The Facebook Advertising Network is growing and is becoming one of the most used online advertising platforms. If you have found yourself looking up a new term that you found in your Facebook Ads account, don’t worry, you’re not alone! There are hundreds of terms (some that Facebook made up) that you will need to know to be a master if Facebook Ads.
In this glossary, I am going to define all of the words that you will find inside the Facebook Ads Manager. Please send us a message if there is a word that we need to add!
Actions
When a Facebook user interacts with your ad in any way, it is known as an action. It includes everything from clicks to video views. It is a good way to gauge how users are responding to specific ads.
Ad Auction
When a business pays for an ad it doesn’t just show up in a feed. Facebook ads compete against one another in an auction process to determine their placement. The highest performing ad, based on the ad’s maximum bid and performance, are the ones place in the most favorable spots due to the fact they will most likely get attention from users.
Ad Accounts
When you open up a Facebook ad for the ist time, an ad account is created. The ad account is where you manage all of your ads. You can add users onto your ad account with varying levels of permissions.
Ad Sets
An ad set is a group of ads that have the same budget, schedule, bid and targetting. This allows you to group ads together to more easily compare statistics within the ad group.
Ads Manager
The ads manager is a tool where you do everything related to your Facebook ads. You create, run, and target ads as well as measure their performance through analytics. You can also take a look at your full billing summary, payment methods and payment history.
Advertising Guidelines
One of the tricker parts of Facebook Ads is actually getting them through the approval process of Facebook. They have pretty stringent guidelines on what qualifies as an appropriate ad – we aren’t just talking obvious things like nudity, curse words, and violence. It includes things like not boasting of misleading claims, no before and after shots and nothing shocking. It’s good to familiarize yourself with some of the rules to avoid wasting time when creating Facebook Ads.
Analytics
Facebook analytics offer insight into how every aspect of your Business Profile is performing. The data allows you to see how well marketing efforts are going based on hard data.
App Dashboard
The App dashboard is where Facebook developers manage the different apps they create for the platform. Here you can configure any settings of previous apps that have already been created as well as create entirely new Facebook Apps from scratch.
App Engagement
App engagement is when a user interacts with an app. Facebook Ads are often incorporated to encourage users to take action within an app like shop, book a trip or start a game. In the world of apps, engagement is key to determining whether the App was successful or not.
App Installs
This is the number of times users install an app being marketed on Facebook. Facebook allows businesses to market their apps through Facebook where they can link back to where users can install the app.
App Uses
This is the number of times someone actually uses an app. In some cases, a return audience is imperative to the success of an app.
Audiences
A Facebook audience is the type of people you target with your ads and content through paid promotions. You can target users based on their profession, income, interest, behavior, location, gender and more. Due to how much information people voluntarily enter into Facebook, it offers one of the most powerful platforms to specific target audiences.
Auto Bid
Auto bid is when you let Facebook decide what amount bid amount to set for your ads. The alternative is manually setting each bid yourself and hoping you can outsmart Facebook algorithms.
Automated Rules
Automate rules notifies you after a certain condition is met in your campaign. For example, if you want Facebook to notify you every time an ad leads to conversion over $20, you can specifcally setup this rule in Facebook Business settings.
Average CPC
The average “cost per click”, or CPC, indicates how much each click is costing you based on the ad budget. This is calculated by taking the entirity of the ad budget then dividing it by the number of clicks. It only means that the user clicked on you ad – it does not mean it lead to a conversion. It is a good indicator as to whether your ads are actually ending in leads, because the more a user interacts with an ad the more likely they are to convert.
Average CPM
CPM, or cost per thousand, is a marketing term meaning what is the cost breakdown per 1000 impressions. The average CPM looks at the add and shows the average cost to leave one thousand impressions. It lets you know how far your dollar is going when it comes to just showing the ad in their Facebook feed.
Bid (or Maximum Bid)
Facebook doesn’t just show a Facebook ad in a designated space. All businesses place a bid for ads and Facebook algorithm places them based on the bid amount and ad performance. When you set a maximum bid, you are setting the maximum amount you are willing to pay for your ad to be shown on a certain slot.
