Choosing the right Facebook ad campaign objectives will significantly impact your campaign’s performance. Your choice affects what kind of ads you display and user action you drive, and how your ads are optimized for performance.
Before starting, you need to know your campaign’s aim — website traffic, video views, leads, app installs, or something else?
Facebook has campaign objectives that match several marketing goals and will likely provide you with what you need.
For simplicity, Facebook breaks its objectives into three stages that map roughly to your customer journey — Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
In this article, we’ll run through each of these Facebook ad campaign objectives and in which situations you should use them.
Awareness Objectives
This first set of objectives is associated with the Awareness stage of your customer journey. This is the first touchpoint where you aim to increase the awareness and recall of your brand primarily to reach new prospects to build your brand awareness.
There are two campaign objectives in this set; while similar, there is a subtle difference.
Brand Awareness
The brand awareness objective focuses on reaching people who are likely to be interested in your ads.
This is done by optimizing your campaign to target people most likely to spend time looking at and engaging with your ads. This way you will maximize your brand lift. If your goal is to increase your brand’s awareness and recall primarily, then this is an excellent objective.
Reach
The reach objective focuses on reaching the largest audience with your available budget and controlling how frequently your advertisements are shown.
Maximizing the impressions your ad receives allows you to quickly show your ad to as much of your target audience as possible. If your goal is to maximize your impressions above all else, then the reach objective may be your best bet.
Consideration Objectives
The second set of objectives focuses on the Consideration stage of your customer journey — increasing the interest of people who are already aware of your brand.
However, these stages are a rough guide, and you could also use many of these objectives to help with your initial awareness campaigns.
Traffic
The traffic objective focuses on driving people to your website. This is done by optimizing your ad to be shown to people most likely to click the link that leads back to your website.
Used with most standard Facebook ad formats, you’ll provide a link to your website and choose from several call-to-action buttons. If your primary goal is to direct people to any part of your website — including products, event information, lead forms, or any other landing page — then this goal is a safe bet.
Engagement
The engagement objective focuses on increasing engagement with your Facebook Page. This is done by either promoting a Facebook Page post to drive engagement, advertising your Facebook Page to increase Likes, or promoting a Facebook Event to get more responses.
Facebook will optimize your ad to find people most likely to take your chosen action in each of these. If your goal is to increase engagement within your Facebook Page, one of these objectives will be for you.
App Installs
The app installs objective aims to get people to install your mobile app. This objective is only available on mobile platforms and optimizes your ad to reach people most likely to install your app. Your advert will link to the appropriate app store, where people can download your app directly from the store.
Video Views
The video views objective aims to reach people who will view your video, allowing you to create a campaign that tells a story about your brand through Instagram or Facebook video.
You’ll be able to measure how much of your video people are watching:
- as a percentage (25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%),
- as several seconds (3 seconds, 10 seconds, or 30 seconds), or
- as the average time and percentage of your video watched.
Lead Generation
The lead generation objective allows you to run advertisements where people submit their information to you directly through Facebook.
Your advert will click through to a lead form within Facebook where people can fill in select information — much of which is pre-populated — and submit it to your business. You should optimize your campaign for those most likely to submit their information.
Of course, this campaign type requires an enticing lead magnet. Besides that, your audience should trust you enough to submit their information to you through Facebook. This means it’s most effective with people already well aware of your brand.
Conversion Objectives
The final set of objectives focuses on Conversion. You have led your audience on a journey through different messaging, introducing your brand and increasing engagement — now, the focus is on getting your audience to complete their purchase journey.
Conversions
The conversion objective aims to reach people who will take a specific action — in this case, a conversion — on your website.
These campaigns require you first to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. You do this to be able to measure conversions. Once correctly installed, you can choose which Conversion to optimize for when creating your campaign.
These could include standard Facebook conversions such as purchases, initiated checkouts, or custom conversions. Facebook then optimizes by finding people most likely to complete this Conversion.
To optimize effectively for a conversion campaign, each ad needs 15-25 conversions per week.
Product Catalog Sales
The product catalog objective allows you to create dynamic ads that pull various products from your website.
To do this, you need to set up a product catalog feed on Facebook. Using a product catalog enables your ads to be kept dynamically up-to-date with the latest product imagery, pricing, and text from your website. You will also be able to dynamically retarget people dependent on what website pages and products they viewed.
This is a valuable objective if you run promotions for a large-scale eCommerce business.
Store Visits
The store visits objective works similarly to the reach objective. The difference is that you associate the campaign with one of your Facebook Pages. Then you can create ads that reach people within a certain distance of your business.
This objective only works if you have selected a location on your Facebook Page. Also, you should keep the location up to date. This is a valuable objective if you’re looking to reach as many people as possible within a certain distance of your business.
Conclusion on Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives
And there you have it: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and the different advertising campaigns within each of those layers.
Remember to understand your goal before you start, have a clear objective, and let this guide you to the most appropriate Facebook ad campaign type.
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