Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world. Today, Facebook has over 2.8 billion monthly active users, which means one in three people uses Facebook. Facebook is an excellent environment for advertising with such a large population, primarily due to the ease of marketing and advertising brought on by Facebook ad campaign objectives.
Your Facebook advertising campaign objectives are what you want people to do once they see your advertisement on Facebook. When you pick out a goal, Facebook’s algorithm uses advanced analysis to collect and assess your target audience’s user data that are most likely to do the thing you want them to.
Today, there are eleven different objectives in Facebook Ads manager, which span over three distinct categories – awareness, conversion rates, and consideration. Through these three, you can cover most of the things you want to achieve with your Facebook ads.
In this article, we’ll talk a bit about Facebook Ads, Facebook Ad Campaign objectives and examine how you can make the right choice the next time you’re advertising on the world’s most popular social media platform.
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Picking the best ad campaign objective on Facebook is no easy task, especially if you’re new to social media advertisement. There are two necessary steps to picking the correct ad campaign objective:
The first thing you need to do is pick out a category that best targets the people in your existing sales funnel. Since there are three broad categories, you’ll need to understand them better. We’ll get into more detail a bit later down the line, but for now, all you need to know is:
Awareness objectives are best for people on top of the sales funnel (TOFU). They generate interest in the services or products you have to offer.
Consideration objectives are for the middle of the sales funnel (MOFU), and they approach people who are eager to learn more about what you can do for them.
And lastly, Conversion objectives are for the bottom of your sales funnel (BOFU), and they’re made for driving sales, leads, and returns.
Understanding the ad campaign objective categories is a good start – but after you do so, you’ll need to find and select the matching objective for your specific strategy.
You’ll need to review your Facebook Advertising objectives to determine the ones that work with your current sales funnel stage and select the one that works best. It’s that simple.
However, understanding your sales funnel and the role your objectives play in it isn’t enough. To help you gain a border perspective, we’ll cover all three of the categories in-depth and explore what each one brings to the table.
Awareness campaign objectives are objectives for your Facebook Advertising Campaign. They’re used for spreading awareness about your brand, services, and products.
There are two types of awareness objectives, which are reach and brand awareness.
If you’re looking to pump up your brand awareness, awareness campaign objectives come in handy. These objectives allow you to create some buzz about the solutions that your brand offers, and it’s best used when exposing to brand new audiences. Alternatively, these are great if you want to refresh your existing client’s memories of your products and services.
To put it into perspective, think of this goal as the ideal option if you’re introducing a brand new product. You want to reach as many new people as possible, and you want to alert the existing clients that you have something new cooking.
When you’re selecting this campaign objective, you’ll need to remember its sole purpose. It’s used to create awareness around your product, not generate leads or promote engagement. While this is a more than useful tool for establishing a connection with your prospects, it shouldn’t be used for driving engagement.
It’s an objective used to help your audience familiarise themselves with your product and services, nothing more, nothing less.
If you’re looking to spread the word as much as possible and raise awareness of your product or services, you’ll need to select the reach campaign objective. The reach campaign objective is purposefully designed to help you reach as many of your prospects as possible within your preset budget range.
It’s especially useful if your company operates in a relatively local area, so you can reach as many people in that specific area as possible, making your advertisement that much more relevant.
Think of it as running a local small-town butcher shop. If you use the reach campaign objective, you’ll make your shop more visible only to the people who’ll actually come to purchase meat and other goods from you.
The reach campaign objective is an outstanding way to reach as many targeted prospects as possible and raise brand awareness.
Awareness aside, the second most popular category of ad campaign objectives is a consideration. The consideration campaign objectives are used to help your audience understand your products or services better.
It’s not used to help people find what you’re selling – it’s used to inform them about the services or products and give them a general idea of what they can gain from purchasing them.
There are six different consideration objectives, making the consideration campaign objectives the most abundant category of the three. The six consideration campaign objectives are:
The traffic campaign objective is used if you want to send your prospects to another place, such as your website, your lead generation page, or anywhere you want them.
Let’s say you’re using Facebook Pixel or SDK on your website or app. In that case, you can track the activity of the people that visit your website through these advertisements, allowing you to retarget them in future campaigns on the other echelon of your sales funnel.
To put it into perspective, campaign objective examples are like an advertisement asking a question. Upon clicking on it, the advertisement brings the visitor to the page with the answer.
Keep in mind that Facebook doesn’t measure any actions taken by the visitor once they navigate away from the platform.
