Facebook rolled out a new iteration of their ads dashboard yesterday. While it's still no AdWords, it's a step in the right direction. Key takeaways:
Connections: The number of people who liked your Facebook page, RSVPed to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing this sponsored story or ad.
Connections are essentially what Facebook has called Conversions, but limited to 24 hours post impression. Cost Per Connection now becomes the single most important Facebook metric.
Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads. This is different than impressions, which includes people seeing them multiple times.
Put simply, Reach is unique user impressions.
Social Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads with the names of their friends who liked your page, RSVPed to your event, or used your app.
Enough said.
Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your campaign's sponsored story or ad.
This is a great new metric that Facebook has introduced because it will allow advertisers to gauge when they've saturated their target audience. I assume that over time, Frequency trends will indicate when people are most likely to engage with an ad (i.e. when Frequency is over X, engagement rate steadily declines).
In addition to updated metrics, Facebook has introduced some nice new graphs at the Campaign and Ad levels:
So, what's still missing? Robust demographic reporting, for one. We want to see how our ad variations perform for different, perhaps pre-defined demographic clusters. Also, how about some detailed profile reports? The current profile reporting feature is cumbersome, high-level, and currently broken. C'mon Zuck, you can do better than that.