Choosing the Right Facebook Ad Objective For Your Campaign
By far one of the biggest questions I hear as an agency owner – and probably one of the most important bits of beginner knowledge – is how you know which objective to choose for your Facebook Ad. And it’s a great question, because it’s probably one of the biggest mistakes I see new Facebook advertisers making.
Luckily, there’s a really simple solution.
Out of all the things I can teach you about running ads, this is probably the simplest answer I have to give:
To know which ad objective best suits your campaign, you have to understand what your ultimate goal is for the campaign.
To better illustrate this, let’s dive right into the 11 ad objectives you can choose on Facebook. .
Want to watch this lesson on ad objectives instead? Click here.
Marketing Funnel Phase 1: Awareness
There are three basic stages of any marketing funnel: awareness, consideration and conversion.
All 11 ad objectives fall under one of these three stages.
Awareness is about generating interest in your brand. At this level, you’re targeting a broad and cold audience – meaning they’re probably learning about your business for the first time and aren’t as eager to opt in yet.
Awareness ads are typically lower cost ad campaigns and are great when you’re just focusing on growing your audience and sharing great content.
Within the awareness stage we find the first 2 Facebook ad objectives.
Brand Awareness is focuses on showing your ads to people who are mostly likely to remember them. (How does Facebook determine this? Well, that’s for another post!). In my experience, brand awareness typically performs best for bigger brands who really just want to keep their business top of mind.
Another great use for brand awareness is specific to businesses that want to position themselves as market leaders.
There’s not a major end goal here, other than getting eyes on your content, but still, it can be very effective for larger businesses looking to generate interest and beginning to warm their audience up.
The second objective, Reach, focuses on showing your ads to the maximum number of people in your audience. Now, reach is still an objective that’s low cost however, there are some pretty exciting use cases here.
One of these use cases is re-targeting ads. As people move through your funnel from awareness to consideration to conversion, their level of intent increases.
Recently we’ve been finding that reach is often very effective when working with re-targeting ads. Retargeting is great for content used to build authority and trust, so if we are retargeting an existing audience with these goals in mind, reach is often our best bet to make sure as many people as possible see that content.
A great example of retargeting is showing content to the audience that you gained from a previous lead magnet ad.
And with this, we move on to the second stage of your marketing funnel:
Marketing Funnel Phase Two: Consideration
Consideration is the stage in which you are probably trying to get your audience to consider you over your competition. You’re sharing your differentiators, you’re getting more specific with the audience and the type of content you share, and you are providing them with more and more value so that you can be seen as an expert, authority and leader.
At the Consideration stage, your audience are at least somewhat familiar with you. They’re warming up. Ads are sometimes a little more expensive to run here than at the previous stage – but now your audience are warmer and will be starting to consider you as a viable option
The first objective under Consideration is Traffic. On Facebook, the traffic objective is all about sending people to an external website, app, or a Facebook event.
This objective can work particularly well when you want to share a blog post with your audience, for example. You’re asking them to take an action and to leave the Facebook platform (by visiting your website), so there’s a bit more intent here, but this is still a simple ask on your part.
Engagement, the second Consideration objective, focuses on generating page likes, event responses, and reactions, comments, or shares. This is an objective we often like to use with our audience of coaches, consultants, and course creators.
Post engagement is particularly exciting to use because it serves your ad to people who are most likely to engage, which can then help you generate social proof for your brand. Social proof is any public feedback or interest your audience shares on a post or page.
Now, it’s important to note that engagement can sometimes be positive, but it can also be negative. Some advertisers stay away from using the engagement objective because they want to avoid any negative social proof in their ad, but in our experience, as long as you are monitoring your comments and your page, engagement is an incredibly useful objective to use to build that all important social proof.
The next objective under Consideration is App Installs. We don’t typically use this objective with our clients because it rarely applies to them. But if you have an app to share, this would be a particularly useful objective for you, as Facebook will serve your ad to people who are most likely to download and engage with your app.
Video Views is, however, an objective we use often with our clients. Choosing this objective will encourage Facebook to deliver your ad to those who are most likely to watch a video you share.
Now, the goal here is not to convert, but simply to get your audience to watch a majority of a video you share to continue warming them up. If that’s a strategy of yours and you have video content to share, then video views is definitely an objective to consider as part of your funnel.
Next up, Lead Generation – this uses a built in form on Facebook to gather key information. This objective works particularly well any time you need to collect an email address to deliver a free lead magnet to your audience and we are seeing better and better results using this objective for list building campaigns.
The last ad objective of the Consideration phase is, the Messages objective. Here, Facebook shows people ads that allow them to engage with you directly via DM on Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
In my experience, this objective works particularly well with local businesses who benefit from having direct conversations with their local audience. They can also work well for coaches and consultants that use messenger bots that are designed to gather more information from your audience and feed them into specific funnels (want more info on how to do this? Drop me an email here with your questions).
Marketing Funnel Phase 3: Conversion
Last but by no means least is the Conversion phase – the golden egg for many businesses!
Conversion phase ads are where your warmest audience members are usually interacting. The costs of running these ads are usually higher than the previous two phases, but this is often where the magic – the Conversion – happens.
Often 80 to 90% of our efforts with our clients are spent here currently because conversion ads work particularly well for coaches, consultants, and course creators who want to build their audience using lead magnets, and then want to sell their courses, programs and services to that audience.
Now, just because the typical funnel involves starting with Awareness and moving through Consideration towards Conversion, doesn’t mean you have to start with Awareness – often you can go straight to the Conversion phase.
The Conversion ad objective is wonderful for a lead magnet or sales page or ecommerce purchase. Any time you want your audience to opt in for something, or purchase something – or do anything that involves more buy in, conversion is more often than not your objective of choice.
Speaking of ecommerce sales, the Catalogue Sales objective is built for ecommerce brands that are looking to run ads to generate sales for their business. If this is the ultimate goal you are after as an ecommerce brand, you might try this out on your warmer audiences.
Lastly, the Store Traffic objective works wonders for local businesses who want to get feet in their door, in real life, and not just on the internet. Store traffic ads are shown to people in your vicinity who are most likely to visit your store in person.
As you can see, choosing the best ad objective for your campaign really just depends on what your ultimate goal is for your business and what audiences you have to work with.
It’s imperative that you choose the right ad objective, otherwise your ads are unlikely to deliver the results you want.
Examples of choosing the wrong ad objective that I see all of the time are:
- Choosing the Traffic objective to drive traffic to a landing page (for a lead magnet) or a sales page. The correct objective here would be Conversions, as that will drive users with a higher level of intent.
- Choosing the Video Views objective where an ad using video is running, but the goal is a lead magnet opt-in or the sale of a product. Again, the correct objective here would be Conversions because that is the ultimate goal.
If you don’t already have your hands on a copy of my latest guide, you can click the link below to get your hands on a copy:
The 7 Biggest Most Common & Costly Facebook Ad Mistakes – and How To Avoid Them.
I dive deep into one of the biggest mistakes in the video above so if you watch it now you are already 1/7th of the way to ad success!
I’d love to answer any questions you have about ad objectives and how they work, so feel free to drop your questions below in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll see you around here for the next one!
