Facebook is rolling out new metrics and removing a litany of redundant and useless metrics from the Ads Manager.
The Facebook Ads Manager is messy. 
Too many metrics makes reading ad data a pain.
Thankfully, Facebook’s been listening. Facebook is removing redundant metrics, and adding metrics to help businesses and brands succeed.
You will notice that some of these metrics are labeled as “estimated’ or in “development” in the ads manager.
Facebook is adding the label “estimated” to be more transparent about their reporting methodology. Facebook measures ad performance by scaling samples in order to provide real-time results. When this method is used, Facebook will label the metric as estimated. Labels that are still in BETA will be labeled very obviously as “development,” indicating that they may change throughout this
A great example is the new “Ad Recall Lift” metric Facebook is rolling out. Since this metric works by polling a sample of the advertising audience, it is labeled as estimated. Given that it’s a new metric in BETA, it will also be labeled  development.

Over 20 Ad Metrics on the Chopping Block!
Bam, big changes are coming. 

The Redundant and Repetitive Ad Metrics 

Actions
Actions, people taking actions, cost per action. Actions as a metric is a sum of various actions users have taken on your ad. Since there are many different possible actions a user can take, this metric is not granular enough to derive business results.
Amount Spent Today
This is a redundant metric. If you want to see the amount your ads spent today, simply adjust the date range to today and use the Amount Spent metric.
Button Clicks
This is another redundant metric. Link Clicks, Event responses, and saved for later are all metrics tracked for your ads.
Carousel Card
This metric provided clicks and conversions for Carousel ads. Its redundant – you can already get clicks and conversions data from the ads manager.
Mobile App Actions Conversion Value
This is another redundant metric. You can use Mobile App Purchases Conversion Value instead.
Positive & Negative Feedback
Positive and Negative feedback as metric outputs are not insightful on their own. These signals are used as inputs for the Relevance Score metric which paints a clearer picture for understanding how well an audience is responding to ads.

The Useless Ad Metrics

Canvas Component Time Percentage
Who even uses this? …Exactly why this metric is a goner. Use the other Canvas metrics for view times.
Page Mentions, Cost per Page Mention
This is an outdated metric for your brand. Page mentions can’t tell if you’re receiving positive or negative feedback. If you care about following, use the page likes or page engagement metrics instead.
Social Reach, Impressions, Clicks, Unique Clicks
A social ad is supplemented with copy that’s familiar to all of us “3 friends liked this page.” However, advertisers don’t have control over when this sort of social ad is delivered. Since these metrics are not actionable for advertisers, Facebook is doing away with them. Instead, leverage traditional reach, impressions, and clicks for ad performance.
Page Tab Views, Cost per Page Tab View
This metric tells you how many views your Facebook page tabs received as a result of an ad. This metric is relatively useless. Page likes and page engagement are better indicators for Facebook page success.
Link Click Destination
This metric was built to help advertisers understand which clicks lead people off Facebook through an app’s deep link or to an app store or other backup link destinations. Due to new mobile operating system updates, this metric is being revisited. In the meantime, advertisers can use outbound links as a metric.

The New Kids

There’s probably many more new metrics that are in development and on their way to our ad manager accounts. Two metrics that already existed on the Ads Manager but are still in development are:
Store Visits
This is an interesting metric for physical retail and office locations. You can run Facebook ads that are built to drive store visits using a store locator.
Ad Recall Lift
This will be one of Facebook’s most powerful metrics if its rolled out right. This gives brands the ability to measure the recall-performance of their ads.
We’ll keep you posted as more metrics come out.
Get the rest of your marketing friends up to speed by sharing this article with them  
 

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Monthly Revenue

One of the most important metrics to measure is your monthly revenue. This can be calculated by multiplying the price of your products or services by the quantity you’ve sold over a particular month.

This is a very important metric to calculate as it allows you to assess the performance of your business month after month. By calculating your monthly revenue you can analyse trends such as dips in revenue during a particular period, prompting you to dig deeper to find out exactly what’s causing that drop. On the other hand, you could also spot a welcome increase in revenue, which should lead you to find out what caused it and, more importantly, how to make it happen again.
By working hard to replicate positive results you’ll be laying the groundwork for a sustainable business – one that draws in more revenue each month. You would also need to plan your revenue forecasts around this figure. This guide will help you out in preparing your forecasts with the help of a few additional bits of information, such as costs and profit margins.

