The 10 Most Important Meta Ads KPIs

Spend ÷ Customers

This tells you: how much you pay for an actual paying customer

Benchmarks show CPA is rising (~$30 average in some datasets) for services industries. For eCommerce scenarios, we have seen CPA or in this case “cost per sale” of far less, let´s say around $5.

Conversions ÷ Clicks

• Average: ~5–10% (varies heavily)
• Strong: >10%

This is where funnels win or lose. You also need to consider that there are various conversion rates from impressions to clicks, then from clicks to leads, from leads to sales etc. Whenever you improve one of those metrics, your overall results will be improved by a multiple! For example: Your CR from impressions to clicks is 10%, and your CR from clicks to leads is another 10%: this would mean that from 100 impressions you produce 10 clicks and 1 lead. If you improve both to 20%, then you will have 20 clicks and 4 leads instead! Keeping track of your conversion rates, and improving them wherever you can is paramount to your sustainable success.

Spend ÷ Leads

Especially critical for:

• agencies
• service businesses
• travel (→ relevant for our sister company Kapwa Travel, for example)

Average ~ $27+

Keep in mind that the CPL can be much higher, for example in high ticket sales. Even CPL of several hundred dollars could make sense, if your revenue is high enough. Solely because your CPL is very high does not mean that your ads are not running well. For example: you buy a lead for 500$, while your CR is 10%, so you need 10 leads at a total of 5000$ but your average sale is 20000 – 30000$. This gives you a total ROI of 4:1 – 6:1 which should be good enough, provided your margins are also high enough.

Clicks ÷ Impressions

Measures how attractive your ad is.

• Average: ~1–2%
• Top performers: 2–3%+

When you set up Meta Ads campaigns, then it is very important to provide a set of various creatives – let´s say one static image, one carousel, and one reel with primary text variations as well as descriptions

Spend ÷ Clicks

• Traffic campaigns: ~$0.70
• Lead campaigns: ~$1.92
• Australia: AUD 1.15–3.20

Important — but only meaningful with CVR. Similar to Google Ads Campaigns, the CPC development is sth. to look out for. It is a good indicator of how the competition is doing, and where you need to adjust. Again, a high CPC does not mean that the campaigns are not good. You really need to keep track von Conversion Rates, CPA or CPS as well in order to assess, whether your CPC is sth. that you have to optimise.

Measures how expensive your audience is. The global average for this metric is maybe around ~$6–7 and might be meaningful for companies that are after awareness campaigns. We at Kapwa Marketing do not really use it that often. However, it is still a metric that can give you an idea of the industry.

Frequency is a KPI that gives you an idea of how often users see your ad. High frequency means that your audience might soon suffer from “ad fatigue”. But what is a “good” ad frequency? This really depends on whom you ask and what time window you are looking at. As a rule of thumb, we work with an ad frequency of about 5-7 within the last 30 days at the maximum. Of course, an ad frequency of less than 5 or even 3 might be in general better but if you have a well performing ad and not much competition, you´d rather go “never change a running system” and just keep on running your ad.

This refers to the % of clicks that actually load the page. This is often overlooked, but critical; moreover, many people confuse this with people who just clicked any link in you ad which does not mean at all click to your landing page or website. You need to check for external link clicks!

A Low LPV could also be the result of 

• a slow website
• tracking issues
• bad UX.

Finally, we also look into reach & impressions, similar to campaigns on Google Ads. We always try to have a high impression share, esp. on Google. This is important for scaling and brand awareness But again, these are vanity metrics unless tied to conversions.