Intro: If you’re new to Facebook advertising you might want to read our introduction article here. This post is more advanced and is a guest post by Craig Robinson of Qwaya.com.

As a band or record label grows they eventually turn to online advertising. The larger you grow, the more online advertising campaigns you run and the more metrics you have to deal with. That’s just how it goes. So when you want to accurately measure your ROI on Facebook to truly tell if you’re successful, this is something that becomes harder to do as your music career grows.

The fact is that most established musicians and labels are not Facebook-specific. Facebook can be just one of the many mediums on which a musician will advertise. This means that you may also have campaigns running on separate social media websites, on Google, on the radio or TV, in magazines and newspapers, and this isn’t even counting the “investment” you’re making in recording, equipment, touring and other aspects of the business.

So in order to keep your head in the game and to tell if your Facebook campaign is really successful, you have to work with a marketing dashboard (your advertising tool—like Qwaya for example—should give you all the features of a dashboard). In essence, a marketing dashboard is the digital display of the important information you need in order to trace campaign-related activities.

Using Your Dashboard Effectively

Defining Objectives

Look, you already know that deciding whether or not your Facebook campaign is successful or unsuccessful is basically common knowledge for anyone able to do basic math. You can tell exactly where you’re lacking and where you need to improve. You can gauge exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The point here is that you want to use your dashboard to accurately measure your numbers so that you know in which areas you should be working to improve. It is really that simple.

Weighing Pros and Cons

You will be left with a lot of data that needs to be broken down into quantifiable, tangible categories that you can work to improve on. The pros of cons of this simply means that you have to decide in which areas you should focus more of your investing vs. which areas you should pull back from. If you’re getting conversions at a greater rate from Facebook Sponsored Stories, for example, you can easily judge this data and perhaps pull spending from other ads to try to increase your profitability.

Accurately Assessing the Data

In order to accurately assess the data, you have to continuously assess it. Numbers can change rapidly in the scope of a Facebook campaign. You may experience a sudden surge, or you could be looking at a quick plummet.

While a lot of similar literature out there makes things seem a lot more complicated in terms of measuring success, the truth is that it doesn’t have to be complicated. You can read your data from any one of a number of systems and decide which direction to go in. And whether or not your campaign is successful is as simple as focusing on your bottom line and judging whether or not your audience is growing, stagnant, or shrinking.

Written by Craig Robinson, Qwaya.com Editor and Social Advertising expert.