revenue.

It’s relatively simple to add in these extra columns, you can even set up a new Custom Column and save it as your default so you only need to do this once.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to do and make sure you always see the things that matter to you when reporting on your campaigns:

Remember, Facebook uses a different attribution model than Google Analytics so you may see a disparity between the platforms when looking at your results.

Facebook’s default attribution model attributes any order to Facebook, if the users either clicked or viewed the advert.

By default, Google Analytics uses the last non-direct attribution model which means that if a user clicked on a Facebook ad and came to the website, then left and came back using a Google organic search and then placed an order, by default, Google Analytics will attribute that order to Google organic search and not Facebook. It’s important to remember that there will always be the same total of orders, it’s just that Google Analytics may place some of them against different platforms, depending on where the customer clicked last. There’s no right or wrong model to use, it’s just something to be aware of. Without doing extensive incremental testing, it would be very difficult to know whether that customer would have placed an order through any channel if they hadn’t originally seen the ad on Facebook.