Success Metrics for Facebook Instant Experience Ads

If you run Instant Experience ads, how do you measure success? Facebook has added metrics that may prove helpful.

In this post, I’ll help you find those metrics and understand what they all mean.

Let’s go…

Access the Metrics

You’ll need to add columns to your Ads Manager report.

Click the “Columns” dropdown in Ads Manager and select “Customize Columns.”

Facebook Ads Manager Customize Columns

Run a search for “Instant Experience.” You’ll see seven metrics…

Instant Experience Metrics

What the Metrics Mean

Following are the metrics related to Instant Experience measurement and what they mean…

Instant Experience View Time: “The average total time, in seconds, that people spent viewing an Instant Experience.” This is similar to video view time metrics for measuring an engaged user. (SIDE NOTE: I’d love to see this for Landing Page Views and traffic metrics.)

Instant Experience View Percentage: “The average percentage of the Instant Experience that people saw.” These ad units can scroll through multiple components. If your more important components are at the bottom, a higher percentage would be a priority.

Instant Experience Impressions: “The number of elements viewed in an Instant Experience.” This one confuses me a bit. While my assumption would be that an impression would be opening an Instant Experience, that metric is coming up. Instead, this seems to be related to the number of components that you see (similar to the percentage).

Instant Experience Reach: “The number of people who viewed elements from an Instant Experience at least once.”

Instant Experience Clicks to Open: “The number of clicks on your ad that open an Instant Experience.” (This metric is in development)

Instant Experience Clicks to Start: “The number of times an interactive component in an Instant Experience starts.” This will typically be a video. (This metric is in development)

Instant Experience Outbound Clicks: “The number of clicks on links in an Instant Experience that take people off Facebook-owned properties.” Instant Experiences are often used to warm up an audience before sending them to a product page on the advertiser’s website. (This metric is in development)

What About Audiences?

This may be bit off-topic, but I can’t ignore it.

I wrote about the need for more targeting options due to iOS 14+ changes in another blog post. That includes audiences related to Instant Experience engagement.

Right now, Instant Experience audiences only include the following:

  • People who opened your Instant Experience
  • People who clicked a link within your Instant Experience

That’s it!

Instant Experience Engagement Audiences

It’s not as if Instant Experience is some new format. It’s been around long enough for Facebook to develop this further. And there are so many options for audience building — based on these seven metrics alone — that could provide some great options for advertisers.

Facebook is clearly collecting and storing this information. Why not allow us to target based on it?

Your Turn

How do you measure the success of your Instant Experience ads?

Let me know in the comments below!