Facebook Ads Reach & Frequency

This document details the options for Facebook Ads Reach and Frequency. You can quickly navigate to a particular section by using the table of contents below.

Overview

Option 1: Use the daily stored Ave. Daily Reach and Ave. Daily Frequency metrics that are averaged in TapClicks date ranges

Option 2: Use the TapClicks homegrown Reach MTD and Reach Lifetime metrics

Option 3: Use TapClicks On Demand where exact accuracy for Reach and Frequency is required

Option 4: Use TapClicks ETL features to create the KPI you need

Conclusion

Overview

Facebook Ads has a number of metrics that are classified as “Estimated” metrics, which can vary slightly when you look at data between TapClicks and Facebook. For more information about Estimated fields from Facebook, check out this article.

Most TapClicks users have questions about Reach and Frequency when it comes to Facebook Ads. Reach and Frequency are defined below.

1. Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once.
   • Example: If you and I see an ad on Day one, then I see the same ad on day two, Facebook Reach will be two people reached, but if you look at this data daily, you may expect 2+1 = 3 people reached.
2. Frequency: the average number of times each person saw your ad.

Since these metrics are estimated, and because they represent individual people who are deduplicated over a date range, TapClicks offers four different options to report on these metrics and tell your data story. The options are as follows:

1. Use the daily stored Total Daily Reach, Avg. Daily Reach, and Avg. Daily Frequency metrics that are averaged in TapClicks over date ranges.
2. Use the TapClicks homegrown Reach MTD and Reach Lifetime metrics.
3. Use TapClicks On Demand where exact accuracy for Reach and Frequency is required.
4. Use TapClicks ETL features to create the KPI you need.

Option 1: Use the daily stored Avg. Daily Reach and Avg. Daily Frequency metrics that are averaged in TapClicks for date ranges

The TapClicks dashboard stores all data from Facebook Ads on a daily basis, which means the Reach and Frequency metrics are also stored on a day-by-day basis. For this reason, the TapClicks labels for these fields include “Avg. Daily …” as a prefix.

When representing this data for any date range you select in your dashboard, TapClicks applies an averaging formula to these fields to create a representative value for the metric for the selected date range.

For the most accurate representation of the direct, daily stored Reach and Frequency fields from Facebook Ads, we recommend that you use “Group By = Date” in your visualizations.

If you choose not to “Group By = Date”, please note that these individual daily values will be averaged when they need to be aggregated across clients, campaigns, ad groups, ads and other data views, and the resulting values in TapClicks will not exactly match the Facebook Ads platform value for the same date range.

Example

Let’s assume that you have the following Reach daily values stored in your database from Facebook Ads:

• Day 1: 50
• Day 2: 150
• Day 3: 0
• Day 4: 75

When presenting this data with “Group By = Date”, you will see exactly the daily values provided by Facebook Ads. However, when you remove the “Group By = Date”, the result will vary as follows for the date range:

• Total Daily Reach = sum of the daily values = 50+150+75 = 275
• Avg. Daily Reach = (sum of non-0 values) / (count of non-0 days) = (50+150+75)/3 = 92

Depending on how you provide reporting to your customers, this may meet your needs.

Option 2: Use the TapClicks homegrown Reach MTD and Reach Lifetime metrics

In an effort to provide more options, we have exposed fields that provide more flexibility for your reporting needs.

Reach MTD

The Reach MTD (Month to Date) field is the month-to-date Reach value for the given day within a single month. When reviewing this data in your dashboard, the date at the end of your date range selector within a given month will reflect the Reach to that date in time. 

Reach MTD is an optional turn-on because it does require additional API calls to Facebook, which increases fetch time.

Example

You are looking at the date range of Dec 1 through Dec 15 in your dashboard. The Reach MTD field will show you the Reach value that represents Dec 1 to Dec 15 exactly.

If you were to change your date range to Dec 10 through Dec 15, the Reach MTD field will show you the value for Dec 1 through Dec 15, because of the month to date logic on this field.

This field works well when you need to rely on monthly reporting for your advertisers and is not designed to work when spanning multiple months. For that scenario, please refer to other options in this article like Reach Lifetime or On Demand.

Reach Lifetime

The Facebook user interface gives you the option to pull Reach data for the “lifetime” of an object (ad, campaign, etc.), instead of passing in a specific date range. When working in your dashboard, the value for Reach Lifetime is based on the end date in the date range you select within the dashboard. If you specify a date range from Jan 1 to Dec 31, then the Reach Lifetime on Dec 31 will be displayed. If you choose Jan 1 to Jun 1, then the value on Jun 1 will be displayed. 

Reach Lifetime is an optional turn-on because it does require additional API calls to Facebook, which increases fetch time. Once enabled, the lifetime metrics will be stored in the database for your reference. Based on the nature of the way this data is returned by Facebook, there is no way to get the lifetime values for days before the metric was enabled.

Option 3: Use TapClicks On Demand where exact accuracy for Reach and Frequency is required

If you need to provide exact Reach and Frequency values for specific Facebook Ads advertisers or campaigns in your TapClicks reports, TapClicks On Demand widgets can help you tell your data story.

For information about how to create a On Demand widget, please see this article.

For FAQs about On Demand widgets, please see this article.

Option 4: Use TapClicks ETL features to create the KPI you need

Finally, while the options above will help provide different ways to present your performance data, we understand that there may be cases where you need to modify how the resulting data are calculated.

TapClicks has several ETL features that can help you refine your data:

• Advanced Calculations to create your own formulas.
• Google Sheets for TapClicks allows you to push data to Sheets where you can modify the data yourself.
• Smart Connector enables you to bring that data back into the dashboard for reporting.

Additionally, the TapClicks Customer Solutions team is available to help consult with your team, understand your unique reporting needs, and propose a solution.

Conclusion

TapClicks wants to ensure that your team can tell the data story necessary to keep your customers coming back. If you have any questions about the information in this article, feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or customercare@tapclicks.com. We look forward to hearing from you!