Choosing the Optimum Facebook Campaign Objective
Ah, Facebook. Facebook and its many complex and wonderful advertising features – including interest targeting, bidding and budgeting strategies, dynamic product ads… all things that and maximise profits, minimise ad spend, and bring marketers sheer joy.
But before you get into the complex, juicy stuff, you’ve got to understand the very basics. And the very basics include choosing the right campaign objective.
Why Does it Matter?
Choosing an objective means that Facebook is going to work its algorithm magic to show your ads to the users that are the most likely to perform your desired action. If you’re new to the Facebook Ads game, you’ve probably seen some jargon like ROAS, ROI, or CVR being thrown about the shop. We’ll explain these terms further later on, but for now, just know this:
Choosing the right objective for your campaign means you will spend less on your advertising and get better results. Convinced yet? We hope so! Read on to find out what campaign objective is right for your business.
Getting Started
Heading into Facebook Ads Manager, when you go to create a new campaign the first stop is choosing your objective.
There are 3 categories of campaign objectives:
-
-
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
-
Each objective has its own purpose, its own function. While not every objective requires you to install the Facebook Pixel, we highly recommend that you do to start collecting as much data as possible for any of your future campaigns.
Awareness campaigns – increase interest in your brand and start to acquire some cold leads.
Consideration campaigns – increase social proof (likes, comments, and shares), and get users to interact with your brand.
Conversion campaigns – increase purchases or leads – essentially where the action happens.
Choosing the Objective
As you can see in the image above, there are several types of objectives under each of the three categories, 11 to be exact:
Brand Awareness
The Brand Awareness objective is perfect to get more cold users familiar with your brand. A cold audience is an audience that has never interacted with your brand in any way. This objective can also help to drive traffic to your website! This objective is also great for new brands, or brands that are testing the waters with a new target audience.
Supported Platforms:
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Image
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
-
Traffic
The Traffic objective will optimise to send as many people to your website, app, or Messenger conversation as possible. Facebook’s algorithm won’t optimise to send the users that are going to necessarily purchase anything on your site or app, it will simply optimise for the users that are most likely to click through onto your site.
What’s this objective good for? If you have a flagship piece of content, like a standout whitepaper or article on your site, the Traffic objective is a great way to promote it and attract users that are the most likely to read through.
Sending traffic to your website (even traffic that might not necessarily convert) is going to help you in terms of SEO as more users spend time on your site. As well as this, you’ll get your content seen by the right people that are going to have an interest in your business, pushing them further down the sales funnel.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Audience Network
- Messenger
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Images
- Video
- Carousel Ad
- Slideshow
- Collection
-
Engagement
The Engagement objective is the best way to increase your social proof. Social proof is likes, comments, and shares on your posts. Why is this important for your business? Think about it, when you hear about a brand for the first time, you head over to their social media to check out if they’re legit. If a page that claims they’re number one has no engagement on their posts, they’re lacking that social proof that inspires your trust, making you less likely to buy from them in the future.
The Engagement objective will target the users that are the most likely to like, comment, and share your ads. It would also target those that are the most likely to respond to an event or offer claim at the lowest cost to you.
Supported Platforms:
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Images
- Videos
- Slideshow
-
App Installs
The App Installs objective is pretty self-explanatory. If you have an app and you want people to download it, this is your best bet. Facebook will target those that are the most likely to install your app at the lowest cost.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Messenger
- Audience Network
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Single Image
- Single Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
-
Video Views
Another fairly self-explanatory objective, the Video Views objective will try to get as many views on your video as possible. Great for increasing your social proof (users can see how many views a video gets on Facebook), you can experiment with many types of videos. The Facebook algorithm loves video-format, so including videos in your campaigns (with any objective) is going to be highly effective. You can run campaigns with customer testimonials or informative vlog-style content. This is another great objective for pushing those that are in the middle of the funnel closer to the end goal of a conversion.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Audience Network
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Single Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
-
Lead Generation
The Lead Generation objective will help you get information from prospective clients in exchange for a freebie, like an eBook or whitepaper. A user won’t be directed to your website or landing page, though. Instead, Facebook, Messenger or Instagram will show a user an “Instant Form” that appears natively on the platform, and you’re able to customise the questions that are asked to make it best suited for your business.
The Lead Generation objective also gives you the opportunity to download your leads either directly from Facebook, or integrate with a major CRM like MailChimp or Salesforce.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Messenger
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Single Video
- Single Image
- Slideshow
- Carousel
-
Messages
The last of the Consideration objectives, the Messages objective is optimised to get users to have a conversation with your business. Yep, that’s right! While you can build campaigns that are supported by the Messenger format, selecting the Messages objective for your ad campaign will get more users to interact in Messenger to complete purchases, answer questions, or get support.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Messenger
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Image
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
-
Conversions
Now we’re at the stage where you’re trying to get users to convert into actual customers or take a specific action on your website. You will need the Facebook Pixel installed for the Conversions objective, and you will be able to set it to create Custom Conversions to maximise your ROA even further.
While this is the most popular Facebook ad objective, we do still recommend that you test with objectives in the Awareness and Consideration sections to attract more cold leads to your business and increase your funnel size overall, leading to more conversions in the future. You can run quite a few experiments with different audiences based on their engagement with your business in your Awareness and Consideration campaigns.
You can specify what you want your conversion to be beyond a purchase: you can optimise for link clicks, landing page views, app events, or even replies in Messenger!
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Audience Network
- Messenger
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Image
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
- Collection
-
Catalogue Sales
The Catalogue Sales objective will show images taken directly from your product catalogue to users. If you’re running an e-commerce business, this is definitely the objective for you – especially if you’re cycling through product ranges fairly quickly. You won’t have to manually input your creatives to your ads – thanks to the Pixel and Facebook’s algorithm, you can sit back and let them show the right image to the right person – making them much more likely to convert! These don’t necessarily have to be retargeting campaigns either.
Supported Platforms:
-
-
- Audience Network
-
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Carousel
- Image
- Collection
-
Store Traffic
Our 11th and final campaign objective: Store Traffic. This is where Facebook’s targeting capabilities get wildly impressive. If you have a physical store, you can target your ads to the people that are the most likely to go to your store, restaurant, or any other physical place of business. Using this objective increases your foot traffic. Facebook targets those that live or work within a certain radius of your store, and will show them ads that have shop locators or CTAs that say “Get Directions” or “Shop Now”.
Supported Platforms
Supported Ad Formats:
-
-
- Image
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
- Collection
-
A Final Word
There you have it! All 11 Facebook Ad objectives and how to use them. What’s the next step for you? Make sure you know what your goals are for your campaign – are you trying to get more people in the top of the funnel? An Awareness objective could be your best bet. Trying to push those warm leads over the edge to a conversion? Test out a conversion campaign!
With any business goal, outlining a clear objective is the very first step that you take, and your Facebook campaigns are no exception!
Looking for help with your Facebook campaigns? Book a free trial with Filed today! Filed is an AI-powered marketing platform built to optimise your Facebook and Instagram campaigns to give you an unfair advantage.
Try Demo – Filed, Marketing Software
Follow us on Instagram for blog updates – Instagram, Filed AI
