Facebook Advertising Glossary
Marketing your brand, product or service on Facebook using paid campaigns opens up a whole new world of advertising and therefore, a whole new list of technical terms that need to be understood.
The definitions of the standard elements to Facebook advertising are listed below. This list will be updated accordingly as this platform is forever changing and aspects to this form of advertising are constantly being added and adjusted.
General Terms:
Business Manager Account: free tool developed by Facebook to allow businesses and agencies to securely manage their company's Pages, ad accounts, catalogues and pixels in one place for their Facebook and Instagram accounts, without sharing login information or being connected to their co-workers on Facebook.
Call-To-Action (CTA): button located at the bottom right hand corner of the ad which encourages consumers to take a desired action such as ‘Book Now’ or ‘Learn More’.
Split Testing or A/B Testing: marketing strategy where two elements of an advertising campaign are tested against each other to analyze which one will deliver the best results. It is important that only one element of each ad variant is changed so that the results can be compared accurately.
Facebook Pixel: code that is placed on your website. This code collects data that helps you to track conversions from Facebook ads and helps them to optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.
Sales Funnel: marketing strategy designed to capture users' interest and nurture them at each stage of the buying process until they're ready to purchase. Different sub-strategies can be implemented at each stage of the funnel but the key aspect of a sales funnel is to ensure that the messaging is relevant to the user at each individual stage.
Ad Types
Image Ads: allow you to promote your brand, product, service using an image.
Video Ads: allow you to promote your brand, product or service using a video.
Instant Experience Ads: full screen experience that opens after someone clicks your ad on a mobile device. Once a user has opened up the instant experience ad, they can watch videos, swipe through photos in a carousel, fill out forms and explore images with tagged products.
Dynamic Ads: ads that automatically display the products to users who have expressed interest on your website, in your app or elsewhere on the Internet. Upload your product catalogue to Facebook and set up your campaign once and it will continue to deliver images of those products to the relevant audience members. Ensure that you always update your catalogue and pricing to keep your dynamic ads optimised.
Carousel Ads: allows you to display 2 or more images and/or videos, headlines and links or calls to action in a single ad. Audience members who see your carousel ad can then scroll through the carousel slides by swiping on mobile phones or tablets or by clicking the arrows on a computer screen.
Insta Story Ads: ads that show in amongst your Insta Stories on Instagram. They run separately to all other types of ads and have different creative and technical requirements.
Audience Terms:
Cold Audience: any audience that has not seen or engaged with your brand, product or service before.
Warm Audience: any audience who is aware of your brand, product or service and/or has engaged with you before on your social media platforms or your website.
Hot Audience: custom audience of people who have engaged with your brand in a significant way such as spending a significant amount of time on your website, making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter.
Custom Audience: targeted audience created from an existing source of consumer data such as an email subscriber list, current Facebook & Instagram page followers or audience members who have visited your website, for example.
Lookalike Audience: audience of people who are similar to (or who "look like") any of your current audiences. For example, a lookalike audience of website visitors will be an audience of people who are similar in terms of their demographics, interests and online behaviour to the people who have recently visited your website.
Targeting Terms:
Targeting: the process of defining an audience for your ads.
Cold Targeting: target audience based on the demographics and interests of consumers who are identified as part of your target market.
Warm Targeting: target audience consisting of custom or lookalike audience members.
Retargeting: target the same audience members who have engaged with your brand, product or service online with the same ad or a new ad.
Ad/Marketing Objectives:
Brand Awareness: focused on reaching new customers to introduce your brand, product or service to and/or improve brand, product or service awareness among users who are already familiar with you. This is also helpful to use when launching a new product or service.
Reach: focused on delivering your ad to as many people in your target audience as possible
Engagement: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are most likely to engage with your ad and/or your Facebook/Instagram pages.
Lead Generation: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are most likely to fill out a lead form. This type of ad allows advertisers to promote a form requesting contact information from interested audience members who can complete the form without leaving the platform. This form can be auto-filled, providing a quick and easy way for users to submit their information to the advertiser.
Traffic: focused on driving as many people as possible to a chosen web page on your website.
Video Views: focused on delivering the ad to audience members who are most likely to watch your video ad.
App Installs: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are mostly likely to download your app.
Store Visits: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are mostly likely to visit your physical store. This ad is linked to Google or Apple maps and provides directions and navigation to your store for audience members who click on the ad.
Messages: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are most likely to message you via Facebook Messenger after seeing the ad.
Conversions: focused on delivering your ad to audience members who are most likely to perform a certain action of your choice such as sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product on your website or register for a course etc.
Catalogue Sales: focused on displaying items in your product catalogue that has been uploaded to Facebook to relevant and interested audience members.
Important Performance Metrics:
Impressions: the number of times your ad was delivered to your target audience.
Reach: the number of people who saw your ads at least once.
Engagement: includes all interactions taken by audience members with your ads while they were running. Engagements include reacting to, commenting on or sharing the ad, claiming an offer, viewing a photo or video or clicking on a link.
Relevance Score: score from 1 – 10 given to your ad which is calculated based on the positive and negative feedback Facebook expects an ad to receive from your target audience. The more positive interactions Facebook expects an ad to receive, the higher the ad’s relevance score will be and the more people you ad will reach.
Ad Recall Lift: an estimate of the number of people who may remember seeing your ads and therefore remember your brad, product or service, if asked, within two days of the ad being delivered to their feeds. This metric is based on the actions taken by the audience members after seeing your ad such as Googling your company name or relevant topics related to your industry, brand, product or service.
Link Clicks: the number of clicks on links within the ad that led to destinations on Facebook itself (e.g. your Facebook page) or links that have taken the user off Facebook such as your website. This metric tracks all links clicks by audience members, even those link clicks which can been clicked on more than once by the same audience member.
Unique Link Clicks: the number of individual audience members who performed a link click.
Video Plays at 50%: the number of times your video was watched at 50% of its length. This metric includes plays that skipped to this point.
Adds to Cart: the number of add to cart events tracked by the pixel on your website after the audience member was delivered the ad to their feed.
Add Payment Info: the number of add payment info events tracked by the pixel on your website after the audience member was delivered the ad to their feed.
Cost per Checkout Initiated (CPCI): amount spent per checkout initiated. This is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on running the ad by the total number of initiate checkout events tracked.
Purchases: the number of purchase events tracked by the pixel on your website after the audience member was delivered the ad to their feed.
Outbound Link Clicks: the number of clicks on links that took audience members off Facebook-owned platforms such as your website.
Cost per Result (CPR): the average cost per result from your ads. This is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on running the ad by number of results tracked. The cost per result indicates how cost-efficiently you achieved the objectives you set in your ad campaign.
Cost per Lead (CPL): amount spent on each lead received during the campaign. This is calculated by dividing the amount spent on running the ad by the total leads tracked.
Cost per Click (CPC): amount spent on each click on the ad by an audience member. This is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on running the ad by the total number of clicks tracked.
Click-through-rate (CTR): the percentage of times audience members saw your ad and performed a click. This is calculated by dividing the total number of impressions by the total number of link clicks and multiplying that result by 100 divided by 1.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): measures the revenue generated compared to the money spent on the advertising campaign. This is usually represented as a percentage and can be calculated by dividing the profit received from the campaign (revenue – ad spend) by the total amount spent on running the ad and multiplying that results by 100 dividing by 1.
Bounce Rate: the percentage of people landing on your website and leaving the site without visiting any other pages.
