7 Things I Track Every Week in Any Ad Campaign

In the last post, I talked about a mistake that cost me extra money.

After that, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to wait until the end of the month to find out something was wrong.

I started tracking certain numbers on a regular basis — so if something’s off, I know quickly, not after the money’s already gone.

First, How Often Should You Check?

One important note before we continue: how often you check depends on your budget size.

Think of it like driving: at a normal speed, you don’t need to check your mirrors every second. But at high speed, even a small delay in reaction can cost you a lot.

Same idea with ads: if the budget is very large (say, $10K+ a day), I’m checking daily, sometimes hourly — because a small mistake turns into a big loss fast.

If the budget is smaller, you don’t need all that — every couple of days to once a week is enough, and it also gives the algorithm time to actually “learn” the audience.

What matters is that your monitoring frequency matches your budget size — you don’t need to check like a company spending millions to benefit from this.

Here are the most important things I track on any Meta video ad, explained simply:

1. New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC)

Simply put: how much does each new customer cost me.

If a new customer cost me $10 today and $30 tomorrow with no real change in the market — that’s a warning sign. I need to know why.

2. Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)

This is: for every dollar spent on ads, how many dollars come back in sales?

If every dollar brings back $5 in sales, that’s healthy. If it drops to $2, something needs a second look — even if sales themselves are still growing.

3. Hook Rate — Does the Video Grab Attention?

This is: of everyone who was served the ad, how many watched the first 3 seconds of the video?

Think of it like a street vendor shouting to get attention — if no one stops to listen from the first sentence, nothing he says after that matters.

4. Hold Rate — Did People Stay Until the End?

Different from the metric above: this tells you whether people who started watching actually stayed until the end, or dropped off halfway through.

If people are dropping off early, something in the content itself needs to change.

5. Comments and Engagement

Not just like counts — comments specifically tell me: is this the right audience or not?

If the comments are mostly questions about price or “where can I get this” — that’s a buying-ready audience. If the comments are completely unrelated to the topic — the ad reached the wrong audience.

6. On-Site Behavior

When someone lands on the website, how do they behave?

Do they browse multiple pages and read? That’s a genuinely interested person. Do they land and immediately leave? That means the ad reached them, but they’re not the right audience.

7. New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors

Important to know: is the ad bringing in new people, or is it just the same people coming back to watch again?

If most visitors are new, the ad is expanding your reach. If it’s mostly the same people, you might need to reach a wider audience.

Why I track all of this — and it’s not about the numbers themselves

The real reason is to answer one question: is this ad reaching the right audience or not?

If all these numbers look healthy, the audience is right, and I can safely increase the budget.

If something’s off, I find out quickly — before spending a lot of money on the wrong audience.

In the next post, I’ll show you exactly how this habit helped us during a very large-scale test — on a serious ad budget.