Accelerate your thought leadership by contributing to our blog. Join our community of experts now!
Enjoy reading this blog post written by our experts or partners.
If you want to see what Databox can do for you, click here.
Facebook is a marketing powerhouse.
With more than tens of millions of users logging in every day, Facebook stands out as one of the best platforms for marketers that want to target specific audiences and attract more leads to their website.
However, as Uncle Ben would say – “with a great audience comes great competition”.
Nowadays, more businesses than ever compete against each other to establish the best ad placements.
Not only that, but with Facebook constantly updating, staying on top of all the new changes can be extremely overwhelming. That’s why it’s important that you always have the latest data and information at your disposal.
Well, guess what – you’ve come to the right place.
Inspired by our recently published research report on the state of Facebook ads performance, we decided to put together another piece of original research based on the data collected from almost 70 surveys we ran in the last few years. As a result, we managed to pull out 24 statistics and insights that will help you plan your next Facebook Ads campaign better.
According to our research on the correlation between higher Facebook ads budget and sales, we found out that the vast majority (more than 90%) of the marketers surveyed believe Facebook ads are at least somewhat effective at generating sales. Only 8% said that Facebook Ads are “not effective” in generating downstream impact.
Many beginner Facebook marketers often wonder whether Facebook is still a strong organic channel for brands.
According to the marketers and brand owners that we surveyed – it definitely is.
More than 70% of marketers think that Facebook is still a powerful organic channel for brands, while a bit more than 25% believe it’s pay-to-play.
For more than half of the companies we surveyed, 15% or more of their overall lead flow originates from Facebook.
In addition, 40% of them believe that Facebook Ads is effective in lead generation, while 60% of them say that it’s crucial.
According to our Facebook Ads research, around 60% of agencies set their objectives to revolve around ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), which makes it one of the most notable metrics on the platform.
So how well does Facebook ROAS fare?
Most of our respondents said that their average Facebook ROAS was around 6-10x. Additionally, 5% of the companies stated that their ROAS is higher than 80x.
For about half of the surveyed marketers, the typical Facebook CPA is under $25. Around 10% said that it was over $75.
In general, there aren’t any real CPA criteria. This metric is mostly dependent on your exact type of campaign, industry, and target audience.
Facebook calculates CPC by dividing the total amount of spend against the total number of link clicks.
In the survey that we did in 2018, almost all of our respondents reported a CPC under $1. Two years later, CPC under $1 has been voted as a “realistic and good one” by the vast majority of companies. Most of them actually opted for CPC between $0.76 and $1.
Even though some researches show that CPC on Facebook has been heavily increasing since 2018 (due to the supply and demand of ad space) – it still remains under $1, on average.
Related: Reduce Your Facebook Ad CPM with These 10 Pro Tips
According to most of the marketers we spoke to, the average CPL for a Facebook ad falls between $0 and $25.
Understanding CPL is important since many marketers start questioning whether they are actually wasting money on Facebook ad campaigns.
The best way to check if the campaign is worth your while is to compare your CPL with the lifetime value of your customer.
A lot of SMB businesses have their worries when it comes to planning out a sufficient budget for Facebook ad campaigns.
And many believe that Facebook Ads aren’t worth pursuing if you don’t have a huge budget to support the campaign.
According to our study, eCommerce businesses usually have monthly Facebook budgets under $2,500 – so you can scratch this issue off the list.
While ad frequency may not carry the same importance as metrics such as ROAS, CPL, and CPR, it still plays a huge part in creating a successful ad campaign.
In fact, around 69% of marketers pay at least some attention to their Facebook ad frequency.
The best working Facebook ad frequency for two-thirds of our respondents is 3-8 times.
Companies are meticulously monitoring Facebook ads results – and the costs. During the last two years, half of the companies reviewed their Facebook ads performance daily, but also monitored Facebook ad costs daily.
Want to make sure your Facebook ads are performing and trending in the right direction? There are several types of metrics you should track, from costs to campaign engagement to ad-level engagement, and so on.
Here are a few we’d recommend focusing on.
Tracking these metrics in Facebook Ads Manager can be overwhelming since the tool is not easy to navigate and the visualizations are quite limiting. It’s also a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.
We’ve made this easier by building a plug-and-play Facebook Ads dashboard that takes your data and automatically visualizes the right metrics to give you an in-depth analysis of your ad performance.
With this Facebook Ads dashboard, you can quickly discover your most popular ads and see which campaigns have the highest ROI, including details such as:
And more…
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Facebook Ads account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Almost 40% of companies stated their FB ads need a couple of days to gain traction, while ad campaigns remain effective for a couple of weeks for more than half of respondents.
Additionally, 22% of our respondents reported that their campaign remains effective for even a few months, while only 7.3% said that the performance starts to drop after a couple of days.