Churn

If your business gets repeat customers, you should know who they are by calculating repeat custom. This metric goes both ways – you will also need to calculate the churn, meaning the number of customers that stop buying your product. This figure will give you valuable insight into whether or not your clients are satisfied with your product.
If clients are dropping out after making the first purchase, for instance, it could indicate that something’s not quite right with your product. At this stage you should focus your efforts on improving your product rather than try to attract new customers.

How? Ask!

You could get all the answers you need by speaking to both your existing and past clients and asking questions along the lines of:

“We really miss you! Is there something that we can do to get you back?”

“Would you suggest our product to your friends and relatives? If yes, why would you do so?”

You could even go a step further and ask for feedback before the client walks out on you, just like Starbucks did in coffee shops across the world:

If you don’t happen to have coffee shops in every corner of the globe, you can still get in touch with your clients to ask questions and get feedback by sending them a short email questionnaire, for instance. Online tools like Surveymonkey or Surveygizmo make this quick and simple.
You also have another option that’s closer to home – you can get customer feedback through your site itself! Check out Olark or Qualaroo – these tools make it easy for you to ask questions to your website visitors as soon as they go to specific web page or behave in a certain way.
Most importantly: If you really want to lower your churn you need to better understand your customers. Forget about what you think about your company and start thinking about it from your customers’ perspective. What do they want from you? Which problems are they trying to solve? Does your product address these problems? Find out, and modify your product accordingly.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-off exercise, but a process that should be implemented in an on-going manner. It’s crucial if you’re looking to build a sustainable business in the long run.

Lifetime Value

The client lifetime value (LTV) applies for businesses that either sell a subscription based service or get repeat customers. It is the projected revenue that you will get from each customer for his lifetime. There is a simple way in which you can work this out. Take the average revenue per sale and then multiply it by the number of repeat transactions and average retention time. The diagram below will make this easier to wrap your head around:

So let’s say that you get a total number of 2000 repeat customers per year for your online store that spend on average $200 for every transaction that they will make. The average number of transactions per year is 3 whilst the retention rate is 2 years. To work out their LTV you need to do the following:

In this case the LTV would be $1200. So in other words each customer is getting you $1200 before he stops buying from your site.
LTVs vary according to the type of traffic that you are attracting to your site. For example you can compare different LTVs for the different clients that you get from online marketing campaigns and then focus on those that have a higher LTV. You can also compare the different LTVs based on geography – which regions have the highest LTVs? Once you find that out you can start focusing your strategy on attracting more clients from those regions.

Conversion Rate

This metric will help you to measure the success rate of your website. In order to improve your website you need to know how many sales or leads you’re generating from your current web traffic. If for example you want to work out the sales conversion rate for your website you will use the equation below:

This will give you the percentage of unique visitors that are making a purchase from your website. In order to improve your conversion rate you will have to analyse every step that each visitor is making before purchasing your products.
A lot of CMOs are discouraged when they calculate their conversion rate because the real situation would be that from, say, 100,000 unique visitors they can only convert something below 2% into sales. However, keep in mind that not all of your visitors are ready to buy and most of them are still at the beginning of the buying cycle.
You should look at it this way: if you improve your conversion rate by just 1% you will increase your sales by 50%. So rather than discouraging yourself, focus on continuously improving your conversion rate by optimising your website. These tips will help you to convert more sales from your website.

Cost per Acquisition

This metric is one of the most important ones that is ignored by a lot of businesses, unfortunately. The cost per acquisition is the price that you have to pay to acquire a new customer. This means that it measures the cost of advertising to convert a visitor into a customer.
You need to know exactly how much a customer is costing you when using different advertising channels, such as PPC (pay per click) advertising. This will give you a clear indication on whether you should continue to invest in advertising or else use other means to generate business that will cost you less money.
So let’s say you have an option of choosing whether to continue running PPC ads or invest in SEO – what you would need to do is to calculate how much it is costing you to acquire a new customer through these channels. With PPC, this is quite easy to calculate since all you need to do is to divide the total cost of your PPC account by the number of sales that you’ve generated for that particular month.
On the other hand, to calculate the CPA from SEO you need to calculate the monthly service fees of your web-marketing agency and any additional costs that you might incur when running an SEO campaign and divide them by the number of transactions generated from SEO for a particular month. The latter can be easily obtained by logging into your Google analytics account and finding the total number of transactions generated by organic traffic. Find this under the Acquisitions > Keywords tab as shown below:
 

And there you have it!

