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How do I analyze my paid media performance?
How do I analyze my paid media performance?

Understand your paid spend

Clare Jolly avatar
Written by Clare Jolly
Updated over a week ago

When you’re running ads on social media and search engines, you have to know what you’re spending your money on, and which ads are delivering the results you need. You can do just that with the Paid Performance tab in Digivizer.

Here’s a breakdown of how to use this page to analyze your paid media performance.

Date Picker

Digivizer’s Date Picker offers period-on-period analysis and reporting flexibility. You can leverage the predefined time periods or select and compare any period that is important to you.

You can use the Date Picker to narrow down (or expand!) the data you’re seeing.

By clicking on the Date Picker, you get this expanded window where you can choose from one of the options we’ve provided, such as seeing how your ad campaigns performed yesterday, last week, or even last quarter. You can also set your own custom date range, which can take into account the entire range of paid media performance data up to 30 days before you first connect your paid media accounts to Digivizer.

Please note that if your paid media accounts are ever disconnected from Digivizer, such as if you needed to renew permissions for your Facebook account (which happens every so often for everyone), you won’t be able to see data for the period you’ve been disconnected. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your accounts are always connected - so you can see all your historical data, whenever you want.

Read our help article for more information on how to use Date Picker.

Filter Bar

This bar that reads “Add filters to focus the data you are seeing” is really important for analyzing your paid media performance. It’s a fast way to drill down to see specific campaigns or objectives or platform data. We’ve set up some default options for you, but you can type anything into the search box in order to focus the data you’ll see in the graph and table. If you’ve included “Spring Sale” somewhere in the name of all your spring sale campaigns, for example, you could focus on that part of your paid media strategy using this bar.

Here’s all the options we’ve provided for you to choose from:

  • See your data by platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, or Microsoft Ads

  • See only the active campaigns you’re running, or even the inactive campaigns if you want to see what used to work or did not work for you in past campaigns

  • See all your paid campaigns that relate to specific objectives, such as brand awareness, reach, traffic, app installs, video views, lead generation, engagements, likes/followers, event responses, product sales catalog, store visits, and messages

Tip: You can even mix and match these filters!

Campaigns Data Graph

Here’s where you start getting the benefits of choosing your date range and filters. In the Campaigns Data graph, you get a visual representation of how your chosen paid media campaigns have performed in the date range you selected. The left hand side of the graph represents the first filter. The right hand side of the graph represents the second and third filters.

See those extra filters in the top right? You can change those to adjust the graph to show what you really care about. You can also hover over specific dates on the graph to see the numbers the graph represents.

Tip: to simplify the graph from three variables to two or even one, simply set the filters to the same metric (i.e. set everything to impressions if that’s what you want to track, or set two filters to impressions and one to spend if you want to see whether your ads are delivering more impressions for less spend - the ideal!).

Take a look at this graph, which is from the same date range as the graph above. This one shows impressions and spend as the chief filters, and how to hover over the graph to see a specific date:

Paid Performance Table

This table is where you can find a lot of information about your paid media performance so long as you know where to look. Here’s what the table looked like the week before we wrote this help article. If we wanted to analyze our paid media performance for the week, we can use this table to check on the performance of many variables.

First things first: there are four levels to this table. You can view all your data at these levels:

  • Platforms - meaning you can see all your paid media data organized into platforms such as Facebook (which includes the Facebook Audience Network and Instagram), Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads.

  • Campaigns - where you can see every individual campaign you’re running in your chosen date period. The first column in the table will still reflect which platform the campaign is on, while the second is the name of the campaign.

  • Adsets - where you can see every adset (group of ads) in the campaigns you’re running. Again, the first column in the table will still reflect which platform the campaign is on, while the second is the name of the adset.

  • Adverts - where you can see every single ad you’re running. Again, the first column in the table will still reflect which platform the campaign is on, while the second is the name of the ad.

Each column can be sorted from highest to lowest, and vice versa. The first two columns stay fixed as you scroll, so you don’t lose track of which platform, campaign, adset or ad you’re looking at.

As for how to analyze what you see in the table, here’s how to start. First, you have to know why you’re advertising on social media or search engines in the first place. Look for that metric on the columns and sort by it to start seeing where you’re getting results.

In this screenshot, you can see that we name our ads with “ToFu”, “MoFu” and “BoFu”, as well as other details. These mean “top of funnel”, “middle of funnel”, “bottom of funnel”. If you’re not familiar with the marketing funnel, basically at the top of the funnel, you’re building brand awareness, helping people find you and get to know you initially. Impressions are pretty important at this stage of the funnel.

You can see that we got a lot of impressions on Instagram for a ToFu advert in this period. That’s great! But the CPM (cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions) is high. Getting 1000 impressions on Instagram cost us twice as much as it did on Facebook. Ouch! That’s going to shape our paid media strategy for sure.

Tip: you can export all this data in the table to a .CSV if you want to move it into Sheets or Excel for further analysis and reporting. Remember that you can change filters and the date range in order to customize the data you’re seeing in the table as well as the graph!

Need more support?

If you need any further support, we recommend you use the in-platform chat feature to connect with our support team or book a demo with our experts.

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