What you Need to Know to Choose the Right Objective for Your FB Campaign

Facebook objectives can be tricky. If you don’t have any experience you might pick the wrong strategy for your business and end up wasting money. In order to reach your goals in digital marketing, you must make sure you invest correctly on ads in social media, especially Facebook.

Facebook divides the objectives into three categories: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions. If you are new to this platform, and your goal is to increase sales, you may think that beginning with a conversion objective campaign is the way to go.

This is your first mistake.

Today I will go over my 3 favorite FB objectives and how I begin my strategy for most businesses. I will also briefly highlight the rest of the objectives so you can get an idea on how they work.

Before you begin creating your first campaign, make sure to install the FB pixel on your website or landing page so you can get the most out of your account.

My 3 Favorite Facebook Objectives

1. Traffic Objective

This objective is part of the Consideration category. In this stage you introduce your product or service to potential customers. I choose to skip both objectives in the Awareness category (brand awareness and reach) simply because the Traffic objective is best suited to take people to your website/landing page. I like to begin with this objective for most of my clients because we can gather data, build audience lists, understand demographics, and much more.

The traffic objective is a good start to your campaigns so you can test different ad sets and compare the data to determine which interest targeting or audiences convert best. Also, you can optimize your ad delivery for landing page views, link clicks, impressions, or unique daily reach. If your goal is to take people to your website, I suggest to use landing page views.

I recommend to go with this strategy if you are a small to medium size business that wants to target people who may be in need of your product or service.

2. Lead Generation Objective

The lead generation objective is probably one of the most convenient objectives to use to capture a lead. This objective can be misleading as the label reads lead generation, however, the goal is to capture the lead within FB and not take them to the website. With this strategy, you create a lead form as a FB ad that allows you to select pre determined info for the customer to fill out and you can also use custom questions on the form.

I recommend to keep the lead form with a max of 5 questions because you don’t want to scare the customer away with an application that looks like your going to buy a house.

The cool thing about this objective is that since the potential customer is already signed into their profile, FB will automatically fill out the required fields such as name, email, etc. making it much quicker and easier for the client to fill out the lead form. At the end of the form you also have the option where the client can go to the website in case you want to give them more info.

I like to begin working on my accounts with a Traffic and Lead Generation Objective to compare the data on which one converts the best. Once we have a good amount of leads, (I use a benchmark of 30 but this can vary) we can create a Conversion Objective campaign.

3. Conversion Objective

Just like the Lead Generation objective, you will want to use this one once you have leads from your Traffic objective. I like to set a benchmark of 20 to 30 leads. The difference is that this campaign is directed for customers to go to the website and convert on there.

This campaign objective is the most effective one if your goal is to increase conversions on your website, of course it will only work if the pixel is installed and you have defined the custom conversions that you want to track. Conversions are any desired action that you would like a customer to take such as signing up for a webinar, filling out the contact form, or completing a purchase.

The three objectives listed above are my favorite to use in campaigns because they are the most aligned with the majority of my clients goals.

I will also quickly highlight the remaining Facebook objectives and their purpose.

Brand Awareness

• If you have a big budget and want to showcase your ad as much as possible go with this objective
• You will notice the frequency will be slightly higher than normal since FB will focus on displaying ads so people will remember your brand.
• You have the option to include a website URL, however, you are better off using the Traffic objective at this point.

Reach

• Facebook will try to show your ad to as many people possible within your budget
• Not many ad optimization options
• Only use if you have a big budget and want as many people possible to see your ad

App Installs

• Just as the objective reads, this is best for advertising your app and targeting people who will most likely install it.

Video Views

• Similar to the Traffic Objective, I would use this one in the specific case that you had videos to advertise.
• As I explained in the Traffic objective, once you get enough leads, you may use the Conversions objective to also advertise your video ads

Post Engagement

• Facebook will target people who are more likely to comment, like, or share your post.
• Not that useful unless you really want people to engage with your post

Page Likes

• I don’t see the need for this anymore unless you are highly active with your FB page and you want to make sure your audience follows you so they can keep up with your daily posts.

Event Responses

• Only useful if you are hosting an event for your business and you want to provide details and have the audience engaged

Messages

• This campaign objective sends people directly to messenger so they can start a conversation with you.
• Many customers like to ask questions before making a purchase or requesting your service
• This serves as a good way to reel in the client and start a conversation

Catalog Sales

• Perfect for when you have an e-commerce store and want to promote the products from your catalog

Store Visits

• This is useful if you have several locations and want to increase the foot traffic to your business
• You will need to set up your business location in business manager

I hope this blog has helped you understand which direction to take when creating your FB campaign objectives. This is only the beginning as you can get more complex when you start to use audience lists but we will save that for another blog post. There is more to it than what I briefly went over, however, by sharing my favorite objectives I am sure it will take you one step closer to achieving your goals.

Originally published at www.hitedigital.com on December 4, 2018.