Facebook Custom Columns

Key Takeaways

one of the best things about the Facebook Ads platform is everything you can do in it you can try and get more app installs you can get more page likes you can get on-site conversions all of these different things and the thing that I think Facebook does the worst by default is show you how things are performing honestly the column choices in Facebook are just not as advertiser friendly as I would like them to be when you first log in so we're gonna go back to the basics and what I want to talk about today are how to create your own view and choose what columns you want to see when you log into Facebook and then how to create saved views so you can constantly go back to the same thing and customize them for maybe your set of campaigns it's around app installs verse conversions against something else and you'll always have these saved views that you can go back to so let's hop in and start to customize our views when you first log into the Facebook platform it'll always default this sort of view at the campaign level you're always gonna see campaign name delivery budget results reach for me as an old-school advertiser this set of columns is honestly just a mess there's results over here and then to three columns away is cost per result why are those not right next to each other it doesn't make any sense to me so what we want to start to do is customize the views that we're seeing within the platform and we can do that through this one little drop down over here where you see columns when you click on this you will see that the performance default option is what's chosen there are a lot of different views that you can choose in here from setup delivery engagement and I highly encourage you to go through all of these and see if any of them are a good fit for you but what I want to talk about today is starting to customize our columns and see the view that you actually want to see so let's put together the view that I always like to see when I log into my accounts for the first time at a high level I'm just gonna click on customize columns once the builder loads you'll notice there are a number of different sections in here the first is off to the left and these are basically the categories the table of contents if you will of the metrics that we're going to be able to choose from then in the center are going to be the actual metrics themselves you'll see some of them already have a checkbox and next to them some of them don't and then corresponding with that are the columns that have been chosen these are the values that have already been chosen by default so this is showing me the performance view that was first in there so what we can do in this side over here is start to get rid of columns that we don't want so I'll just get rid of these two or we can start to move things around by hovering over the little dots and we can drag move different pieces where they want to go what I'm gonna do is go through and choose the columns that I want to see whenever I log into an account first as an old-school marketer this is the type of view that I like to see I got my start in paid search I think a lot of us did it back in the day and this is the type of view I like to see I want to see clicks impressions click-through rate amount spent the results for each campaign and then the cost per result and then some other metrics down the line what we can do is save this as a preset in the campaign so we can always come back to it so down in the bottom left just click Save this preset and then it'll give you a field where you can type in the name of what you want this set of columns to be named so I'm just gonna label this as PPC and hit apply and once we hit apply you'll notice that the view has changed and at the over here and the columns drop down it now labels it as PPC because that's what we named it so when you click on the drop down again you'll notice that down here there's actually going to be a new listing as PPC there's also an X right next to it so if you ever save a set of columns that you don't want you can just click that X and it'll delete that set of columns but now we have a view that we can come into and even when the campaigns originally kick us back into this performance view as a default it's a really easy step to come in here click from the drop down hover down the PBC and now you've got your columns exactly the way you want them to so you can see the actions that you want to see at the top and this is just one of the views that you can create when you come in and in that customize columns builder there are tons of different actions you can choose from it starts you off in the performance section so you can see all these different metrics here you can then go down into conversions and you can start to see what the standard events are so if you've been using event conversion actions on your site you can start to do like app installs and then you'll notice that there are a number of different columns in here as well where you can start to choose the number of unique actions that somebody has taken or the value of it if you're pulling in a specific value for an online purchase or something of that nature the cost metric is basically what is the cost per install of that campaign so in the same way that we have cost per result over here that's what that column is and then unique cost is relatively self-explanatory the cost per unique action that somebody took on your site so just check the boxes next to each one of those that you would want to see and it'll populate over on the right so let's look at add to cart we want to know total value cost so then if we scroll down it'll start to show the Add to Cart conversions the adds to cart with the website adds to cart offline and on Facebook Add to Cart so you can keep all these different columns in here if you want to typically for an easy view I will uncheck all of these just to kind of narrow the number of columns and then you'll see the value for each of the add two carts and then you'll see the cost per add to cart if you were to save this I'm not gonna say that just for sake of example you can also see custom conversions for these you won't be able to do unique or unique cost but any of the specific conversion actions that you've created anything custom you can create columns for those as well and see how those are performing away from just standard events now the last thing I want to show is at a slightly different level of the account so let's X out of here one of the things that I think is really important is being able to see how your campaigns are set up and understanding what's actually going on in them whenever you create a new campaign ad set or add there are certainly performance metrics you want to see columns for and that's what we just went through but there's also different setup pieces you want to know what target audience you're going after what ad creative you are using what are the different campaign settings you have in place and there are sets of columns that can help you see that at a high level without having to click into each of the campaigns ad sets ads and clicking the edit button to see what the settings are one of the ones I want to run through I personally have to do a number of different QA pieces or our Facebook ad campaigns QA meaning Quality Assurance we go through we set them up we have somebody on the team double check to make sure it looks before we launch just to make sure there aren't any errors and that takes a lot of time if you have to click into each one of them so what we're gonna do is set up a queue a preset filter just to make my job just that much easier utilizing custom columns so let's hop into the ads tab and start to set that up so on the ads tab you'll notice that the PPC columns have followed me into this tab as I already had those as a preset so you can still see the same data at the ad level but what I want to do here is be able to see what the actual ad creative is aside from just knowing the image and the name so what we can do here is come down and just customize our columns again I'm gonna get rid of all of these performance columns in here because although they're super important that's not what this preset filter is going to be meant for what I want to know is what ad creative is in place so I'm just gonna ditch all of these and start to set up something based on the actual ad creative instead so over here on the left you can see the settings group here's where you can start to get into the way things are set up you can see the IDS if you need to the ad set name campaign name if you want to see those you can start to see the date that things were created when they start and the objective all this sort of thing but what I'm gonna scroll down to is the ad creative now you can see that in this section you can choose what the headline is the body the link the description and then I also want to make sure that all of our tracking looks right so I'm also going to include the URL parameters field to make sure that we have all of our tracking parameters in place the way they need to be then I'm gonna say this is a preset so now I'm going to name it QA - ad because at some point I'm eventually going to need to set up ad set and campaign QA columns but at this point I want to make sure that they're all grouped together so I start with QA and then I choose the level that it's gonna be and then I hit apply now that I've resized the columns you can start to see what's in here so I apologize that everything is blurred out but I can't be telling you all of our clients tracking and information and that sort of thing now at a glance I can easily see the headline body landing page link and any of the tracking parameters that are in place for each of these ads and the way that we want them to be this includes the URL parameters which we've talked about in a previous video where you can set those up apart from the actual landing page URL but it'll be really easy for me to come in here and make sure that the headline and body copy match with the ad name and how we have everything organized in the account and make sure that all the tracking looks good and everything is set up and ready to run and then if I ever need to change my columns again just click on the drop down and you can see that QA - ad is set up over here I could run back into PPC if I want to get back to the performance metrics that are here or I can start to create more custom column sets so I can always come in and see exactly what I want to see at a glance without having to reset all of my columns every single time and that's it it's super simple this is one of those instances where you got to spend a little bit of time now to save a lot of time later it's really easy that the next time you go in set up your custom columns just check that save as preset button to make sure that you don't have to sit there and click and drag and drop and do all that kind of stuff again well you want to be able to spend all of your time optimizing your Facebook campaigns not just trying to figure out what's going on and actually seeing the performance that's in it thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos