Pretty much all of the campaign objectives do exactly what they say on the tin. However, to make your life a little easier (we’re great like that) we came up with the brilliant idea of putting together a handy guide that delves a little deeper into each objective.
NOTE: You’re going to want to save this if you’re just starting out!
Awareness Objectives
Any awareness campaign aims to generate initial interest in your brand. The trick is to pull the audience deeper into your funnel. Leave them wanting to know more. Focus on a new audience, those hearing about your brand for the first time. It’s likely this approach won’t lead directly to sales but don’t panic. It will help Facebook build that all-important data to build you better-targeted audiences down the line.
Brand Awareness
When choosing the brand awareness you aren’t trying to get the audience to buy, buy, buy. That isn’t to say that you won’t get any conversions from this type of campaign, but, sales are definitely not the metric you should be focusing on.
The success of brand awareness campaigns is determined against what Facebook calls “Ad Recall”. This refers to the number of people who remember seeing your ad – an estimated figure generated by Facebook, based on polls taken by users. To put it simply, the more memorable the ad the better.
Reach
If you’re just starting out, or your company isn’t quite as established as some of the bigger names, this could be the objective for you! Facebook aims to show your ad to the maximum amount of users, it will get shown to as many people as possible whilst staying within your budget and audience metrics.
With reach ads, it’s also important to consider setting a limit to the number of times someone will see the same ad. You don’t want to bombard them with the same message over and over again.
Do note, that despite maximising the number of users seeing your ad, the quality of the audience can sometimes be questionable as they aren’t necessarily an audience that will provide a high click-through rate.
TIP – these ads aren’t only used on the audience at the top of your funnel, they can be more specific and bring awareness to a warmer audience to notify them about a new product or service.
Consideration
This section of ads works best with the middle of the funnel audience. People that already know your brand and have potentially interacted with it in one way or another. This allows your ads to be optimised for people likely to think about your product or service and give them a nudge to learn more.
Traffic
A traffic campaign aims to get as many link clicks as possible. Maybe you’re running an event you want lots of people to hear about; you want people to view an app, or simply just sending traffic to your homepage. You can use any URL you like. Your ad is shown to users (based on past behaviours) who are likely to click on the link. Do remember that the traffic objective will never replace the conversion objective. But, it’s a great place to start if your pixel is fresh out the box (setting up a conversion campaign here will not work as the pixel doesn’t have enough data, but more on that later).
One bugbear with traffic campaigns is that Facebook doesn’t track or measure any action taken after they have left the platform.
Engagement
So, we’re all tired of hearing about social proof. This can be a daunting prospect. How are you going to compete with brands with thousands of likes? The engagement campaign is a great way to build this through, (you guessed it) encouraging engagement. Think about this — are you more likely to trust a brand that has 7 likes on a post or 7000? No need to answer, we already know.
There are three types of engagement campaigns. Firstly post engagement—the bread and butter of engagement: likes, shares and comments. The second type is page likes — simple enough. And thirdly, event responses, which encourages people to do just that — respond to an event.
When someone interacts with your page, ad or event. Facebook shares that activity with all of their friends, which in turn will reach even more people. This community validation will increase your online word of mouth marketing.
App installs
This is an easy one! Facebook shows yours to people who have previously downloaded apps from ads, so are more likely to do the same for yours. However, if your goal is for more in-app purchases, you will want to select the conversion objective instead.
Video Views
If you want your videos to gain as many views as possible choose this type of campaign, you can select to optimise for views that last for 2 consecutive seconds or 15 seconds and longer. The one you select would depend on the type of content being pushed. The great thing about these types of ads means that you can retarget based on those who watched your video, they were interested enough to sit through your ad!
TIP – always ad captions to your video ads, a massive 85% of Facebook videos are viewed without the sound on!
Lead Generation
These ads work the best on people in the middle of your funnel who have already shown an interest in your product or service, they already have a buying intention. Now, this ad will only work if you have an enticing enough offer. It allows viewers to enter their data and in exchange, they will receive a type of reward. Like we said, the more desirable the better.
You can choose between optimising for the volume of respondents or those with higher intent. Depending on what you are trying to get out of your campaign help you choose which category to focus on.
Note: Customers LOVE lead generation because they don’t even have to leave the platform they are on to submit their data! After all, we do live in convenience conscious world.
Messages
It allows the customer to automatically start a conversation with your business. They are great for building community and allows you to connect directly with the consumer. It gives the feel of a human behind the brand, not just an auto bot sending auto-responses that don’t answer the questions they asked.
We do stress that you use this type of ads with caution! You must have someone ready to answer the messages as quickly as they come in. You don’t want to risk them writing you off as a disengaged brand.
Conversion
Conversion ads work best on people who are already familiar with your business or service, a little like consideration but they are usually further down your funnel. Whether it’s interacting with your Instagram page, visiting your website or clicking through on one of your other ads. They already have a strong interest and buying intent and just need that last little push.
NOTE: You need a Facebook Pixel for these types of ads.
Conversions
The conversions campaign objective allows Facebook to optimise your ads to have the most amount of customers perform actions on your site or app. These include things like buying products, adding to cart, signing up for a mailing list.
Tip: conversion ads work best on customers who already know about your brand, the people at the bottom of the funnel.
Catalogue Sales
These ads are used to remind customers about products they have already shown an interest in. Products they have viewed or interacted with on your website. So when you’ve wishfully added that work from home loungewear to your ASOS bag and not followed through with the purchase (mainly because, who has £581 to spend on new outfits that no one is ever going to see) and they then pop up on your newsfeed, taunting you, that’s all thanks to this little guy.
These ads are more specific than conversion ads as the goal is to generate sales rather than a specific action on your website.
Store Traffic
This is one for bricks and mortar businesses. Facebook targets totally based on location, no other factors are taking into consideration. For this to work properly your location business settings must be correct on Facebook. You don’t want to spend a few hundred pounds targeting Newcastle, Australia if you’re based in the land of Geordies.
We hope now that when you log into Ads Manager you have a better idea of what all the campaign objectives mean so you can make better choices when building your ads. If you’re ready to move on to that stage we can help, see our guide on how to create your first successful ad campaign.
Still baffled, as a Facebook advertising agency we can help! Schedule a call with us today!
