Facebook Advertising Glossary

Ad Account – Grouping of all your specific ads activity. Your ad account includes different campaigns, ads, and billing information. Each ad account has a specific name and ad account ID number. An ad account name can be the same for multiple ad accounts, but the ad account ID will always be a unique string of numbers.

Ad – An individual ad includes its creative (ex: the image and text it uses). Ads are kept within an Ad Set, and multiple Ad Sets are kept within a campaign.

Ad Set – Campaigns are made up of Ad Sets, and an Ad Set includes one or more ads, a budget, and a schedule. Each Ad Set within a campaign has its own separate budget unless CBO is enabled for the campaign.

Action – The number of actions taken on your ad, Page, app, or event after someone viewed your ad, even if they didn’t click on it. Actions include Page likes, app installs, conversions, event responses, and more. For example, 2 Page likes and 2 comments would be counted as 4 actions.

Bid – The amount you bid in ad auctions to have your ads shown on Facebook. There are three bidding strategies you can use to determine how Facebook will bid for you in ad auctions, based on your cost and optimization goals.

Budget – The maximum amount you’re willing to spend on each Ad Set. If CBO is enabled for the campaign, the budget is set and managed at the campaign level instead of the Ad Set level.

Campaign – This is a level within the structure of a Facebook ad. The structure is as follows: Campaigns > Ad Sets > Ads. Ad Sets and ads exist within a campaign. At the campaign level, you’re able to control a campaign’s objective, such as Page likes, video views, or app installs.

Campaign ID – This is a unique ID associated with a campaign and is represented by numbers. In AdEspresso, you will always find the campaign ID in the URL of your campaign. e.g.: https://domain.com/campaign/762301

CBO – Campaign budget optimization. This setting is enabled by default for all new campaigns and sets the budget at the campaign level. Facebook automatically redistributes budget allocation across Ad Sets to optimize the campaign’s performance according to your bid strategy.

Clicks – The total number of clicks on your ad.
Conversions – Conversions are customer-completed actions, like purchases or adding to a cart on a website.

Custom Audience – A Custom Audience is an ad targeting option that lets advertisers find their existing audiences among people who are on Facebook.

Daily Budget – This is the amount you’ve indicated you’re willing to spend on a specific Ad Set per day. Each Ad Set will have a separate budget, so keep this in mind if you have more than one active Ad Set in your account. Your ads will automatically stop showing once your daily budget for the Ad Set has been met for that day.

Delivery – This tells you if your campaign, Ad Set or ad is currently running. The status on AdEspresso will typically be: Active, Paused, Completed, or Not Running.

End Date – The date your campaign is scheduled to stop running. A campaign’s start and end dates are based on the scheduling of the Ad Sets within it.

Frequency – Frequency is the average number of times your ad was shown to each person. You may see this number both at the ad and Ad Set level of a campaign.

Impressions – The number of times your ad has been displayed on Facebook.

Lead Generation – Lead generation is the building up of interest in a business’s products or services, and more specifically, a type of campaign on Facebook that encourages consumers to fill out a form with their contact information.

Lifetime Budget – A lifetime budget lets you set an amount to spend over the lifetime of an Ad Set. Our system will automatically try to evenly spread the amount you spend across the period of time that you’ve selected.

Link Clicks – The number of clicks on links appearing on your ad or Page that direct people off Facebook as a result of your ad. (Ex: clicks to install an app, view an offsite video, clicks to another website, call-to-action button clicks to another website, etc.)

Lookalike Audience – This is a type of audience that’s created by Facebook to help advertisers reach people who are similar to an audience that they care about.

Mobile App Install – The number of installs from a mobile device as a result of your ad.

Mobile App Activated – The number of users that installed & opened your app as a result of your ad.

Objective – The objective you selected for your ad. Your objective reflects what you want to achieve with ads. If you are using conversion tracking in your campaign, the objective will *always* be conversions. You can set the optimization goal to be whatever you like, though.

Optimization Goal – This is what action the campaign is being optimized by. It is usually a specific conversion, click, or engagement.

Page Engagement – The number of actions related to the Page and your Page’s posts as a result of your ad.

Page likes – The number of likes on your Page as a result of your ad.

Payment Method – Verified forms of payment you can add to your Facebook account to pay for ads. You need a payment method set up before you can publish any campaigns from that ad account.

Placement – This is where your ad is shown. AdEspresso supports the following placements: Desktop feed, Mobile feed, Audience network, Instagram, Messenger home, Desktop in-stream video, Mobile in-stream video, Instant Articles, and Marketplace.

Post Engagement – The number of actions (ex: likes, comments, shares, photo views, link clicks, video views) related to your Page’s posts as a result of your ad.

Potential Reach – Potential reach is the number of monthly active people on Facebook that match the audience you defined through your audience targeting selections. This is the audience size displayed in step 3 during campaign creation.

Social Clicks – The number of any clicks your ad receives (ex: likes, event responses, offsite clicks) when it’s shown with social information (ex: Jane Doe likes this).

Social Impressions – This is the number of times your ad was viewed and included social information. For example, if the ad is viewed by 3 people 2 times each and it includes information about a friend liking your Page, that means you have 6 social impressions.

Social Proof – The general name for engagement on an ad; likes, comments, and shares.

Status – The status of your campaigns, Ad Sets, and ads can be turned on or off. Keep in mind that if your campaign is Off you’ll need to turn it On before your Ad Sets and ads can run.

Targeted Audience – The targeted audience is the number of people your targeting can reach. You’ll see an estimate of this, like the estimate you see while creating an ad. Bid higher to reach more of your targeted audience.

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