With the traffic objective, Facebook shows the ad only to the people in your target audience that are most likely going to click on the advertisement. That doesn’t necessarily translate into leads or conversions – it just brings people to the thing you want them to see. So if you are looking for people to convert, you might want to consider a conversions driven objective instead.
With this objective, Facebook will show advertisements to the people that they determine will engage with your content, such as actually like, comment, share or click on it.
This advertisement has three subcategories: post engagements, page likes, and page event responses.
Engagement objectives are fantastic if you want to expand the reach of your content. They’re ideal for increasing organic reach into new prospect feeds and expanding your targeted demographic.
That’s not the only good thing that this objective has to offer, as engagement objectives are also great for creating an audience for your Facebook page. More people will like your page and will see more of your posts, indicating you’re actively garnering a bigger following.
A good example would be an advertisement that highlights what your brand is all about, which lures people to your page in any way possible. The content that marks up the advertisement is almost as important as the advertisement itself.
In layman’s terms, an engagement campaign objective is a post inviting people to interact with your business by liking, sharing, commenting, or following.
App installs campaign objectives helps drive mobile app instalments by directly approaching the users and taking them to the online app marketplace such as Google Play for Android or App Store for iOS.
It’s best to use this objective if you have an app that you want to get out there. Facebook directly targets the people who are known to download apps from these types of ads, maximising the chance that your audience will download your app as well.
You’ve seen these a million times before, and the best example would be mobile video games. This featured picture or video alongside a quick, snappy, and captivating text with a download now button below it.
This objective is used for making as many people download your smartphone application as possible.
The video views campaign objective allows you to broadcast your brand’s video to your target audience. That allows you to directly approach your customers and make them watch your video content, further forwarding your brand’s goal.
Whether the goal is sales, introduction, or engagement, putting your video out there for people to see does wonders for conversion. Facebook will show your video to those who are willing to watch it, thus driving video engagement and allowing you to highlight your USP.
Think of all the cooking videos floating around Facebook. They’re from pages you’ve never seen before, but they seem familiar. Now, this is because most of them follow a similar format, introducing you to the brand by providing quick snippets of their everyday content.
The general format used for Facebook videos is a short, snappy, inviting, and engaging video accompanied by up-beat music. The video should highlight what the brand/company/business offers without overwhelming or boring the customer.
Not only is this good for making people aware of your company and content, it’s also fantastic for driving engagement, which is useful for later retargeting.
Lead generation is one of the primary goals of most marketing and advertising strategies. Facebook lead generation allows you to capture information from your target demographic, extremely useful in the MOFU stage, without ever making the users leave Facebook.
Information such as full names, location, phone numbers, preferences, and a lot more become available if you’re using lead generation as a managing objective.
You can fully customise your lead form with this option, which allows you to collect even more specific information on your customers. Generating leads is as easy as encouraging the user base themselves to interact with your lead generation, which can be done by making the lead generation as interactive, fun, and engaging as possible.
While that’s very useful in the middle of the sales funnel, it’s not without its drawbacks. The lead generation campaign objective doesn’t drive any traffic to your website – it operates solely on your Facebook page.
It creates a custom audience for lead advertisements that can be used for further retargeting later down the line. These ads are used if you’re looking to expand your brands’ consideration and reach on your brand’s Facebook page.
The message’s objective is very useful if you’re looking to interact with your prospects directly. These advertisements drive people to your messages, so they’re far more likely to contact you. It’s used for starting conversations between brands and clients, and what’s so great about it is that this option works cross-platform.
Facebook isn’t just Facebook – it’s also Instagram and WhatsApp. This option allows you to drive conversations on Facebook Messenger, Instagram direct, and WhatsApp business.
With just one page and only one objective, you can cover three of the most popular social media platforms in the world.
In layman’s terms, it’s the type of campaign objective that encourages people to click on the message icon, directly creating a conversation between the page and the viewer.
These are not the most straightforward advertisements in the world, at least not consumer wise. If you use these advertisements, you’ll want to respond as quickly as possible to any client query or use an automated response until you can get back to them.
It’s important to do this as fast as possible, as customers tend to lose interest over time if they don’t receive a swift response.
Now, that’s merely a means to get the conversation going. What goes on in the conversation is up to you, so make sure to represent your brand and its value to the best of your ability.
Conversions are at the bottom of your sales funnel, and they’re the thing that gets clients to purchase your products or solicit your services. Through conversion based advertisement objectives, you’re driving the sales and encouraging users to purchase.
