Dashboard keywords glossary

A guide to the key performance indicators across multiple campaigns.

The criteria for evaluating performance may vary with your campaign goals. 

For example, a campaign started with the goal of increasing brand awareness would benefit from a measure of the number of people reached with your ads (Impressions). On the other hand, you can understand a conversion campaign’s performance by looking at the conversion rate and cost-per-conversion (CPC). For a  video campaign, you can set up a pivot table on your Adriel dashboard to view metrics related to video views or engagement time.

Key metrics for Link Click Campaigns

Click

The ‘clicks’ metric you see on the Adriel dashboard refers to clicks on links, not the total amount of clicks across all types. Unlike Clicks (Total), which include clicks on other parts of your ad(s) (i.e. likes, comments, or sharing), Link Clicks is defined as the number of clicks on a link that takes the user to a landing page.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

CTR is the ratio of the actual clicks on an ad to the number of impressions, expressed as a percentage (clicks/impressions X 100)s. A high click-through rate implies more clicks in proportion to impressions and is a useful indicator for measuring relative ad performance.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

CPC is the most commonly online-advertising revenue model method for measuring the cost effectiveness of a campaign. CPC as computed is the average cost incurred for each click and is computed by dividing the total amount spent on the ad campaign by the total number of clicks received during the campaign. This metric helps advertisers analyze and optimize their campaigns based on their budget and the desired outcome, such as conversions or user engagement. CPC is also referred to as the pay-per-click (PPC) by certain online advertisers. 

Engagement

An engagement is defined as any action taken by individuals when an ad is displayed on scree. An engagement may include actions such as liking, commenting, sharing, or using coupons issued through ads, viewing photos or videos, or clicking links.

Ad spend

This is the estimated total spent on your campaign, ad set, or an ad during its schedule. 

Budget

This is the maximum amount that you're willing to spend on your campaigns. The dashboard provides an option to display either the the daily average, periodical average or the lifetime spend of your scheduled ad sets or campaigns. This feature does not apply to ads but only to only ad sets or campaigns.

Bid cap

Bid cap stipulates the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay for a click or an ad impression to be displayed to a user.  By setting a bid cap, advertisers ensure they don't pay more than their desired maximum cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Bid caps play a role in determining ad placements and competition and are also a budget control mechanism. High cap may yield better positioning but low cost may limit an ad's exposure or reduced delivery.

Bid strategy

This is the way in which an advertiser wants to bid in an auction; determined based on cost optimization and goals for ad delivery.

Link clicks

This is the number of clicks on links within the ad that led to advertiser-specified destinations

Placements

This refers to the different places an ad is displayed on various platform.

Time breakdown

This will display data using the logic below:

  • Daily Breakdown: You can view your ad data for each day that your ads were active. These values are estimates.

  • Weekly Breakdown: When the selected data relates to a period more than 90 days and less than 1 year old, the data is displayed for each week that your ads were active. These values are estimates.

  • Monthly Breakdown: When the selected data is more than 1 year old, the data is displayed for each month that your ads were active. These values are estimates.

Key metrics for Conversion Campaigns

Conversion

A ‘Conversion’ refers to an event when a visitor takes deliberate action in response to to an ad. Conversion events are different across advertisers and businesses, and can include: signing up for membership, leaving contact information, requesting a consultation, payment, adding to shopping cart, installing the app, etc. can all be counted as conversion events. For example:

  • Pixel: add to cart - This metric tracks event where a product is added to a customer's shopping cart.

  • Pixel: initiate checkout - This metric tracks event where a customer enters the checkout flow prior to completing the checkout flow.

  • Pixel: add payment info - This metric tracks event where payment information is entered during the checkout flow.

  • Pixel: purchase - This metric tracks event where a purchase is made or checkout flow is completed.

    *To learn more about Pixel events, click here.

Total Conversions

The total number of conversions including all recorded conversion events. What events are counted as conversions can be customized, and whenever such events occur they are counted as a conversion.

​Cost Per Action (CPA)

Cost-per-Action refers to the cost of each desired conversion. This is computed by dividing the total number of conversions generated by the total advertising cost of the campaign.

Conversion Rate (CVR)

Conversion rate refers to the ratio of conversions to the number of visitors. The higher the conversion rate, the more effective the online advertising campaign generally is. Conversely, if your conversion rate is low, your ad may be less competitive or you may need to account for alternative factors, such as product prices.

ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)

ROAS is a measure of the efficiency of your ad spend. ROAS is typically expressed as ratio or percentage - it is the ratio of total revenue generated by your ads compared to the aggregate advertising. This is a useful indicator to judge the effectiveness of your online campaigns in terms of sales - 1:1 implies that the campaign broke even while a ratio greater than 1:1 signifies positive return on ad spend. 

Bounce rate

This is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request made to the Analytics server.

Key Metrics for Reach Campaigns

Impressions

Your exposure is measured in terms of impressions, which are the number of times an ad is displayed on-screen to potential customers. 

Reach

While impressions are based on the number of times an ad is shown, reach is taken into account the number of users. For example, if an ad was shown to a user 3 times, it counts as 3 impressions and 1 reach.

Frequency

Frequency is the average number of times an ad is shown to an user. If the frequency is high, users may become tired of the ad in question, so it is generally recommended to change the creative when its frequency exceeds 3.5.

CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions)

An indicator of the average cost of 1,000 impressions. This is the most commonly used cost method for reach campaigns.

Key Metrics for Video Campaigns

Cost Per View (CPV)

The average cost is paid when a user watches beyond the 30-second mark of an ad (or the full ad if the video ad is less than 30 seconds) or interacts with the video (whichever comes first).

Views

Views are the number of times users watched a given video.

View Rate

The hit rate is counted as the number of views or engagements from video ads divided by the number of ad impressions (video and thumbnail impressions).

Video played to 25%*

Shows how many times the video has been watched beyond 25% of its duration

Video played to 50%*

Shows the number of times a video has been watched beyond 50% of its duration.

Video played to 75%*

Shows how many times a video has been watched beyond 75% of its duration.

Video played to 100%*

Shows the number of times a video has been watched all the way to the end.

*Note: For the ‘Video Play Progress’ metric, only users who watched a given video all the way to the end are counted.  If a user engages with a video by clicking on a URL as shown, a companion banner, an extension, etc., a view will be added to the count.  If a user watches only 15 seconds of a 20-second video and then clicks on a displayed URL to go to a landing page, this is counted as a hit.  However, since the video in such a case was not played to the end, it does not count towards the ‘100% video playback’ count.