Data reports don’t have to be scary! And actually, they’re vital to the successful growth of your business. Data is the end-all-be-all for making decisions with your marketing. In this episode, I’m walking you through all the data Team Hirsh tracks weekly for our clients. You’ll learn exactly what you should be tracking every week with ads, the difference between banked and booked sales, plus how to record your actual profit and make decisions moving forward. Our data reporting is actually pretty basic, but it can make or break your ads strategy. Listen to this episode for all the details!
Key Points:
1:44 The 12 metrics you should be receiving a report on every week for your ads
3:31 The difference between banked and booked results from your ads
5:02 The scary truth about gathering data that’s not scary at all!
6:49 How these weekly reports give you the data you need to make decisions about scaling your ads and some questions you should be asking as you scale
7:52 Discover how we create a funnel summary and learn how you can implement one to improve your own strategy.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:30]
In today’s episode, I’m going to share everything you need to be looking at weekly in your Facebook Ad Reporting. I pulled up one of our client’s weekly reports, and I’m going to share with you guys what we report and send to our clients every single week and what you should also be looking at weekly in your ads. And if you haven’t gone back and listened to the episode where I share what we track daily [Episode 9], I would highly suggest doing that, because it’s very similar. (But daily is an internal tracking thing, and then weekly, we report to our clients.) But weekly basically takes the summary of the week, reports on it, and then we also take those weekly reports, and we turn them into a summary of the month basically.
All right. Every week we report the following: We report total ad spend, total number of clicks that the ad received … Link clicks is important because there’s two different things Facebook reports, and link clicks means they actually clicked on the ad, not just that they clicked “read more” or “see profile.”
[00:01:00]
We report on the number of conversions. For a lot of our clients, that means number of webinar registrations, leads, video series, signups, challenge registration – anything that’s getting them into the top of the funnel … (Now, if they had multiple funnels, this will be two different weekly reports for the different funnels.) Then we report total number of purchases in the funnel. So, if it’s a webinar and whatever that call-to-action is, we report on how many purchases came in from that webinar.
[00:01:30]
Then we report the percentage of opt-ins who purchased, so our purchase conversion percentage. That means if 100 people came in the funnel and one purchased, 1% would be the answer there. This allows us to basically create what our ad spend should be the following month when we check-in on a call, because we can see trend of purchases basically.
[00:02:00]
Then we report the landing page conversion, which is basically how many people clicked on the page and out of that many people, how many people opted in. This allows us to see, did that drop down, did that go up, is that low, do we need to do anything? And then if you make tweaks, this would also give you the opportunity to say, “Did it improve our results over the last couple of weeks after we made this tweak?”
We do the average cost per purchase, so total ad spend for the week divided by how many purchases. [Then] what’s our cost per acquisition or cost per purchase, average cost per link click, and average cost per lead.
[00:02:30]
Then below that, we have a summary where we do the total sales. Sometimes we separate that out between banked and booked. What that means is some of our clients have payment plans, and so we want to see we banked this much. So, if I have a payment plan of 3 x $375 or something, I banked $375, but I booked 3 x $375 (and I don’t want to do the math on the spot, so I’m not!). We have banked and booked sales, so total.
[00:03:00]
Then we have profit on the banked sales, so obviously ad spend minus those sales, and then ROI, which reports in a percentage; and then same thing for the booked. That’s only if you have payment plans, but I do think it’s good [to report] because sometimes you’re breaking even on that first payment, if that’s how your funnel’s converting, but really you’re profiting because you’re going to get two more payments of the $375. You should be comparing those and what that equals, so banked sales and booked sales, and we compare the difference basically there.
[00:03:30]
That is essentially what we report on. Now, the only thing we will add in sometimes, if there’s a webinar, is the show-up rate to the webinar (which sometimes the client has to go in and fill out). We will also add in … show-up rate to the webinar. And then if there is a webinar that’s like, an application instead of a purchase, which we have a few clients doing that, we will do number of applications instead of number of purchases, and then cost-per-application instead of cost-per-purchases.
[00:04:00]
So I’m hoping … you guys could see data and stuff doesn’t have to scare you. It can be pretty basic, and it really needs to be just straightforward, because we’re just doing spend, clicks, landing page conversion, opt-ins, purchases. We obviously customize this for each funnel because we need to see all the key pieces in a funnel and what we need to report on. But it doesn’t have to be so complicated that you don’t know how to understand it.
[00:04:30]
In our weekly report that we send to clients, we link to the spreadsheet, but we also summarize these things for each funnel in an email and then add commentary, like, “We scaled to 15 audiences,” “We upped our daily budget because it’s converting so well, from $500 a day to $800 a day; and next week here’s what we’re doing.” So we give a little bit of commentary, but essentially what we want is our clients to just not have to go in the Ads Manager.
[00:05:00]
But it’s really important that all this data ends up in a spreadsheet, because what I can do is literally, like … Every month has a tab for our clients, and so I can go back a year in some of these cases for our clients … I can go back and see how something was converting a year ago. Or for our clients who launch once or twice a year, we just pull up that launch report and that spreadsheet from the launch, and we can make assumptions and projections based on those numbers.
[00:05:30]
This is super, super important, and then every month we summarize the total, too, of all those things. We make a summary for July, summary for August, summary for June – and then we have it in there, and we can compare it. That way, when a client makes a change or something … and this will happen. Something stops working exactly how it was [for example, and] we can say, “Okay, what happened? Where’s the drop-off?” It’s very easy to fix. Or we can really make a justification for saying “Let’s double our budget this month.”
[00:06:00]
This client that I’m looking at now, he wants to go up to $100,000 a month in spend by the end of the year. Well, we have to make sure as we scale that these numbers don’t start to skew when things start to stop working. For example, if the sales percentage conversion went down, when we scaled, we’d say, “Wow, is our quality of our audience not as good? Do we need to look at that?” Or if the cost per lead went up, but the cost per purchase went down, we could say, “Well, we can afford to pay that cost per lead because we’re getting the purchases – and as we scale we might have to pay a little bit more cost per lead.”
[00:06:30]
Data is so, so important, and those are the things we report on weekly. It’s in a spreadsheet. We can look back week after week after week, every single week, at the client’s on our roster. We can see trends, we can see patterns, and we can make decisions off the data. The data is what you make decisions off of. The data is the end-all-be-all. You might think something’s going to work great and it doesn’t, or you might think something’s going to suck and it doesn’t. Use this data, and either it’s you or your agency, somebody should be giving you a weekly report and you should be capturing this every week for every funnel that you run traffic to. We break it out in funnels. Sometimes the funnel has multiple campaigns. We put it all into a funnel, a summary of that funnel for that client.
[00:07:00]
Now, if you are running your own ads and you would like help, or if you don’t know how to do your weekly reporting … If you don’t have time for it … Because I’m guessing the majority of you, unless you are a marketer or a Facebook Ad expert, shouldn’t be doing your own marketing … And you want to see if the Hirsh Team can help you, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and book a call with our team to see if we might be the right fit. Thanks so much for tuning in today, guys.