Instagram Course: Lesson 1 - Ad Terms

These are the important terms you’re going to need to know to fully understand your Facebook ad performance.


Impressions count the number of times an ad appears in the News feed. They do not represent how many people your advertisement reached because your ad can be shown multiple times to a single user.

CPM - Cost Per 1,000 Impressions

CPM represents how much you pay per thousand impressions/times your ad appears.


Where impressions count the number of times your ad appears, Reach counts the number of individual users that have seen your ad. If you got 1,000 impressions from reaching 500 users, it could mean your ad was being seen by the same people twice.


Frequency counts the number of times individual users are seeing your ad. You shouldn’t take Frequency at face value because it doesn’t actually count how many times each user is seeing your ad. What it does is divide the number of impressions by the number of people reached. Some people could be seeing your ad a few times and others once. A high-frequency number requires further investigation. Age, city, country?

1,000 impressions and 500 users reached would result in an ad frequency of 2, meaning individuals are seeing your ad twice on average.


A click on Facebook can be a number of things like a click on your profile photo, your profile name, the time, the like button, etc. Clicks, count ALL click activity.

URL Click

URL click on Facebook counts the number of times the link to your webpage was clicked. This tells you whether people are responding to your ad in the way you want them to.

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Click Through Rate measures the effectiveness of your ad in generating responses overall, it represents the number of clicks out of the number of impressions. CTR is a calculation of your clicks, multiplied by 100, divided by the number of impressions. A low click-through-rate could mean your ad isn’t attracting attention, or that you’re reaching the wrong audience.

100 clicks out of 1000 impressions give you a CTR of 10%

Facebook shows you your Click-Through Rate for both Clicks and Link Clicks.


Conversions count the number of completed goals. If your goal is to get iTunes sales, a conversion would be counted every time you earned a sale in iTunes.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate counts the number of goal completions out of the number of clicks. It’s a calculation of conversions, multiplied by 100, divided by the number of clicks.

10 conversions out of 100 clicks equal a 10% Conversion Rate

Delivery Optimization

Your ad Delivery Optimization is the goal of your ad. If you want video views, that’s what your ad should be optimized to get. If you want clicks to your website, that’s what your ad should be optimized to get. Facebook will try to show your ad more to people who are most likely to fulfill your ad’s Delivery Optimization goal.