Billing Manager
In the ad manager there is a billing section where you can find all information pertaining to your final bill on all Facebook ad spending. Here you can breakdown all the charges and payment methods. You can also see the amount that was budgeted for each ad and what was actually spent.
Billing Summary
The billing summary is a comprehensive list of all past ad charges incurred through purchasing Facebook advertisements. You can click on each charge to see a detailed breakdown of each charge included what the charge covered and what specific ad ran during the period.
Broad Categories
Facebook offers specific targetting which is a really powerful tool for marketers. Braod categories under targetting groups Facebook users according to likes, interests, apps they use and more. for example, if someone likes a bunch of News pages, you can target them by picking the broad category “News”.
Budget
Facebook budgets are the way you control the cost of Facebook ads. It helps you control how much is spent on each individual ad so that costs don’t keep climbing without your knowledge. The budget serves as a cap, not a guarantee that money will be spent. Your ad competes in auctions for space, so it needs to compete in quality and bid amount in order for the budgeted funds to be spent.
Business Manager
The business manager page is appropriate for users who manage more than one Facebook Ad Account. Through the Business Manager page you can manage ad accounts, pages, and the users. It makes managing Facebook pages a whole lot easier thanks to the amount of access and control you have in one place.
Campaign
A campaign allows Facebook business accounts to group ads and ad sets together to gauge performance. A good example of an ad campaign, would be if you did a lot of ads for Black Friday. You could put all the different ads on the Black Friday campaign to see which performed the best according to your specific objectives.
Campaign Reach
The campaign reach refers to the total amount of users experienced ads within the campaign. It allows you to gauge exactaly how many people were exposed to every single ad within the campaign.
Campaign Tags
Campaign tags allow you to organize your different campaigns into cataegories. For example, you may create a “holiday” tag, so by opening this cateogory you can see all of the campaigns related to holiday ads.
Carousel Engagement
Carousel posts allow you to create multiple cards a user can scroll hoirzontally through. It is a powerful tool that allows a lot more user interraction, so it makes sense Facebook offers a separate measurement of how users engage with carousels. Carousel engagement reports are broke down by action and carousel card, so you can gauge how users interact with each individual card.
Catalog Sales (Objective)
For stores with a catalog, you can set “Promote a product catalog” as an advertising objective on Facebook. First you will need to create a produt catalog on Facebook that features your products. Next, you can setup dynamic ads focused on these products. A great way to top of this type of campaign is to setup a
Facebook pixel on your website to track users who view your shopping catalog away from Facebook then retarget the ads towards those users on Facebook.
Clicks
Clicks include any time a user interacts with a piece of content. It includes link clicks, likes, comments, shares, photo clicks, Facebook clicks and more. It is an all-encompassing metric of user interaction with Facebook content.
Connections
Connections is a targeting tool which allows you to pick an audience based on how they are networked to your business based on the Facebook information. For example, you can target or exclude an audience who directly likes your business page with an ad set.
Conversions
A conversion is whenever you get a user to do what you want them to do via an ad. Specifically for Facebook ads, your conversion goals can differ based on your objectives, but one of the best ways to setup conversions is installing Facebook pixel. Facebook pixel tracks user actions on your website after they click an ad. This means you can setup conversions, including actual purchases, to track the performance of your Facebook ad.
Cost Per Action
Cost per action/conversion is the total it takes to achieve a specific objective through your Facebook advertising efforts. By choosing a specific objective the idea is to choose something that will more likely lead to a conversion – like clicking the Shop Now button on your business page.
CPC
Cost per click is when you pay for each user that clicks on your ad. They do not have to complete a conversion like buying something or signing up for a newsletter, they just need to click. This means that you don’t pay for users who just look at the ad without taking any action though!
CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)
Cost per thousand impressions is how much you are charged for 1000 Facebook users to see your promoted piece of content. This allows you to know how far your ad is reaching without going into how people are interacting with your ad.
Credit Spends
The total number of credits used on a desktop game app that was also recorded as an event and also attributed towards your ads. It is a good way to gauge how apps are performing in delivering ads.
