Even though I love Facebook Ad Reporting tool for exporting just about any campaign related data, there’s scope for improvement. Any brand using Facebook Advertising understands the importance of segmentation – not all Facebook users are equal and not even all Facebook fans equal either. The key here is segmentation – the more granular you can get, the more differences you’ll see in behavior for key metrics such as Cost Per Reach, Cost Per Click, Cost Per Engagement etc.

Keeping this in mind, here are the two improvements that analysts could benefit from:

#1 – Ability to segment Connections Targeting under Data Breakdown

Connections Targeting is crucial as it helps determine whom to target (or not) i.e. fans, friends of fans, users not connected to the page. Each of these segments exhibit a very different pattern in terms of engagement rate, the type of engagement and the cost per reach/engagement. In my experience, it’s almost an inverse relationship between the cost per reach and engagement for these three groups. Reaching fans is the costliest (as it’s very targeted) but it also produces the highest engagement rate out of the above three groups. Moreover, users not connected to your page are more likely to like a post while fans and friends of fans are more likely to comment or share on content.

If you were planning post promotion for your next post, you would ideally want to know the pattern and how to allocate the total budget between the various connection targeting options possible. However, this option can only be utilized if you have already created separate ad sets for each of such connection targeting options. By doing so, you can rank the cost per reach, engagement, website click, video play etc. So, if you ran a post promotion for 25-44 and chose ‘All’ under Connection Targeting, you cannot retroactively find out how different groups behaved with your content.

#2 – Ability to know Negative Feedback for Advertised Content

If you’re onboard with point #1, then you’d also want to know the actions taken by users after seeing your ad (any type of ad content). Within the existing reporting tool, there are plenty of metrics that you can download depending on the type of your content. It could range from page likes to post engagement to conversions via Facebook. It can then be broken down by the existing options in point #1 to find out the best performing segments.

What’s missing right now is the Negative Feedback (hide post, page unlike) that you can get for the entire post from Facebook Insights. For any paid content I run on Facebook, I’d surely want to know the kind of paid content that triggers a negative reaction from the user. Example, if friends of fans feel overwhelmed from promoted posts in their newsfeed and end up hiding the post, I would want to keep that in mind for the upcoming post promotions. There are way too many possibilities to list here but the idea is clear. Avoid the low performing ones (or negative performing) and go on with the positive performing ones.

What do you think can be improved within the existing reporting tool to help analysts make better decisions?