How to run great Facebook campaigns without analytics

You can go a long way running Facebook ads without analytics if you use common sense.

First of all, you must be clear on your campaign target. A campaign can only have one of two goals: create awareness or create sales.

Creating awareness means the goal of the campaign isto be visible to your target audience, but not in a way that leads to sales. There can be different reasons you do not want to sell via Facebook. Perhaps it is not possible to sell your product or service online. It could be that the campaign is part of the first step of a sales funnel, where the purpose is to build awareness or trust.

This means the actions you want your users to take are not so significant because you aim to influence them or perhaps engage them in dialogue.

However, as part of your sales funnel, you will eventually need to get the users away from Facebook and onto your own site. It is therefore essential that you do this as soon as possible in your funnel set-up.

You want to do this because you want to own the users you reach. Getting them to your own site allows you to do remarketing and perhaps get their e-mail address as well. So the Call to Action should always be to get a user to your site. Remember that your interest, in this case, is the opposite of Facebook’s; they will do what they can to include your active ads in their sphere.

Create sales

The other goal of a Facebook campaign is to drive sales. Your goal here is much more evident than the first target. The campaign must be part of a funnel (via your site) that leads to sales.

Facebook sales work best for impulse-driven sales where the presentation of your product is so strong that it can drive sales itself.

Insider tip

We have seen a lot of data from many sites, and Social Media is one of the worst performing platforms when it comes to sales results. Traffic from Social Media has a lower conversion rate than other platforms (the best are SEO and Direct).

Every business is unique, so you should never generalize, but as a rule of thumb, you should not use Social Media as a sales platform. If you do, Facebook is the best of them, and Instagram and Twitter are the worst in converting users into customers.

Minimal Analytics Requirements

You don´t want to do Facebook entirely without analysis measurements, but you can go a long way with a few steps.

If your goal is to create awareness, then you are interested in reach. This is how many people see your ad or post. This is easy to check on your Facebook posts. You are also interested in how many clicked onto your site. They have much more value to you. You can get this number from Google Analytics.

If you are interested in sales, you are a little more in the dark when it comes to data. You can get data on the traffic from Social Media, but since there are few converts, it will probably not tell you much. You will soon discover that Facebook and Google define a conversion differently — funny enough — in ways that favor their own platforms. So their numbers don´t match.

Unless your business is very different from the majority of businesses, you won’t be able to sell much via Facebook traffic, and it is confusing and biased if you try to measure the available data yourself. Our advice is not to spend too much time analyzing it.

Your time is probably better spent making more content or reflecting on how different posts work when you compare them to each other. This will give you indications on what messages work best in your engagement process. You could say, if you focus on quality, then quantity will follow.

Originally published at www.canecto.com.