If you’ve tried Facebook Ads you know it has a language all its own. It can be daunting to work through all the various terms and abbreviations used to describe ad types, placements, audience types and more. Making matters worse people often use different words or abbreviations to say the same (or similar) things.
But fear not. We’ve compiled a list of the top terms you need to know. Bookmark this and keep it handy for reference as you’re creating your campaigns so you can quickly find the definition you need, understand its meaning and be back on your way to the work that really matters – building successful ad campaigns!
The 50 Most Important Facebook Ads Terms You Need To Know
Ad account: Grouping of all your specific ads activity. Your ad account includes different campaigns, ads and billing information.
Ad name: The name of the ad you’re viewing in reporting.
Ad Set: An ad set is a group of ads that share the same budget, schedule, delivery optimization and targeting.
Audience Network: This is a network of mobile app and mobile web publishers who’ve been approved by Facebook to show ads in their apps.
Bid: The target maximum amount you’ll pay per result for your ad set. This may appear as Auto if you selected auto-bidding.
Billing Summary: The billing summary shows you a list of all of your past ad charges. Clicking each description link will take you to a detailed breakdown of that charge, including the dates that the charge covers and the specific ads that ran during that period.
Billing Threshold: A billing threshold allows you to set when Facebook sends you a bill for your ads based on how much you spend.
Budget: The maximum amount you’re willing to spend on your ads, on average each day or over the lifetime of your scheduled ads.
Button Clicks: The number of times people clicked the call-to-action button on your ad.
Check-ins:The number of check-ins to your Facebook Page that are attributed to your ads. If your Page has a physical address associated with it, people can check in to your Page when they update their status in their Facebook News Feed or Timeline.
Clicks (All): The number of clicks on your ads. This includes all link clicks, clicks to your Facebook page, profile page, or picture. It also includes all post reactions, likes, comments, shares, photos, videos.
Conversions: Conversions are customer-completed actions, like purchases or adding to a cart on a website.
CPC cost per click (All): The metric is calculated as the total amount spent divided by clicks (all).
CPL cost per lead: The average cost of a lead. It’s calculated by the total amount spent divided by the number of leads.
CPM (Cost per 1000 people reached): The average cost to reach 1,000 people. Online advertisers typically look at CPM as a performance measurement for the cost-efficiency and value of an ad campaign.
CTR Click through rate (All): The percentage of times people saw your ad and performed a click (all).
CTR Click through rate (Link Click-Through Rate): The percentage of times people saw your ad and performed a link click.
Daily Budget: The daily budget is the average amount you indicated you are willing to spend on a specific ad set per day. Each ad set will have its own separate budget, so keep this in mind if you have more than one active ad set in your account.
Delivery: The current status of your campaign, ad set or ad delivery.
Engagement: The total number of actions that people take involving your ads. It indicates that your ads are relevant to your target audience.
Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad.
Impressions: The number of times your ads were served on screen to your audience.
Lead Generation: Lead generation is the process of building interest in a business’s products or services. On Facebook, you can create campaigns using a lead generation objective that allows consumers to fill out a form with their contact information.
Likes and Interests: Likes and Interests allows you to refine your ad’s target audience based on what they’ve included in their profiles, as well as the Pages, groups and other things on Facebook they’ve connected with. This includes sections like interests, activities, favorite music, movies and TV shows.
Link Clicks: The number of clicks on ad links to select destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook-owned properties.
Lookalike Audiences: Lookalike audiences are created by Facebook to help advertisers reach people who are similar to (or “look like”) an audience that the advertiser cares about. To create a Lookalike Audience, you need a Custom Audience, which is a list of your current customers or people who have engaged with your business.
Objective: The objective you selected for your campaign. Your objective reflects the goal you want to achieve with your advertising.
Offline Events: The number of events that were recorded by your offline events data and attributed to your ads.
On-Facebook Purchases: The number of purchases made within a Facebook-owned property (such as Pages or Messenger) and attributed to your ads. Purchases on Facebook may include conversions such as event ticket sales, travel bookings or movie ticket sales that happen directly on Facebook-owned properties.
Organic Leads: Organic leads occur when someone sees a lead ad, tags their friend in it, and their friend submits a lead.
Outbound clicks: The number of clicks on links that take people off Facebook-owned properties.
Page likes: The number of likes of your Facebook Page attributed to your ads.
Partner Categories: Partner categories are a targeting option you can use with your ad to identify and reach the right people with the right message on Facebook, based on their activity off Facebook.
People Taking Action: The number of people who took an action that was attributed to your ads. The people-taking-action metric complements reach. This metric shows the number of people who engaged with your business after seeing or engaging with your ads
Pixel: A set of code that is placed on your website or app. It helps you track traffic, conversions, and various other data of site visitors or app downloaders.
Placement: A placement is the location where your ad is shown. Ads may show in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and right column. Ads may also show on Instagram, Audience Network, Instant Articles and Messenger.
Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once. Reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people.
Relevance Score: A rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your target audience is responding to your ad. This score is shown after your ad receives more than 500 impressions.
Source Audience: A source audience is the audience a Lookalike Audience is based on.
Targeting: This is the process of defining an audience for your ads.
Total conversion value: The total value of all conversions attributed to your ads.
Unique Clicks (All):The number of people who performed a click (all).
Unique link clicks: The number of people who performed a link click.
Video average watch time: The average time a video was watched.
Website add to cart: The number of add-to-cart events tracked by the pixel on your website and attributed to your ads.
Website Conversions: The number of events or conversions recorded by the pixel on your website and attributed to your ads.
Website leads: The number of lead events tracked by the pixel on your website and attributed to your ads.