Most Important KPIs for Meta ads going into 2025
Earlier in my media buying career, I was overwhelmed by all the KPIs you can track. Do we really need to track up to 10 metrics? Unfortunately (or fortunately), the answer is yes—and then some. Over time, you’ll realize tracking more metrics helps identify and fix issues faster.
The good news? Once you understand these metrics and how to use them smartly, they’ll become your best friend for optimizing ads.
In this post, I’ll break down the basics and give you benchmarks for each. Let’s get started! If you prefer video, you can watch this on Youtube by clicking here.
CPC
CPC stands for Cost Per Click. The average benchmark here $1, and anything under $0.5 would be amazing! This is a basic metric that shows you how much a click costs on your ads. This metric can be highly effected by the primary text and headline of your ad, and it's a great feedback on how effective your messaging is.
CTR
CTR stands for Click Through Rate. The usual benchmark here is 1%, anything above 3-4% would be amazing and exceptional! This is another basic metric, that shows the percentage of people who clicked on your ad. The biggest effect on the CTR is coming from the creative side, so basically the static image, or the video part of your Meta ad. Having an amazing offer will also help with this metric (think about Black Friday for example)
CPM
CPM is for Cost Per Mille. The usual benchmark here is $20-$25. This is what I would call the 3rd basic metric, and it shows how much it costs to get 1000 impressions. Audience targeting and competition will be the biggest factors here. In theory, the higher the CPM is, the more valuable the audience is. However, having $100 CPM, even with 2% CTR is not a good move, and it will be really hard to make those ads profitable in the future.
Results
Result depend on what you optimize your campaign for. There are a lot of options, such as link clicks, leads, purchases etc. This is important to track as this will be usually the #1 goal of your advertising.
Reach
Reach shows how many different people your ads were shown to at least once.
Impressions
The main difference between reach is that it shows how many times your ads were shown. If you've reached a 1000 people, and everyone has seen your ads 2 times, your impression would be 2000.
Frequency
Frequency is the multiplier here, is shows how many times on average a person has seen your ads. With the previous example, with 1000 reach and 2000 impressions, your frequency would be 2. You can expect higher frequency with smaller audiences, lists, and retargeting campaigns. We generally try to avoid having frequency over 5-10x.
Link clicks and Landing Page views
Link click is how many times your ads were clicked on, and landing page shows how many people actually loaded your web page. It's really important to track both, as you might have a broken link with 400 link clicks, but nobody actually saw your website - this is a big,big issue! Website speed is also a factor to consider here, if your website is slow, lot of people might exit while your home page is still loading.
ROAS
ROAS stands for Return On Ad Spend. We need to do some math here to get the benchmarks! Usually, most brands aim for 2-3x ROAS. There are a lot of other factors that can affect this metric. On the most basic level it is Revenue Generated from Ad Campaign/Cost of Ad Campaign. Your website's conversion rate is also closely related to ROAS, as well as CPC, CTR and CPM.
ATC/Link Clicks
Add To Carts/Link Click ratio. This is a custom metric you have to set up manually, and it shows the effectiveness of your product page, and how well it is converting visitors to add items to the cart. Our benchmark here is 15%.
Purchase/ATC
Purchase/Add to Cart. This is again a custom metric that you need to set up manually, and this shows the effectiveness of your checkout process. It should be easy to convert visitors who already added to cart, so our benchmark is higher here, between 30%-50%.
Hook Rate
Hook rate is used to determine the effectiveness of the first few seconds of video ads, especially UGC videos. This is a customer metric calculated by 3-second video plays÷Impressions. The benchmark here is 25%.
Hold Rate
Similar to the hook rate, it is mainly used on UGC videos, to judge how engaging the videos are. The higher the %, the better it is. The usual benchmark is 25%.
Possible things here you might be thinking about:
Okay, it's nice knowing these KPIs, but how do I set up the custom metrics?
How should my column setup look to effectively optimize my ads?
Wow, good post!
I ain't reading all that.
Hopefully you are somewhere in the first three. In this case, feel free to drop a comment, leave your feedback and the next post will be EXACTLY about what you need help with.
