You may have noticed that if you compare the number of clicks in the Audience Inspector and the number of clicks in the Interests Breakdown the values shown are different, and can sometimes vary considerably.
While the clicks are referring to the same campaign, they are actually reporting two different metrics:
- Link Clicks (more specifically, inline link clicks): This is the number of clicks on links that effectively redirect users to your external page. These are shown in the Audience Inspector box and in the stats of your Campaign Dashboard.
- Engagement Clicks: These are clicks that indicate an interaction between the user and your ad. Engagement clicks include link clicks as well as likes, shares, visits to the page etc. This is the metric reported in the Interests Breakdown box.
Another important reason why numbers are usually very different between the two boxes, is that a person interested in a certain topic, let's say "Kindergarten", can also be interested in another one, let's say "Early childhood education." Since it's the same person, it will only count as one link click, but as they are interested in both topics, it will count as two different engagement clicks, one per interest!
Why do we use two different click metrics? Unfortunately, the "inline link click" value isn't available for the Interests Breakdown, so we are showing the only click data we can get.