Facebook A/B tests provide marketers with insight into the exact things they need to include in their ads to reach broader target audiences and enhance performance.
More than 57% of surveyed companies A/B test their Facebook ad campaigns every time.
More than 90% of marketers we surveyed said Facebook lead ads were beneficial for their business – while the top chosen incentive for lead ads was getting deals and offers.
When asked about whether boosted posts provide as good ROI as Facebook Ads, 76.7% of marketers said ‘No’, 16.3% answered ‘Yes’, while 7% of them weren’t sure.
Even though boosted posts do not provide a similar ROI to Facebook Ads for the vast majority of surveyed companies, more than half of them still boost posts at least monthly.
At the same time, fewer than 20% of the marketers said that they never run boosted posts.
More than 78% of the marketers we surveyed say that ads with CTA buttons perform significantly better than ads without CTA buttons.
The most used CTA is “Learn more” (and the best-working): more than 90% of the companies we have surveyed used “learn more” as CTA in their Facebook ads.
The CTA buttons that seem to be the least efficient are “Contact Us” and “Sign Up” with only 10% of marketers stating that those worked well in their companies.
When it comes to engagement, nearly 50% of the marketers we surveyed recommend posting on Facebook 2-3 times per week.
Only a small minority in this survey recommended posting several times a day – less than 10%.
Also, most of them say that shares are the most valuable type of engagement on Facebook, while the average engagement rate these days is between 2-3%.
The engagements that come second to shares are comments and clicks, while the least valuable types of engagement are reactions and likes.
In 2019, Facebook introduced quality ranking as a better alternative to the relevance score – it could provide marketers with better insight into the exact reasons why their ads are underperforming.
The quality ranking is important to the Facebook ad success for more than 92% of the surveyed companies.
Additionally, more than a third of those same companies found quality ranking extremely important.
While you might have had second thoughts about introducing remarketing in your business, this data may encourage you.
More than 76% of the respondents highly ranked their satisfaction levels with the results FB remarketing brought to their businesses.
The most used remarketing strategies were, respectively: Retargeting based on engagement, Retargeting email custom audiences, Shopping funnel retargeting, Dynamic retargeting on Facebook (DPA) and Time funnel retargeting.
The remarketing strategy that was used the least was Retargeting Based on Facebook/Instagram Shops.
Companies state that more than half of Facebook ads they’re running (57%) are TOFU. Top of funnel content also tends to perform the best.
While TOFU content seems to be the top performer, it only leads by a small margin to product/service promotions and blog posts when it comes to performance.
Companies leverage more video ads than image ads on Facebook – and for most of them, videos generate more clicks.
Picking the ideal audience size isn’t as easy as it may seem – both small and big audiences carry certain disadvantages.
For more than 40% of the marketers we polled, the best-working audience size for Facebook ads is 50,000+.
At the same time, 25.7% of them chose an ideal audience size to be between 10,000 and 50,000, while 31.4% opted for an audience below 10,000.
While this is definitely a close battle, Facebook Ads come out on top with more than half of marketers saying that their audience is more likely to engage with their ads on Facebook than on Google.
For most companies, Facebook still generates more traffic, leads, and sales than Instagram.
At least 70% of marketers chose Facebook as the more efficient platform in all three regards.
In the B2B race, Linkedin seems to outrun Facebook by a mile.
Linkedin is a go-to option for B2B and is more efficient in reaching business decision-makers for more than 70% of companies we surveyed.
Running a successful Facebook ads campaign is hard work, no matter how many years of experience you have under your belt.
From targeting the right audience to keeping track of the campaign’s performance, Facebook Ads can easily become extremely overwhelming.
Not only that, but with the constant changes and updates that Facebook is introducing, it doesn’t seem that the job will get any easier.
This is why a lot of marketers incorporate other tools to help them manage Facebook Ads.
One of these tools is Databox.
Databox can help you stay on top of these changes and make the most out of your ad campaigns. You will be able to target the right audience and present your results to the shareholders through impressive Facebook ad campaign dashboards.
By connecting your Facebook Ads account to Databox, you can monitor all of your important data in one place, track multiple data sources, monitor different campaigns, and set specific goals for your team.
Sounds interesting? Sign up for a free trial today and take your Facebook ads campaign to the next level.
Hey, we’re Databox.Our mission is to help businesses save time and grow faster. Click here to see our platform in action.
Are you maximizing your business potential? Stop guessing and start comparing with companies like yours.
At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Marketing Research Analyst at Databox. Being an experienced Strategic and Creative Planner, with more than 15 years of practice, Nevena is passionately dedicated to untying the knots and entanglements of marketing, sales, and human behavior in order to deliver understandable, useful, and actionable insights for businesses.
Get practical strategies that drive consistent growth