Dig deeper: B2B audience targeting: Meta Ads as an alternative to LinkedIn
2–3. Engagement KPIs: Hook and retention rates
Another area where Meta Ads could do better is the engagement stage of the funnel.
If you ask me, when it comes to engagement, the most important goal is to catch users’ attention in a crowded feed or string of Stories and Reels. What they do next (from leaving a comment to purchasing) is up to the next stages of the funnel.
When your ad is catchy enough, it gives you a chance to:
Deliver your message.
Push your audience to complete the action you want them to take.
These two items can be calculated very easily using Meta Ads’ custom metrics:
Hook rate: Determine if your ad is catchy enough to stop users from scrolling and grab their attention.
Formula:
Hook Rate = 3-second video plays / Video plays
Retention rate: Check if your ad is well-crafted to deliver its message and encourage users to act (though this mainly ties into CTR and conversion rates).
Formula:
Retention Rate = ThruPlays / 3-second video plays
Using these two metrics, you can determine whether to improve your ad’s hook or body. This will help you create better-performing assets at a lower cost since you’d only need to adjust one part.
However, Meta Ads doesn’t offer the same depth of raw KPIs for images as for videos, which is unfortunate. Despite using it internally, a metric like dwell time could easily resolve this issue, but Meta Ads has yet to make it available to advertisers.
In the meantime, I don’t see a solution other than using CTR to determine whether an image engages well.
4. Traffic KPI: Quality visit rate
Like the engagement stage, the traffic stage of the funnel could benefit from additional KPIs.
Once your ad grabs users’ attention, the goal is to prompt them to take action. While Meta Ads provides various click-based KPIs to measure this, they tend to be fairly shallow.
Meta Ads doesn’t tell you whether that click was valuable: Did those users bounce? Did they consume your content in-depth?
You will not know unless you have enough typical conversions (purchases, leads, etc.).
In those cases, how do you assess performance? The good news is that you have everything you need to do so, and easily!
Your first goal should be to define what is a quality visit. One way to look at this is to consider users who, once they reached your website, did one or more of the following actions:
Visited at least two pages.
Scrolled all the way down to the bottom of your landing page.
Spent more than 30 seconds on your landing page.
Played a video on your landing page.
With these simple triggers, you can set up a custom conversion in Meta Ads. This allows you to optimize your campaigns with the new KPI and evaluate your landing page’s performance using the quality visit rate.
Here’s the formula:
Quality Visit Rate = Quality Visits / Landing Page Views
I recommend using landing page views to filter out clicks that weren’t tracked due to issues like cookie consent or ad blockers. This way, you’ll have a reliable KPI for your analysis.
Dig deeper: 3 powerful micro-conversion strategies for paid social
5-6. Performance KPI: Lifetime value and benefits
While those KPIs may seem like a stretch since you typically need an analytics or CRM solution to access that data, it’s disappointing that Meta Ads doesn’t fully leverage its integrations with tools like GA4, HubSpot and Salesforce to showcase its true business value.
Still, I believe every PPC should periodically review these metrics. Here are the formulas you need to calculate:
Lifetime Value (LTV) = average order value x total transactions / unique customers
Lifetime Benefits (LTB) = LTV x profit margin
I wrote an entire article on this exact topic, so feel free to check it out and dive deeper into LTV.
Meta Ads offers a robust set of KPIs for campaign management, but advancing your measurement and optimization capabilities requires the creation of more sophisticated metrics.
KPIs such as net new reach, hook rate, retention rate, and quality visit rate, along with more complex metrics like lifetime value, provide deeper insights into campaign effectiveness, allowing for more informed decision-making beyond just ROAS or conversion rates.
Hopefully, Meta will recognize the value of integrating these metrics directly into Ads Manager. In the meantime, savvy PPCs can leverage these advanced KPIs to stay ahead of the competition.
Dig deeper: Here’s why PPC now looks more like paid social and what it means
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