Choosing the right or wrong campaign objective on Facebook make the difference between a major success to a colossal failure. Learn how to choose the right campaign objective, that really serves your goal. In some cases, It is not necessarily the obvious one.
When setting up a new campaign on Facebook, the first step you are required to do is choosing the campaign objective. The purpose of choosing a campaign objective is letting Facebook know what you are aiming to get with your budget. It can be conversions, leads, website traffic, page likes, and more.
The objective you choose will affect your targeting, optimization options, and ad types. Therefore, you can only choose one objective per campaign.
For example, if you choose Website clicks, your default bid will be per click, and Facebook will optimize your ads to get as many clicks as possible at the optimal price.
There are a few campaign objectives to choose from:
Brand awareness – Make people more familiar with your brand
When choosing Brand awareness as the campaign objective, your campaign is optimized to reach as many people as possible, who are more likely to pay attention to your ads.
When to choose brand awareness?
Brand awareness is a good choice If you need to spread the word about your brand, but don’t necessarily want or need more traffic or conversions on your website. Basically, choosing brands awareness means buying and optimizing for impressions.
Tip: Consider using the clicks or conversions objectives instead of brand awareness (both will be explained ahead). When choosing conversions or clicks, increasing your brand awareness will be the side effect while the campaign is actually optimized to reach people who are more likely to become customers.
Local awareness – Promote your business to people around you
Choosing Local awareness is a great fit for small and local businesses who aim to promote their business to people around them. All there is to it is choosing the radius on the map and reach people in that location.
Local awareness ads allow you to choose some unique call to action on your ads, like “Get Directions”, “Call Now” or “Send a Message”.
When to choose local awareness?
Local awareness is ideal when you want people around you to know about your store, service, offer or products, and you can offer them a special offer, or give directions to your local business. For example, it can be used by a local locksmith that wish to spread the word about his service in his community.
Reach – Show your ads to as many people as possible
Reach ads are relatively new. The Reach objective is aimed to show your ads to the maximum number of people according to your budget. With Reach ads, Facebook will optimize for the highest number of possible impressions, without any consideration of clicks and actions taken by the people who see these ads.
Do not confuse Reach ads with a reach and frequency buying type. Reach and frequency is not an objective, it’s just a different way to buy Facebook impressions, while with Reach ads, a maximum reach is actually the objective to optimize for.
As oppose to the reach and frequency buying type, Reach ads allows you to target custom audiences, and multiple countries, in one ad set. Reach ads biggest advantage is the ability to cap the frequency and make sure your ads will not be displayed to the same people over and over.
When to choose Reach?
Reach ads are great to make sure almost anyone in your target audience will see your ads. For example, reach ads can be great for remarketing with Facebook. With remarketing, you don’t necessarily need to optimize for conversions or clicks, since you are targeting past visitors or buyers. In this case, when using remarketing, you might find it more useful to use Reach ads, and make sure your ads will be displayed to as many people as possible to your target audience.
Traffic – Get more people on your website
By choosing the Traffic campaign objective, your campaign will be optimized to show your ads to people who are more likely to click and reach your website (but not necessarily take specific actions on your site). With the Traffic campaign objective, the click is the desired action, regardless of what the user does on your site after clicking on your ad and reach your website.
When to choose Traffic?
Choose the Traffic objective when your main goal is to get more people to your website and there are no specific actions you wish they will take. For example, if there is a blog post you want more people to read, and page views has a higher value than a blog subscription.
Engagement – Get more people engaged with your brand on Facebook
The engagement campaign objective actually contains four different campaign objectives, who are mainly focused on engagement: Post engagement, Page likes, Event response and Offer claims.
Post engagement – Boost your page posts
Get more people to see and engage with any of your page posts. Choosing post engagement is exactly by clicking the “Boost post” button straight from your Facebook page.
With post engagement ads, Facebook will show your ads to people who are more likely to like, share and comment on your post at the lowest possible cost, according to your target audience, bid, budget, and of course ad relevancy.
