Facebook offers advertisers a variety of ways to monitor and evaluate advertisement performance. We would like to introduce one of them, called "Inspect".

Although "Inspect" has only recently been introduced, it is not in fact a completely new function. Rather, it uses earlier elements from Facebook's "extradition Insights" and presents them more clearly and to an extended extent.

A look at the measurement values in the Advertising Manager reveals the first important indicators for your advertisements, but at this point the reasons for an increasing/falling performance are not yet visible. Those who want to develop more understanding of performance do not get around to dealing more closely with bid strategies, target group saturation, auction cross-sections and competition.

And here comes "Inspect": An analysis dashboard that summarises and visually illustrates the above mentioned key figures. You can use the function by clicking on an ad group level in the Ad Group Advertising Manager and controlling the same area in the navigation you are currently viewing.

The only prerequisite for Facebook "Inspect" is that the ad group must have achieved 500 impressions within the last seven days before you receive data about this.

Below we will review the individual areas within "Inspect", explain to you how you should interpret the values and give you practical tips for your own Facebook campaigns along the way.

Bids

Those who work with bid strategies such as "target costs" can follow in this section of "Inspect" how the set bid strategy affects the development of costs per result (e.g. lead). This diagram also indicates changes in bid strategies. This is the most interesting part, as you can draw conclusions about how the change in bid strategy has affected your earnings costs.

Tip: You should be aware in advance how the commandment strategies used work. Otherwise you may miss valuable results/ conversions due to lack of understanding. To give you an example, if the bid strategy "Maximum Offer" establishes a bid control of five euros and can achieve the 100-result/ conversion of bids of 5,01 euros, none of this would be taken into account in the Facebook auction.

Auctioning

In this diagram you will get an insight into the auction competition. The underlying percentage indicates the percentage of competition in the auctions above the average for the period considered. The normal reference corridor is between -20% (low competition) and 20% (high competition). The latter usually leads to increased costs. For example, it is common in B2C e-commerce that, especially at Christmas time, the auction competition and thus the costs increase significantly.

Tip: Analyzes past campaigns to derive seasonal influences. This would allow you to switch back a gear in periods of high competition, if necessary, and to gear up in phases of low competition.

Target

One of the most common causes of rising costs per conversion is the saturation of target groups. This shows how much the target group share of your ad group is achieved. If saturation is too high, this usually leads to an increase in frequency. The reason for this is the so-called Use effect of the target group: fewer and fewer new people can be reached and thus the number of advertisement impressions per person increases.

Further thought, it means that more advertisement impressions per person with a simultaneous decline of new people reached have the effect of increasing the cost of achieving a conversion.

The example below shows how increasing target group penetration is accompanied by an increase in frequency and cost per conversion.

Tip: If you notice this development in your advertisements, it is recommended to enlarge the target group (e.g. by targeting extension) or even try out a new target group.

Auctioning

For several simultaneous campaigns, it is important to keep an eye on the overshoots. This "Inspect" section tells you how often the ad group with other ads from your advertising account was represented in the same auction. As a result of any overshooting, the advertisements concerned are removed from the auction. For example, a 20% overlap rate indicates that the ads will be removed from the auctions in 20% of the cases.

Tip: Smaller overshoots (10%) can normally be neglected. Especially in the case of high overlaps that restrict the delivery of advertisements, you should consider whether you do not want to merge the overlapping advertisement groups or make clear target group boundaries.

Progress of major changes

The last section of "Inspect" contains the progress of important changes to the ad group. This gives you a quick overview.

Tip: Note that every time you change the learning phase of Facebook starts again. It is therefore not advisable to make changes shortly after the start. Facebooks algorithm just needs its time (learning phase) to deliver first valid results that will serve as a basis for further actions.

Conclusion

With "Inspect", Facebook provides you with a valuable tool that can be extremely helpful in analyzing ad performance. And that also makes it easy to understand. Nevertheless, the crucial thing remains to interpret these diagrams and key figures correctly and to draw appropriate conclusions for optimization. Good luck trying it out!