Creative Hub
This is a relatively new tool on Facebook that allows Facebook business pages to get inspired and build ads/content. It allows creative to explore other brands’ work on Facebook as well a preview their own work before publishing it on Facebook. Since Facebook is a relatively new medium for ads, the importance of the preview mode to make sure everything looks right on all resolutions cannot be understated.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
This is the number of time an ad was clicked divided by the number of impressions. It gives you a good idea as to how many people are actually clicking and interacting with your ad rather than just scrolling right through it and ignoring it.
Custom Audiences
A Custom Audience is a list of customers made of existing customers you imported into Facebook. Once you’ve imported the customer list you can target ads and content to them through your promotional efforts on Facebook.
Custom Conversions
This is a feature that allows you to create conversions on your webpages without digging into the code. Make sure you have Facebook Pixels installed first for it to work! Using a url or event and a category you can create a new conversion that’ll be tracked when someone is led to your site from a Facebook advertisement.
Daily Budget
When planning out an ad you can set the average amount you are willing to spend on any given ad. This varies from each ad, so make sure to set it up to match the objectives of each ad.
Daily Spend Limit
The Daily Spend Limit is the amount Facebook caps spending off at for Facebook Business accounts.
Destination
In Facebook ads, the destination is where the ad leads to when a user clicks the ad or the call-to-action button. You can link a destination to an app, business page website or messenger. This is a powerful tool that allows you to direct uses exactly where you want to do after they click on your ad.
Delivery
Facebook ads are different in that they are not delivered exactly how and when you want them to be, and you need to opimize to get the best delivery. Facebook delivers an ad to an audience at any given time and place based on ad auctions. The ad auctions place the ads they think to perform the best as well as considering the actual value of the bid.
End Date
The end date is when Facebook stops delivering your ads When you set up your ad and budget, you put the span of time the ad will be delivered. You can set a continual ad with no set end date, but you have to use a daily budget, not a lifetime budget.
Engagement (objective)
The engagement objective means you want more users to interact with a piece of content outside your regular audience. It is a good objective to choose if you already have a post that is attracting a lot of organic attention, and you want to expand the reach of the content/ad.
Event Responses
An event response is when a Facebook user responsds as “Interested” or is “Going” to an event you’ve setup on Facebook. This is a metric used to gauge how many responded to event thanks to a paid advertisements, and it does not include organic reach.
Events Manager
This is the place where you manage any events you set up and manage on Facebook. You can add an address, description, time span, add a photo and more. You also can see who is interested and going to your event.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is the place where you go to see all analytics related to your Facebook Business Page. Here you can track the performance of posts, advertisements, videos and more to help gauge how well your social media marketing efforts are working.
Frequency
Frequency is the number of times a single user is showed the same ad or boosted content. For example, if your ad’s frequency is 3 times, the same ad was shown to one user 3 times on average. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how well the ad is converting.
Funding Sources
The funding sources are the payment methods listed under the Ad Account. One business page can have more than one funding source. When you are managing multiple pages from one ad account, it is important to keep track of the payment methods and apply them to the right accounts when boosting ads or posts.
Impressions
The impressions are the number of times an ad was on a screen. If a user scrolls down then back up and sees the same ad it only counts as one impression. If the user has two separate browsing sessions where they see the same ad, it counts as two impressions.
Likes & Interests Targeting
When you like a page, it is more than just showing off to your friends your interests. Facebook keeps track of likes and interests of users, so that marketers can use these as way to create audiences to target paid content and ads.
Link Clicks
This is the number of times Facebook users click on any part of an ad. It includes links in the content, button clicks, etc. It is a good way to determine if a piece of content is interesting users or not.
Mobile App Install Ads
Facebook offers ap ads to help incentivize users to install apps. You can also use ads to help encourage the user to install an app or take a specific action on the app. You can also integrate Facebook SDK, to help reach appropriate customers and track actions to see how well your ad campaign is functioning.
Messenger Engagement
One type of objective for a Facebook ad is to get users to send messages to your fan page – often received by a bot. Messenger engagement allows you to see the analytics behind how well these types of campaigns are performing.