When to choose post engagement?
Post engagement is a good fit only when there’s a specific post on your Facebook page you wish to promote.
Please note – If the post is aimed to send traffic to your website, the Traffic or Conversions objectives are the better choices, since they are optimized to do that, as opposed to posting engagement which is optimized to get more likes, comments, and shares.
Page likes – Promote your Facebook page
Get more people to like your Facebook page. When using the Page likes objective, ads are aimed to get more page likes, and does not contain a link to your website!
When to choose Page likes?
The page likes objective is good only when you simply need to get more page likes, or you don’t have a proper website and your Facebook page is the best way to display your business online. Other than that, it’s not a recommended objective to use. Page likes are no longer such an asset since people who liked your page will hardly see your page posts unless they are promoted as well, to your “Likers”. Do not assume that people who liked your page will definitely see your page posts – this is hardly the case anymore.
Tip: Using the Traffic or Conversions objectives will also get you page likes while getting traffic to your website. Many people will click on the “Like Page” button of the ad, instead of or in addition to the actual button.
Event responses – Get more event responses
Facebook allows page owners to create and promote events with ads that will be optimized for getting more people to be interested in the event. The actual events can create through your Facebook page, and it is not mandatory to promote them, but it is highly recommended if you wish to get more people to know about them and possibly attend.
When to choose event responses?
Use event ads when you have an event published on your facebook page, but it’s not getting the response rate you expected organically.
Tip: It is highly recommended to Check the quality of the users coming from event ad before expanding your budget on this ads. It will not always attract the right audience you are interested in.
Offer claims – Promote your offers
Facebook allows page owners to create unique offer posts and promote them with ads. The offers can be a discount, a promotion and more. Choosing the Offer claims objective will enable you to promote your offers and optimize towards getting as many offer claims as possible, at the best price.
How to create an offer?
When creating an Offer claims campaign, the option to create an offer is a part of the campaign creation process. Choose the type of offer you wish to promote – It can be a percent off, amount off, buys one – get one or free stuff. Any choice you make will open a chain of relevant options.
When to use offer claims?
Offer claims ads are great for promoting your products or services, especially when you have a specific promotion you wish to let more people know about. For example, Creating a special discount offer and promoting it so that more people will see it is an awesome sales boost.
App installs – Get more people to install your app
Get more app downloads with ads that direct straight to your app page on the App Store or Google Play. App installs ads are available only when the Facebook SDK is installed on the mobile app, and the app is listed on Facebook (this part will be done by the app developers). Installing the SDK is a fast and easy process, and definitely worth the effort, since usually Facebook is the most effective user acquisition tool for mobile apps, especially IOS apps.
When to use App installs?
By all means, if you have a mobile app you wish to promote with sponsored campaigns, you should definitely use Facebook app install ads first. Facebook app installs ads are definitely the most efficient and cost-effective way to get more app installs (besides organic installs). With Facebook’s vast targeting abilities, it’s also possible to optimize your campaign in order to reach the highest-quality users, those you really want to pay for, that will actually use your app.
Bottom line: If you have a mobile app you wish to promote, Facebook app install ads are the best way to do that!
Video views – Get your video watched by more people
When choosing video views, your campaign will be optimized to get as many video views at the best possible price.
In Video views campaigns you are allowed to choose what to optimize and pay for: It can be any view of the video or a minimum 10-second view. You can also choose to optimize by the percentage of the video being watched. Of course, choosing the 10 seconds view or a high percentage may lead to fewer views, but the upside is, it will make sure you only pay for actual views.
When to choose video views?
Video views ads are great for targeting “cold audiences”, meaning prospects who are not yet familiar with your brand, offer or product. After you got people to watch a video, it is possible to re-target them with a different ad by creating a custom audience of people who engaged with your video in different levels.
