Facebook Ad Objectives

Facebook Ad Objectives are the backbone of Facebook campaigns. It determines the effectiveness of your ad and how your campaigns reach your target consumers. When creating a new Facebook Ad, one needs to decide which objective to optimize to achieve your goals for the campaign. Choosing the right one is important as it will ensure that your ad will be highly effective.

Are you confused as to what objective you should choose? If you are feeling a little lost, this post is for you. Read on!

 

What are Facebook Ad Objectives?

Facebook Ad objectives are pretty self-explanatory. They are what defines your goal in what you want to accomplish with your specific ad campaign. It will then help Facebook to optimize your ads for the best results you can achieve.

There are three main categories and in each one, there are subcategories:

Pick out the category that best aligns with the goal/s you have for your campaign, basing it on the desired action you want your target audience to make.

As your business grows, your campaign goals will change with it. First, your goal may focus on developing awareness of your brand and acquiring new customers. Later on, when your business grows, you may want to focus more on encouraging people to subscribe to your pages, or make a purchase, or sign up for your events.

 

There are two choices in this category. Basically in this objective, you are telling people about your brand and what makes your business relevant.

This focuses on reaching new audiences to introduce to your business and improving brand awareness to those who are already familiar with you. Use this objective when the main goal is to increase awareness for your brand and not for engagement purposes. This will assist you in reaching customers who are more likely to pay attention to your ad.

The brand awareness objective is useful to large companies, like Apple who always wants to put their brand in front of the consumer’s mind without necessarily looking to generate web traffic, sales, or engagement. This will also be useful for smaller businesses but with limited advertising, this objective might not be as valuable as compared to the others.

This objective is to get your campaign seen by as many people as possible within your target audience and your budget. This is going to maximize the number of people that will see your ads. Simply put, if your priority is to maximize the exposure of your business, this is the objective you should choose.

If you want your ad to be seen by a large number of people and you don’t necessarily need to have any other action except for having the ad viewed, this is a good one to choose.

 

In this objective, your goal is to have people seek more information about your business. Your goal is more than just getting people to see your ad, you want potential customers to visit your website, comment to your posts, install your app, or share your videos.

 

The traffic objective is a popular and well-used option. Use this when your goal is to send users outside of Facebook. Do you want people to go to your website, listen to a podcast episode, discover your app, or visit your landing page? The traffic objective will optimize and show your ads to people who will most likely click your link, based on their past behaviors.

This objective is used to give the consumers more information about your product or service being promoted.

 

This objective is best when your goal is to reach people who are most likely to engage with your post, this includes likes, reactions, comments, and shares. This objective has the advantage of getting additional reach, as people who have engaged with your content can likely generate more organic reach beyond the initial target audience you have paid for.

Choosing this objective can assist you in building your Facebook Page Engagement Audiences and you can use this for retargeting purposes in the future. These campaigns will likely increase your Facebook event attendance, visibility, and social proof.

 

This objective is great if you have an app and you want new users to download and install it. Highlight the value proposition of downloading in your ad campaign so that the potential users will understand how it will benefit them.

You can optimize for app traffic and conversions using other objectives but keep in mind that this is the only campaign that will allow you to optimize for app installs.

Video ads have the most potential on Facebook and can yield spectacular results. This objective will prioritize to let more people view your video campaigns.

Use this objective when you have a video to promote and your goal is to get more audience to view and engage with your video, not for them to click on your link or convert on your promotion.

One thing to take note of is that just because your ad features a video doesn’t automatically mean that you need to choose the Video Views objective. Take, for instance, you want people to click through from your video then the Traffic objective will be more useful, just choose video as your content’s format. Another example is if you want to get people to convert after they watch your video, for this you should use the Conversion objective.

 

This objective is great when your main goal is to generate leads on Facebook right within the ad without having to drive traffic to your website or landing page. The Facebook Lead Generation Ads will allow you to capture data such as name, email, phone number, address, etc.

The Lead Generation Campaign is very versatile. One of the best things about lead gen is that you can get people’s email addresses so you can build up your email marketing list.

If you’re using lead ads, you may need a third-party tool that integrates with Facebook and can automatically take those emails and put them into the email marketing software you are using. This is important as people will expect to receive what you’re offering immediately after they’ve opted in.

The drawback of using this objective is that you will not be able to drive traffic into your website or landing page as people don’t have to go off Facebook to opt-in. However, this will generate your Leads Ad Audience which you can use for retargeting purposes in the future.

 

This ad objective is a new one and the goal here is to take people to a messaging platform like Messenger or WhatsApp to get them to talk to you. This is where you can interact with new and existing customers, whether it be answering their questions or offer product or service recommendations depending on their needs.

 

When your main goal is to encourage people interested in your business to convert and to buy or use your product or service, this objective is the perfect one for you.

 

The conversions objective is used when you want to encourage people to take a specific action on your website, like having them purchase your products/services, download your app, sign-up for your newsletter, or register for a course. However, take note that when using this objective, you need to have sufficient data to optimize this option best.

To optimize Conversions, you should have at least 15-25 conversions per week. This number of conversions provides adequate data so Facebook can learn about the people who convert and determine more people who will most likely convert within your target audience. Facebook will then deliver your ads to those people. 15-25 is the minimum, the ideal conversion number is 50-100+. The more conversions, the better as this provides Facebook more data to work with.

If there are insufficient data, Facebook won’t be able to deliver your ads to the targeted audience and so this objective will not be accurately optimized. If you have low traffic, you might as well choose the Traffic objective even if your goal is to get people to convert. This is because while you want people to opt-in, register, or purchase from your website, choosing the Conversion objective might hinder your campaign due to insufficient data.

 

This objective is useful for businesses with an e-commerce store. This campaign will automatically show items from your product catalog to a relevant audience, keep them engaged, and then hopefully, generate sales. You’ll be required to integrate your product catalog with Facebook.

 

The Store Visits objective is convenient when you have multiple physical stores and you wish to promote your business to the people nearby. Moreover, you’ll need to set up your business locations in the business manager before using this objective. This objective is a little tricky as it drives an offline action that can be harder to track.

This is a great option for franchises and businesses with several sister companies that are trying to drive foot traffic into their stores.

 

Before you create your ad, first you’ll need to consider your top business goal. It’s important to determine what you want to achieve to choose the right objective that will drive your campaigns to success.

Choosing the right Facebook Ad Objectives will have a significant effect on your campaign results so if you are not sure about it, test out different objectives to see what works best for you. Testing out objectives will help you assess what’s best for your audience and the ads you are promoting.

The objectives are pretty straightforward and self-explanatory, so choosing the right one won’t be that hard. Form a strategy and keep in mind the things presented above.