The metrics above should keep you focused on increasing your sales. Do not see them as separate data sets – they all tie in to the same goal. It is important that you share this data with your team members so that they will be able to visualise the bigger picture.
After all, the more they know about the business, the better it is for them to come up with ideas on how to improve the process of acquiring new customers!

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Quality vs Quantity Search Engine Traffic

There was a time when getting your site to rank in Google was pretty easy. All you needed was a bunch of links from other sites pointing to your website, alone with the time it took to stuff your web content with keywords that you wanted to rank for. One of the quickest ways to get links to your site was to create multitudes of articles (which would usually be copied from other sites) that would include a number of keywords in them. You would then submit these articles to article directories.
A common procedure was to use an article, submit it to a site and then slightly modify a few sentences here and there and resubmit it to another site. This process was repeated over and over again, such that by the end of it, the article won’t make much sense anymore. Why was it done? Essentially, everyone tried to cheat Google and other search engines into thinking that the articles posted were unique. An alternative quick-fix for getting links to your site was to spam blogs and forums with a link back to your site. A high traffic keyword would be used to attach the link to your site, also known as anchor text. Check the example below:

This was the norm, done by thousands in order to rank highly in Google for that specific keyword. To outrank competitors a lot of companies enrolled in cheap link building services that were getting them the results they wanted in the short run.
Is this all sounding familiar? If you’ve ever done some or most of the above, that’s probably the reason behind your fall in Google rankings. The downside is that in order to repair all the damages it is going to cost you quite a lot of time and money. But don’t fret, this is probably the best investment you’ll ever make for your business. Why will it take time? Simple – you will need to remove each and every link that you have in these types of sites. Then, together with your web marketing team, you will have to start attracting good quality links to your site. The longer you take to do this, the more it will cost you in the long run. Keep in mind the online sales that you would be losing on a daily basis.
Remember this: unfortunately a lot of companies focus their web marketing strategies on quick wins. The longer it takes you to understand that there are no quick wins with search engine optimisation, the more money it’s going to cost your business.  But enough about that. The underlying lesson here is to shift your strategy and focus more on quality rather than quantity. This is the basic principle to understand all Google updates which primarily focus on web spam. You have to relate this to both content and link-building since they are the two main issues that directly affect your Google rankings.

Fighting Web Spam

Google is quite clear on this: Any and all spammy websites are banned from ranking in their search engine. Google’s main focus is on the user experience. This means that if a website doesn’t offer value to the reader it will simply fall in the rankings. As mentioned before, you have to see this from two different perspectives: from the content side and from the link-building side. In terms of content these are the main issues that will negatively affect your rankings:

Keyword Stuffing

When you make excessive use of the same keyword in the website’s content or meta tags (the top part of the html code of a web page that includes the page’s title and description) with the intention to attract more traffic to your website. This will lose the flow of the content and adds no value to the reader. Below is an obvious keyword stuffing example just to give you a better idea:
“Yes, we do have white cups and our cups are white and they are cups and the other white cups are not as good as our white cups because cups in general are white and our cups are white too”.
This sentence will get your site to rank for the keyword “white cups” and potential customers landed on your website. Once they read the above sentence, however, they will most definitely go and buy from another site. Which makes one very valid point: there is no point of attracting visitors to your site if you’re not managing to sell your products. From now on, before uploading content to your site, make sure that it adds value to the reader. Just for a moment, forget about ranking in Google and focus on producing amazing content that your readers will find useful.

Duplicate Content

This refers to the content on a website that is used more than once repeatedly, or else is copied directly from other sites. The main intention here was previously meant to increase the kind of content that helped in improving the rankings in Google. Not anymore though. If you really want to rank in Google the content on your website has to be unique. If you have any duplicate content, either that which is stolen from other sites or that which is repeated over and over again throughout your website, Google will penalise your site.  To solve this problem your web marketing team should remove any duplicate content from your website and publish fresh new content in it’s place.
The way forward in terms of SEO is to focus on one basic principle in everything that you do. Make sure that all the content that you produce as a company will be valuable to the reader.  Whether it is a feature list or a blog post, ask yourself: does this help my readers? If not, you’ll be better off not posting it at all. After all, you will only be damaging your brand. This also relates to link building – Make sure that you know what techniques your web marketing agency is using. If they’re trying to get links the easy way, you’re probably getting low quality links which will only harm your rankings.

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