In an attempt to simplify their ad products, Facebook unveiled numerous updates to its Ad Manager platform to help you garner, consolidate, and analyze information.

Customized ad reports

You can now personally customize your report results by choosing specific metrics to include, enabling you to organize data in a way you see fit. Metrics such as cost per page like, cost per conversion, and cost per click can all be pulled into one spreadsheet. This data integration can increase efficiency by enabling marketers to consolidate various data sets into fewer spreadsheets.

Expanded capacity to measure reach and other key metrics

Arguably the top social marketing challenge is how to measure ROI—a hefty problem considering that marketing managers are most interested in increasing their ROI and getting the most utility out of their advertising dollars. The new additions Facebook introduced promise to help you better measure ROI. The updates provide the ability “to measure reach and frequency across any date range for their ad, campaign or account.” You can dissect the data for any ad campaign over any period of time, giving teams the ability to analyze the relative profitability of any particular ad or campaign. These new metrics also allow for easier comparative analysis of individual projects and allow you to dissect the particular reasons for success or downfall of certain ads. These expanded metrics, combined with the new ability to measure clicks, unique clicks and CTR, promise to be lucrative tools. The ability to better measure CTR and ROI helps to reconcile some of the difficulty of prioritizing one over the other due to the quality measure determinates set by search engines like Google.

Improvements in audience measures

One problem that many social marketing campaigns experience is the inability to appropriately reach out to their audience.  The new updates include a breakdown of marketing performance by age, gender, country and placement. Feedback obtained from these enhanced demographic measures can help you better narrowcast ad campaigns to particular audiences in order to lessen the waste of marketing capital.

“Continuous improvement requires systematic evaluation.”—Anonymous.  These new Facebook tools provide the opportunity for greater systematic evaluation, now it is just up to you to utilize them in order to improve your FB social marketing campaigns.