Objective
When creating a Facebook ad, you have the option to choose multiple objectives. Objectives are what you specifically what to do through advertising with Facebook. This includes objectives such as conversions, clicking certain buttons, increasing engagement on an app and more.
Offer Claims
Offer claim are a type of ad where business owners offer incentives like a percentage off or BOGO to customers through their Facebook ads. For online, storeowners give a code for users to enter when checking out. For brick and mortar businesses, you can use QR codes or bar codes for customers to claim their discount.
Offer Claimed Story
This is a sponsored story where someone shares the story of how they claimed your Facebook Over. It appears in the sidebar or newfeed of users who claimed your incentive.
Offline Conversions
Not all purchases are made online after someone converts due to a Faceobook ad, and this is where offline conversion come into play. For business owners who want to track offline conversions, they can do so and import the data into Facebook. This will give you better insight into the whole picture of how your online advertising efforts are influencing customers.
Offline Events
An offline event is a type of conversion that occurs in a brick and mortar location. If you track this data in an excel sheet, you can import it ito your business manager to track, measure and optimize for with your online Facebook ad campaign.
Optimization
Facebook optimization is the process of making ads more effective by applying certain techniques. It includes things like checking ad frequency, cost, target audience, spending limits and other small details which can majorly affect the outcomes of a Facebook ad campaign.
Optimized CPM
When you ads are displayed on Facebook, they all go through a bidding process. An optimized CPM is a type of bid that places bids to help ads be exposed to audiences that are most likely to take action. You pay per impressions with this bid type.
Outstanding Balance
An outstanding balance is an overdue bill you owe to Facebook to pay for ads. You can see the balance under the business manager associated with the page.
Page Engagement
Your page engagement is the amount of interactions users have with your page thanks to ads you’ve published. This metric allows you to analyze if people are interacting with your page after ads to help assess the health of any given Facebook Ad Campaign.
Page Likes
This is the number of likes your page gets thanks to Facebook ads you’ve published. This metric gives you insight into how many people are actually engaging with your page after viewing any given ad.
Page Like Story
This is the number of likes your page gets thanks to a sponsored story. This metric allows you to guage how many users are engaging with your brand after viewing a sponsored story on Facebook.
Page Post Ad
A page post ad is when you boost a post as an ad promotion. It delivers your post to more people, so that they will hopefully like. comment and engage with it. It is a great way to boost brand awareness by spreading content through a paid effort.
Page Post Sponsored Story
This is when you pay to promote a user’s actions on Facebook with the hopes people within their network perform the same action. When a user comments or likes a post it may show up in their network newsfeed organically, but paying to promote these actions ensure it will show up in other’s feeds.
Partners
Facebook marketing partners are marketers associated with Facebook. Facebook allows businesses to seek out marketers who Facebook sees as experts in different areas of different Facebook marketing like small business solutions, analytics, and community management.
Pixels
Facebook Pixels are tracking codes one places on their website to gather data to help track and optimize Facebook ad campaigns. This allows businesses to incorporate effort they’re making on their website into their Facebook ad campaigns.
Placement
This where your Facebook ads are actually placed. Ads can be placed in Feeds, Suggested Video, the Market place, Instagram, the right Sidebar & more. You have the option of selecting the placement or letting Facebook determine where your ad will perform the best.
Post Engagement
This is how much users take an action on a post. This includes link clicks, comments, likers and any other actions taken in reaction to a post. It is a good indicator how well your content is stirring a reaction among your network.
Potential Reach
This is the number of active users your promoted content can reach based on the parameters that are set when you create an ad. The potential reach is determined by the budget and targetting of every ad.
Power Editor
The Power Editor is a dashboard on the Facebook Business Manager that allows you to easily manage ad campaigns. This tool especially comes in handy when you begin scaling ad campaigns which can become quite complex.
Precise Interests
Pricised interests is a retired Facebook ad feature which used to allow users to make ads for users with different interests. Now instead Facebook combines different interests, so ads reach larger audiences. The feature is now just called interests rather than distinguishing between Precise and Broad.
Promoted Post
A promoted post is content you “boost” from your timeline. It is separate from an ad since ads do not show up on your timeline. If you create engaging content on your timeline this is a great way to promote it to a larger audience.
