Platforms like Facebook can be game-changers for increasing quality leads for your community by simplifying the process of reaching potential residents and their families, but how do you measure success with Facebook Ads for Senior Living?
Hint: You can’t just rely on likes from Aunt Sally and the occasional comment from a friendly resident!
The unique goals and challenges of this industry, as well as the nature of the Facebook platform, mean you need to look at specific metrics to gauge how well your ads are really performing and bringing both the quantity and quality of leads your community needs.
So grab your analytics hat and a cup of your favorite morning brew and let’s dig into it.
Metric #1: Results
What needs to be said before we talk about specific metrics is that the result you are optimizing for will change depending on what objective you select when creating your campaign. For example, your key metric or “result” could be: average daily reach, link clicks, landing page views, leads, conversions, sales, app downloads, video views, ad engagements, etc. ad infinitum (not really).
Because of this, the “Results” column is always my first go-to metric to gauge high-level performance on an ad, ad set, or campaign because it shows the number of results I am getting for that specific objective. If I’m running a Conversion campaign I want to know how many conversions I’ve generated, not how many users my ads reached or what my engagement rate is. When I hop into an ad account, I want to very quickly be able to see if my ads are doing what I’ve asked them to do, which again, varies based on the overall campaign objective.
Now you might be thinking, “Well how do you know if the results you are seeing are actually good or not?” Good question. After you’ve run a specific ad campaign (or maybe a specific type of campaign) for a certain amount of time, you can create a sort of baseline in your head so that when you land on your Ads Manager campaign overview dashboard, you can easily see if your campaigns are underperforming and need a deeper look or if they are doing well and you can move on.
Quick note here: Since we’re typically dealing with a large scale of accounts when it comes to Facebook Ads for Senior Living, our reporting setup needs to be as clean and efficient as possible and enable us as marketers to make educated optimizations as quickly as possible.
Metric #2: Cost Per Result
In conjunction with the volume of results coming in, I want to know exactly how much we are spending to actually get those results. This is why Cost Per Result is always the second metric I look at. Similarly, with the average number of results you are accustomed to seeing, you’ll become familiar with the average costs to achieve those results and be able to quickly tell if you need to do a deep dive somewhere.
For example, if you have been consistently getting Thruplays on your Video Views campaign for $0.02/Thruplay for the last three months and then you notice that in the last seven days it’s shot up to $0.07/Thruplay, that should be a huge red flag in your head to mark that campaign for deeper review and analysis.
Managing campaigns for 100s of communities helps with this as you are not basing performance on one location and in one time period. When you have an account with 50+ communities, you can use that data to help build your mental benchmarks so you can better identify outliers and anomalies.
Having this data can also help you during the campaign planning process for a community that’s opening soon. Armed with this data, you know how much budget you will most likely need in order to get the amount of results you are looking for. We all know that when a new community opens they need leads, leads, leads. With your data in hand, you can cherry-pick the best assets that have been proven over time and across multiple locations to deliver the best results at the lowest cost, thus allowing your new community to hit thee ground running.
Metric #3: Leads
To be honest, I’ve just recently added this metric to my default reporting view. You may think it’s silly that in the first section I spent a whole paragraph harping on how I only wanted to see the “key result” that my campaign or ad set was optimized for and nothing else, and now I’m talking about having a static column in place for a metric that’s only related to conversion campaigns.
And you’d be right. That’s why I did not have it in my default reporting view until recently. But enough talking about my idiosyncrasies, let me tell you why I added it…
A few weeks ago, I was pulling a report of ads that had generated the most leads for an account and found an interesting insight. The ads I was running at the top of the funnel had, unbeknownst to me, generated a pretty decent amount of website form submissions, which was not the key result as you might expect. But just think about this with me for a second…
For this campaign in particular, I was promoting a blog post that talked about various retirement options in a particular city, of which this community was one of the listed options. Since this was a top-of-funnel campaign, my singular focus was driving traffic to the website, and based on the metrics we’ve talked about thus far and the ones we’ll talk about below, the performance looked good, but I continued creating other blog posts about different topics. After a few months, as I said above, during one of my account sweeps, I happened to run a special conversion report in which I uncovered that this blog post had single-handedly been generating form submissions for us where prospects were clicking on the Call-to-action at the bottom of the blog post and downloading some of our gated content to learn more about our community.