Tip: You can also promote a video with Conversions or a Traffic campaigns, and optimize for the selected conversion, or to get more traffic. If one of those is your final goal, they might be a better objective to choose than video views.
Lead generation – Collect more leads
Get new leads right on the Facebook news feed, without directing users to your website or a landing page. Lead ads are available on mobile and desktop news feeds only, and looks exactly like conversions or clicks ads, but one big difference – Instead of sending the users who clicked on them to your website, a lead form pops up which allows you to collect details like name, email, phone number etc. directly on Facebook.
The lead form is pre-defined by the advertiser and may be pre-populated with the user details if Facebook has them. If not, the user can manually fill them in and submit the form.
How to create a lead form?
In your Facebook page settings, click “Publishing tools” and then “Lead ads forms” to reach your forms library. Click “Create”, and set up your lead form to determine which details to collect.
The forms library contains all the previous lead forms and the collected data, which is available to be downloaded.
How to get the leads data?
Once submitted, the leads data (the fields of details you have collected on your form) is available in the forms library. Download the details to a CSV file or connect them directly to your CRM system.
When to use Lead generation?
Lead ads conversion rates are much higher than a landing page conversion rates, especially on mobile, so they are very effective to simply generate leads. Lead ads are also effective when there is a complex onboarding process that requires an extra push by a sales team.
Tip: While lead ads are can be very effective in getting leads, it may get you lower quality users than conversion ads. If your leads ads have good performance, it is highly recommended to frequently test their quality.
Conversions – Drive more actions on your website
The Conversions objective is probably the most important and effective objective Facebook has to offer, and it’s available only when the Facebook pixel is installed on your website and there are defined conversions to track and optimize for.
Conversions ads are aimed to increase sales, sign-ups, purchases or any other desired action on your website. Choose which conversion to optimize for, at the ad set level, and the Facebook algorithm will optimize to get the most conversions possible at the best price, according to your bid, budget and target audience. In Conversions campaigns, Facebook displays your ads to people that are more likely to be interested and convert, out of your target audience.
It’s possible to choose only one conversion to optimize for, but Facebook will anyway still track all the other conversions you have set and display them in your stats.
Tip: The Facebook algorithm really works, but it usually requires around 20–30 conversions a day to perform its magic, so choose to optimize the conversion that is most valuable to you, like “Checkout”, but only if it has around 20–30 conversions a day. If your most valuable conversion has fewer than that, try using a lower level conversion with a higher number of conversions like “Add to cart”, which is one level below.
When to Conversions?
Use Conversions ads to drive more people to take actions on your website like signing up, make a purchase, download an e-book or anything that you define as a conversion, and wish to get more of.
By all means – Use conversions ads. The Facebook algorithm works great, and Facebook conversions ads are the most effective paid source of increasing conversions on your website.
Product catalog sales – Dynamically present your changing products
Facebook allows you to create a products catalog to feature your variety of products through the Business Manager settings. Creating a product catalog allows you to dynamically add and advertise different items so you won’t have to keep creating new ads manually.
When to choose Product catalog sales?
Product catalog sales are great for e-commerce advertisers that sell a variety of products at once and frequently update their products catalog. For example, if you sell clothing goods, it can get very tricky to manually advertise the variety of products you have. With product catalog sales, Facebook presents your products dynamically.
Store visits – Drive more store visits and sales
The store visits campaign objective was created specifically for businesses with physical locations. Store visits ads enable you to reach people around your business just like the local awareness ads, but with ads that help them navigate, or contact the local business when the main goal is to get them to walk into your business.
Please note, that store visits optimization is currently available to a limited number of advertisers.
Final words
From our experience, choosing the right campaign objective can do wonders for your Facebook ads results. Before creating a campaign, try to think and define what is your real goal. For example, if you have a great video to feature your product or service, choosing the Video views is not necessarily the best objective for you. If the final goal of the video is to increase sales, you can choose the Conversions objective and use it to advertise your video, while optimizing for more sales, which is your actual goal.