Facebook Campaigns for Marketing Analytics

This article aims to summarise attributes available in any facebook campaign at the time of configuration. Having an overview of campaign attributes available is handy in understanding what can be analyzed,configured and managed within facebook campaigns. Depending on your role, you can go through the article to achieve the following objectives:

Data Analysts: If you are a data analyst, you can use the attributes below to understand what are your possible dimensions of analysis.

Data Scientists : If you are a data scientist, you can use the attributes to identify features for your data science model.

Campaign Managers : If you are a campaign manager, you can use the attributes as options available to configure,manage and optimise your campaign.

 

Facebook Campaign

Facebook Ads Manager  is used for creating campaigns. The first step in creating a campaign is to select its Objectives. Clicking on a Create Campaign button, opens selection choice for objective.

Campaign attribute summary

Attribute summary of campaign is given in the table below:

Facebook Bidding Strategies

Facebook Ad ecosystem is Auction based. Advertisers compete for ad space ( placement ). Facebook provides the following strategies to accomplish the Ad auctions.

Facebook Budget

Budget is the total amount you want to spend for the campaign.  Budget can be configured at two levels.

1. Campaign Budget : Budget for entire campaign.
2. Ad Set Budget : Budget for individual Ad Sets within campaigns.

Campaign Budget

Campaign budget applies to all Ad Sets within a campaign. It can be set on a daily basis or lifetime of campaign basis.

 

Ad Set Budget

Ad Set budget is defined at an Adset level. After you create a campaign, you can choose whether you want to create budget for Ad Set. It is optional. If it is not set, then campaign budget will determine Ad Set Budget.

Facebook Audiences

Facebook supports few types of audiences.

1. Core Audience: Defined from Adset panel, with limited options.
2. Custom Audience: Defined from Audience Builder, with a lot more options than core audience.
3. Look Alike Audience : Uses facebook’s algorithm to find new people similar to another audience.
4. Special Ad Audience : Only available for users in special ads categories of credit, employment and housing ads.

 

You can create last 3 audiences from Audience manager.

Core Audience

Core Audeinces is defined from default adset.  We can select from Location, Age, Gender, Demographic, interest, behavior and connections.

Custom Audience

Custom audiences provide a lot more attributes for selection.  You can create custom audiences from audience manager or from the Ad set option

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience is built from an existing audience source. We provide the source, facebook find similar audiences. We can control the level  of similarity ( or difference ) between source and target audience. For analysis purposes, three attributes of interest would be :

1. Lookalike source
2. Location
3. Similarity Percentage.

Within facebook, creation of lookalike audience will be done from this screen.

 

Audience attribute summary

Attribute summary of audiences is given in the table below:

Facebook Placements

Placement is where our Ads show up. It is of significant importance in any campaign performance analysis. Same ad shown on top placement may have different efficiency as compared to a bottom placement.

There are two  placement  selection choices  in facebook.

1. Automatic placement : Facebook’s delivery system allocates your ad set’s budget across multiple placements. You do not have much control over it.
2. Manual placement : You choose which placements you want your ad to be displayed on.

There are eight categories of placement  in facebook, each comprising of several types of placements. Let us review all possible attributes in facebook placement.

Placements attribute summary

Mobile Devices & operating systems.

Within the Adset configuration, we can also choose which mobile devices and operating systems you want to target your ads on. If you are looking to analyse apple users(iOS) vs samsung users(Android), this will be your starting point.  There are 4 options available at the time of writing.

Mobile Devices attribute summary

1. All mobile devices
2. Android devices only
3. iOS devices only
4. Feature phones only

Another option available for mobile delivery is whether you want to display Ads, when audience is connected to wi-fi.

Optimization and Delivery

By selecting an optimisation method, you inform facebook on what does success mean for your campaign. Based on your “success criteria”, facebook’s machine learning algorithm can work to (optimise)  tweak campaign parameters to get desired success results.

Optimisation attribute summary

Optimisation methods vary for each campaign objective. Here is a quick summary of what optimisation methods are available for each campaign type.