When you want to make your audience purchase your products or, at the very least, visit your business, conversion campaign objectives are the best way to go.
There are three different conversion objectives, which are:
These are the most common Facebook campaign objectives. They’re purpose-built to get your prospects to engage, interact, and solicit as much as possible. The ultimate goal is to give you the best return on investment (ROI), as well as driving valuable conversions.
The conversion objective is the simplest out of the lot. This objective is used if you’re looking to make your target audience click through to your website and do a particular action, such as purchasing, browsing, adding payment details, or becoming a part of your community.
Facebook doesn't track the results outside of their direct platform unless you have conversion events set up. You can set conversion events up with Facebook Pixel or SDK. If you want to find out more about this, click here.
The algorithm might have trouble delivering your ad if your app or page does not generate enough conversions.
Facebook recommends that the advertisers on their platform choose a conversion action that happens at least fifty times a week. The conversion action, in this case, can be engagement, signups, or purchases.
To put it into perspective, if you have a one-day post-click conversion window for sign up conversions and the people interacting with your advertisements don’t follow through in these preset metrics, the algorithm won’t consider it so.
In layman’s terms, if you want people to interact with something in a matter of minutes, and they do it in hours instead, the algorithm will disregard it as a conversion.
Nevertheless, it’s a definitive objective for brands looking to make their customers do whatever they like, such as purchasing, sign up, or adding more details.
Unlike the conversion campaign objective, the catalog sales campaign objective is made almost entirely for eCommerce stores, as it’s specifically optimised for online shopping.
Rather than promoting one single action that you want from your customer, it will highlight multiple options or products in a slidable list. This objective will show relevant products from your eCommerce store to those most likely to browse them.
The whole process is automated, as Facebook understands your products and markets them directly to the right people who have expressed an interest in such products.
To set these kinds of advertisements up, you’ll need to integrate a product catalog with your Facebook page so Facebook can dig out the relevant products from the list and present them to the most probable and qualified buyer. Furthermore, the algorithm considers many factors, such as arrivals, popularity, and sales numbers, when submitting your products.
While this is one of the more widespread campaign objectives, it’s far from perfect. It allows you to target sales and sales only. It’s less than ideal for garnering engagement, leads, or other interaction with your website.
Now, this option is used if you have a product range that you’re willing to present to your audience in the ad form.
The store traffic campaign objective is great if you own multiple brick-and-mortar stores and want to drive people to visit them. It’s an outstanding option if you’re looking to drive people to your actual physical locations, thus making them engage with your business on a personal level.
If you’re going to use this campaign goal, you’ll need to add your business locations on the Facebook business manager. Through this, the campaign goal will allow you to generate more traffic on your real-life locations, thus driving sales in every store.
Now, this works best if you have multiple locations. If you have one, you can make do with the reach objective and some minor advertisement optimisation, as it’s a far easier and more affordable option.
It’s one of the more complex advertisement objectives, as you’ll need to enter all of your business locations in the Facebook manager, and your consumer must have their location services enabled.
While a little more niche than the other objectives, this one is great if you’re looking for interaction and a good ROI chain-wide.
An excellent example of that will be if you’re running a small chain of dry-cleaning stores. This advertisement would raise brand awareness and drive people to interact with your actual locations, thus driving sales all around.
We’re not going to pretend that understanding all of this is easy. Facebook advertisements aren’t as simple and straightforward because they’re quite intricate, and there are more than a couple of them.
Can you change the objective of the Facebook campaign? No, but if you’re unsure whether you should pick the Facebook ad objectives or the optimisation options, our best advice is to give both a shot and see which one works better in your specific case.
Now, this will provide you with essential insight into your performance, so you'll always know what’s best for your particular business.
An excellent way to do this is to create two near-identical campaigns that only differ in the testing factor you’re going to put against the test and letting them run for the same time.
After the time has passed, you can see which one of these is the best performer, and you can proceed accordingly.
Facebook is the world’s most popular social media, making it the perfect environment for marketing campaigns and advertisements. Facebook itself has made advertising on the platform as simple and streamlined as possible, but there are still many things to master.
After reading this article, we hope that you have a good perspective on the three Facebook ad campaign categories. If you understand Facebook campaign objectives, you’ll have a better idea on what you need to do to accompany your social media marketing goals for ads.
Still unsure of what to do? Reach out to our friendly Facebook marketing experts for a free, non-obligatory consultation! We are also rated by many as the best social media marketing company that has proven records to delivering results. We will help you get a better understanding of how Facebook ad campaign objectives works and achieve better results!
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