Reach
Reach is a Facebook advertising objective with the goal of exposing your ad to the maximum amount of people possible. This is a great way to broaden your audience and raise brand awareness by casting out an ad that will have the largest amount of impressions possible.
Relevance Score
After an ad receives 500 impressions, it is given a relevance score. This score is given as a ranking 1 to 10 grading if your ad is reaching audiences that are interested in the ad or not. It is a great way to gauge if your ads resonate with your targetted audience or not.
Reports
This is a record of the most important information from analytics taken from Facebook Business ad campaigns. Reports are accessible through the Ads Manager.
Rules
Ad Rules can be implemented with more advanced configuration with Facebook for Developers using the Ad Rules Engine. This simplifies the ad management process by setting up rules that will either schedule ads or report data from them based on rules you create.
Social Clicks
This is when someone takes an action of a page after Facebook promote that other friends of the user have interacted with the page. For example, if a user likes a page after seeing 5 of their friends like the page, this is called a social click.
Social Click Rate
This is the percentage of people that took action after seeing another friend had taken action on the page. It takes the total amount of times your page was shown as social impressions to users then divides it by the number of times a user took action.
Social Impressions
This is when Facebook displays that a user’s friend has interacted with a page in some way. For example, Facebook may show that a user commented on a promoted post from a business page – this counts as a social impression.
Social %
This is the percent of incidents where your content or ad was shown in a social content (aka social impressions). Often friends will interact with a page after they see their friends are using it as well.
Social Reach
This is the number of times an ad is shown as a social impression to Facebook user. For example, if one user likes your ad then 4 of their friends see the ad it counts as 4 social reaches in your Facebook metrics.
Sponsored Result
This is when you pay Facebook to display your business page when Facebook users type certain keywords in the search bar. The sponsored search queries show before any of the organic results helping you to reach people typing in the search bar.
Sponsored Story
A sponsored story is when you pay Facebook to display social interactions with your page to the user’s network. Facebook dropped this feature in 2014.
Start Date
Start date is when an ad begins displaying on Facebook. When you creat an ad you choose the start date and end date – this dates can range as long or as litte time as you want.
Status
This shows if your ad is delivering on Facebook or not. Every ad goes through an approval process on Facebook. If your audience is big enough and the content of the ad is approved, the ad will eventually green light. If not, it will be stopped and Facebook will notify you. Also, Facebook shows what ads are complete and no longer delivering once an ad campaign is complete.
Store Visits (objective)
The store visits objective is to get a user to a certain location within a chain of stores. This objective is only available to users with multiple locations.
Suggested Bid Range
Based on the content and competition of an ad, Facebook will give you a suggested bid range to get the best return on an advertising investment. However, you can choose to bid the amount you wish based on your business’ budget.
Suggested Likes and Interests
When creating a Facebook audience, Facebook will suggest what interests and likes you are targetting based on the content of your ad. It is a great way to start buiding a target audience for boosted content and/or ads.
Targeted Audience
When creating an ad or boosting a post, you have the option of creating a targetted audience based on location, demographics, likes, intererests, occupations, behavior and more. This allows you to target a specific audience that may be interested in whatever it is you are promoting.
Targeting
The practice of choosing an audience you want to reach based on the type and goal of any given promotion. It makes sure that ads are catered to audiences that are actually interested in them.
Traffic
Traffic is a Facebook ad objective where the goal is to send as many people to your website as possible after they see the ad. This objective is well suited when you just want to get the user to get to the website and not worried about them taking a specific action on the website.
Transaction
A list of charges from Facebook accrued by your Facebook advertising efforts. You can find this data inside of your Facebook Ads Manager.
VAT
This is the amount of taxes added to the charge of running Facebook ads. The percentage depends on the country of the business, and if the add is being used for business purposes.
Verification Hold ($1.01)
This is a temporary hold on a credit card when Facebook is authenticating it. Once the authentication process is complete, the charge will be canceled out.
Video Engagement
This is how often people click your ad after watching a video. It indicates if your video is causing users to take action.
Video Views (objective)
This is an advertising objective when you want to get as many users as possible to view video content.
