Facebook Ads: Pick the Right Objective
Choosing the correct objective for campaign success
When writing ads for Facebook, the first thing you will need to do is identify your objective. There are eleven main objectives that live under 3 overarching categories: Awareness, Traffic and Conversion. This guide will give you a quick overview of all the objectives available and help you select the proper objective to create a winning campaign!
Awareness
There are two campaign objectives under awareness, brand awareness and reach. The main purpose of awareness campaign is to create brand awareness, either through creating brand recall (brand awareness) or reaching as many people as possible (reach).
Brand Awareness
The purpose of a brand awareness ad is to get people to recall your brand after two days. Facebook will use their proprietary algorithm to show your ad with a high level of frequency to people who will be most likely to recall your brand. Frequency means the number of times your ad has shown to your target audience during the duration of the ad and this is the main measurement used to determine effectiveness of these ads.
Reach
A reach ad does not focus on brand awareness or recall. Rather, a reach ad focuses on reaching as many people as possible. Rather than having a high frequency, Facebook will intentionally have a low frequency of ads. The main measurement for these ad types is reach.
Unless you have a very large budget or are a major brand, just trying to gain recognition, steer away from these ad types. Since they aren’t focusing on conversions or traffic, they will not satisfy the end goal of most campaigns.
Consideration
This is the most used group when creating Facebook campaigns. They cover a lot of different areas with an end goal of getting readers of your ads to take a specific action.
Traffic
The main purpose of this category is to target ads at people likely to click a link and visit a specific URL. This can be valuable if you are trying to:
· Drive traffic to your site’s home page
· Drive traffic to a specific landing page
· Drive traffic to a blog post
The main metric you will use in Facebook for this campaign is link clicks. This is one of my favorite objectives to use because I can track the traffic from the link clicks directly into our site and watch how that traffic performs.
Engagement
This is another of my favorites. If I am trying to get people to engage with my posts in some form such as likes, comments or shares, this objective is perfect. I have had quite a few posts go viral using this objective for a real estate client. In addition, if I am looking for more of a brand awareness campaign, this is the objective I use. Having people interact with the ad helps with brand awareness and trustworthiness by having end users of the product provide testimonials and share with their friends. Engagement with the ad, through likes, comments, shares or photo views, is the main measurement of success for the engagement objective.
Lead Generation
If you are trying to find new leads for your business, lead generation ads can be very effective. Lead Generation allows you to create custom forms that collect information from potential customers. With Lead Generation forms, the less information you have to collect the higher your completion rate so keep those forms short and sweet. The key metric for this objective is forms completed.
Messages
Messaging ads are a great way to interact with customers and potential customers on Facebook. You can create an ad with an option to send a message directly to your brand on Facebook. In this hyper connected world we live in, offering the customers quick and simple access to your brand through Facebook messenger is very powerful. This is also a very effective form of lead generation. The key metric for these ads is Messaging Connections.
Video Views
Video views is self-explanatory. The objective here is to get the viewer to watch your ad all the way through. If you are going the video route for Facebook ads, try varying length of videos to see what your potential customers prefer. There truly isn’t a one size fits all approach for Facebook ads, so testing out 7 second to 3 minute videos will help you find the sweet spot for your customers. The key metric for this is video plays.
App Installs
Unless you are trying to promote an app install, this category will not be useful to you. Facebook will target customers most likely to install your apps, and this will be the key metric of these campaign types.
Conversion
There are three different objectives under the conversion category. As the name sounds, the main purpose of this category is to generate and drive conversions. This is my favorite category as this is driving for conversion based marketing. We can use these ads for both E-commerce and brick and mortar sales.
Conversions
When we think conversion as marketers, our mind goes directly to someone buying a specific product. However, this objective can work for many purposes, not just a customer buying a product. Some examples of this include:
· Add item to cart
· Complete checkout
· Download an app
· Create an account
· Filling out a form to download a white paper
One other note, this works best if you also have the Facebook pixel installed. When the visitor to your site takes the action you requested, this gets sent directly to Facebook and will get counted as a success. Facebook will then continue to optimize the ad to find more people likely to take a similar action. There are about 25 different standard conversion events to choose from, such as add to cart, add payment info or purchases that you can use to track the success of these campaigns.
Catalog Sales
Facebook catalog sales is powerful but also complex to get started with. The basic premise is you can show products from your ecommerce store’s catalog directly in the ads and drive sales for these items. If you have your catalogs loaded into Facebook, you will have the ability to create dynamic ads with your product catalog, show personalized ads based on products visitors viewed on your website (if you have the pixel installed), and tag products in Facebook or Instagram ads. The same standard conversion events from the conversion objective will also apply here.
Store Traffic
If you have a brick and mortar business, this objective can be powerful. This ad will target people likely to visit your physical location. The success metric used for this campaign type is store visits. Welcome to location-based advertising in the 21st century.
Conclusion
Here is a quick chart recapping all the Facebook advertising objectives. Setting up the right objective for your campaign is often the difference between a successful campaign and a campaign that fails badly. Set your campaigns up for success choosing the correct objectives based on the goals of your campaign!
I am Dave Schafer, an always learning entrepreneur, CPA, experienced marketer, writer, father and husband. One of my large passions is all things digital marketing, an ever-changing field that offers so much upside done right. If you get stuck on a question or have any questions with digital marketing, email me directly at Dave2742@gmail.com. Thank you for reading my article and ABT (Always Be Testing)!
