I was with one of my clients and explained how different types of campaigns are affecting overall ROAS. The discussion was very fruitful. So I’m explaining things here.

Before starting, let’s start with one example. If someone has 5 goats, 3 cows, and 1 camel. How we can add those?

Well, we cannot add those because all are of different types. We can see that person has 9 animals (totally different). Because we can add only one type of thing.

Now let’s imagine, you are running different types of campaigns (e.g. conversion campaigns, messages campaigns, and awareness campaigns). Every type of campaign will have different CPC, CPM, and CTR. If you want to start comparing those with each other, your analysis will be wrong.

That’s the most important thing and a widely used mistake. Businesses are running different types of campaigns and then at the end of the month when they are seeing reports, they add all those values to calculate overall CPC, CPM, CTR, CPA, and ROAS.

In the coming seconds, I’m assuming all the campaigns for one business objective.

If want to check the true impact of your campaigns, you need to analyze all these things one by one. Why?

The answer is Facebook only optimizes campaigns for the selected objective. Let’s suppose with a traffic objective campaign, you’ll get a CPC of $0.01 but for the same settings, your CPC for conversion campaigns might be more than $1. Because the audience quality for conversion campaigns will be higher and consist of those people who are more likely to purchase instead of just clicking on ads.

Similarly, with Awareness objective campaigns, your CPM will be lower but for the same settings, your campaign CPM will be higher for conversion campaigns.

Facebook or Google are only optimizing campaigns for the objective that you have selected. If you’ve selected campaign objectives as messages, then Facebook will be more likely to find people who are going to messages. It will not optimize the same campaign for purchases (you might get sales but volume will be very low) because this campaign was only optimized for getting messages.

If your campaign is for video views, then you’ll get video views but not comments, likes, and shares (again very few percentages of people will do that as well).

So the thing is that, if at the end of the month, you are seeing low ROAS, the reason will be those different campaign objectives. The awareness campaign will build awareness (that will be good in the longer term), messages campaigns will get messages (that will also be good in the longer term), video views will get views (again that will be good in the longer term) but these all campaign objectives will lower your ROAS (that’s the thing that you are seeing or measuring in short term (for a specific period of time).

So that’s the thing that you need to consider. Here is a practical example. In the previous month, we were only focusing on conversion campaigns, and our cost per sale was €20.65 and ROAS was 4.19. AOV was €86.56, CPC was €0.12, CPM was €1.90 and CTR was 1.57%.

This month we also started a messaging campaign along with conversion campaigns. Our cost per sale is €31.46 and our ROAS is 2.78. AOV is €87.33, CPC is €0.16, CPM was €2.21 and CTR was 1.37%.

But check when we applied the filter of only conversion campaigns for this month’s data, the results are totally changed. Our cost per sale is €24.80 and ROAS is 3.52. AOV is €87.33, CPC is €0.18, CPM was €2.11 and CTR was 1.20%.

So it will be advisable to only check relevant metrics while comparing things and getting to conclusions.