Now you might think, “Well, if another blog post drives more traffic, then shouldn’t we use that one instead?” Yes, I see your point, but if this blog post drives traffic well and moves prospects down the funnel, then I’d rather create variations of this ad and capitalize on that performance!
Metric #4: Unique Outbound Clicks
I personally love running Facebook Ads for senior living because I think they are extremely flexible and are able to do pretty much anything you want them to do. Do you want to raise awareness for your new community in a new, untouched market? Bam, reach campaign. Do you have an open-house event coming up and need the place to be packed with people? Boom, event promotion. Do you want to generate leads and have prospects download your community’s digital flyer? Cha-ching, conversion campaign.
Typically when we’re running paid social campaigns, and specifically Facebook Ads for Senior Living, we are focused on one thing: increasing website traffic. In my opinion, the best, most honest metric to gauge performance on how much website traffic our ads are generating is Unique Outbound Clicks.
This metric does not lie. “Clicks (all)” and “Link Clicks” can mean different things, but “Outbound Clicks” means that someone looked at the ad and clicked on it intending to go to the landing page. Limiting things down further to just the “Unique” clicks makes things even clearer. Since our primary goal is to drive prospects to the website to better understand our community’s services and offerings, this is the most important metric in my opinion.
Metric #5: Unique Outbound CTR (click-through rate)
Similarly connected just like Results and Cost Per Result are, Unique Outbound CTR is the most honest metric when it comes to measuring click-through rate. “CTR (all)” and “Link Click-Through Rate” do not necessarily mean that the prospect clicked through to the website. They could have clicked on your ad to expand the text if you have longer ad copy, they could have clicked on your video to make it fullscreen, or they could have clicked through to your community’s Facebook page and done something there. Unique Outbound CTR ensures that we are gauging our ad engagement based on users with intent, not on people who are click-happy.
BONUS: Frequency
Last but not least, a very important number to keep track of is your ad frequency. How many times have your users seen that same ad? They used to say that humans needed to see an ad seven times before they were ready to purchase something. This number has gone WAY up, but our tolerance for ads has gone WAY down.
If your ad frequency numbers start going up, it could mean two things: (1) your ad set’s targeted audience is too small or (2) your ads are not resonating with your users and they are marking your ads as “not relevant” to them.
A great rule of thumb for ad frequency that I try to follow is this:
🟢 1-3: You’re good. Sit back and enjoy.
🟡 4-7: A change is coming, but you’re okay for now.
🔴 7-10: Cancel whatever you’re doing today and launch something new.
Of course, this isn’t a real science. I’ve had campaigns with a frequency in the red because my remarketing audience was too small, but my Unique Outbound CTR was fantastic because my ads were incredibly relevant so I didn’t touch anything in that campaign. Instead, I increased my top-of-funnel campaign budget to try and get more users into the remarketing audience so ads would be shown to more users instead of the same users over and over again. (Remember, Facebook wants to spend your money, they don’t care what results it gets you, positive or negative.)
In Conclusion
At the end of the day, using Facebook ads to drive qualified leads effectively requires careful measurement and optimization. This is where SeniorLivingLeads.com can help. By tracking, analyzing, and optimizing around the metrics listed above, we can help your communities boost engagement, generate quality leads, and increase occupancy rates through targeted Facebook Ads strategies.
BONUS
Want access to the exact reporting view that we use at SeniorLivingLeads so you can measure your Facebook Ads results like us? Just send an empty email to [email protected] with the subject line “Reporting View” and I’ll be happy to share it with you!