The thing my clients get most confused about when setting up their Facebook ads tends to be which campaign they should pick. The simple answer is that one objective doesn’t works better than another, they all work differently and the one you choose will depend on your end goal.
With 11 options to choose from, it’s no wonder people get confused. But, hopefully this brief introduction to each option will help you choose the best one for your next Facebook and Instagram advert.
Awareness objectives
Brand Awareness
You’re a small business owner, you probably want to grow your brand awareness. But this objective isn’t the one for you.
This objective uses part of the algorithm that optimises for impressions so you are unlikely to get engagement or clicks by choosing this option.
The brand awards objective is more suited to big brands who would use it as part of a longer term sales funnel strategy. Most businesses will not use this objective.
Reach
This objective also optimises for impressions. This campaign will show your ad to anyone in your target market who is on Facebook, but won’t be optimising for an action so you will be unlikely to see any engagement.
This works well on small audiences at the bottom of a funnel, where the audience is already warm.
Consideration objectives
The following objectives optimise for an action. So they will be looking for people within your target audience who are likely to take the action you are optimising and will be showing your ad to those people.
Traffic
If you are using ads to drive traffic to your website choose traffic. The destination URL is set at the ads level & you can drive traffic to a specific website page.
The traffic objective will search your audience and show your ads to people who are likely to click a link.
Engagement
If you need engagement on your posts then you’ll need this objective. Engagement includes reactions, comments, shares, video views and clicks. This objective is good for creating social proof.For this objective to work you need to ensure your ad encourages engagement. If you wouldn’t expect engagement on your post if it was on your page then you are unlikely to get it just because you have put money behind it.
App Installs
This is for businesses that want people to install an app (the clue is in the title ?). So unless you are a developer this is unlikely to be right for your business.
Using this objective will mean your ads will be shown to the people in your audience who are most likely to install an app.
Video Views
Video works really well on social media so it makes sense it would work well in ads. Video views campaigns work really well when they are used to warm up an audience before retargeting them with other content.
To get the most from a video views campaign you need to have great video content that captures people & gets the main message across within the first 3 seconds. Great videos last between 1-5 minutes and have captions as most people will be watching without sound.
Lead Generation
If you are trying to grow your list by getting people to complete a form or download a lead magnet this objective can work really well.
It is more expensive than a traffic campaign which could do a similar job but this will specifically look for people who are likely to take the action to give you the lead.
If you are creating lead gen ads, I recommend you check out Lead Pages
Messages
This is pretty self explanatory but should you wish to encourage people to send you a message using Facebook messenger then use this objective.
This worked really well for a client recently who wanted people to contact her to book a stay at her holiday property. In fact it worked so well she could barely keep up with the messages!
Conversion Objectives
These objectives require a Facebook pixel to be installed on the website in order to be able to optimise for an action.
Conversions
If you are looking to drive sales, conversions is for you. You can optimise for various actions depending on your business needs and which standard events you have installed with your pixel.
This objective will specifically look for people within your audience who are likely to take an action such as adding a product to their cart or completing a purchase.
You can of course get sales from any campaign objective, even without optimising for it. If people want to buy, they will buy!
If you have a small budget it may be best spent on an engagement or traffic campaign as conversion campaigns are more expensive.
Catalogue Sales
If you have an ecomm business you may want to choose this option, otherwise known as DPA (dynamic product ads).
Using the pixel and your product catalogue this campaign can show your audience products they are looking at on your website & allow you to push them to buy. You can retarget people who have left an item in their cart for instance.
Store Visits
This is a great campaign objective for big brands with local stores. Unless you are the owner of a national brand this is unlikely to suit you (if you are, call me ? let’s work together)
So, which Facebook campaign objective should you use?
Now you understand what objective does, you should be able to pick the one most likely to achieve your goal, whether that is to drive traffic, increase sales or just start conversations.
The main thing to remember is that whichever objective you choose will influence how the (pesky) algorithm feeds your ads out and who it chooses to show it to.