Whether you are a digital advertising specialist or a small business owner, learning Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives might come in handy.
These are also called Facebook Ad types, and an ad type must be chosen before initiating a new ad campaign.
When you go to Facebook Ads Manager and click on create a new campaign, you first choose a campaign objective. Campaign objective names are pretty self-explanatory, and in our experience, it’s a good practice to use common sense. Facebook also segmented these objectives into three categories based on the buyer’s journey; awareness, consideration, and conversion.
9 Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives
Figuring out which campaign objective to use is a critical decision in your digital ads efforts. When you choose an objective, it also influences how Facebook optimises your ads, therefore affecting your budgeting. Generally speaking, people who are more likely to take your desired action will be prioritised within your target audience. Now, let’s go ahead and check out each campaign objective along with the possible outcome, guiding you in the right direction.
1. Brand Awareness
As the name states very clearly, this is an ad type to use to raise brand awareness. When you choose this objective, Facebook optimizes your ads for “ad recalls,” meaning that it will show your ads to people who are more likely to remember your brand.
For that reason, this ad type is very suitable for new businesses. You could create a short business video, use this ad type and get great exposure. Established companies, even sales-oriented ones such as an e-commerce store, must spare a fixed budget and use this ad type as a top funnel activity as well.
Some marketers find this ad type rather too indirect, but in our opinion, it’s an effective marketing strategy to reach long-term business goals.
2. Reach
Reach campaign objective allows you to hit those big numbers, reaching as many people as possible spending the least money. So when you choose this objective, Facebook optimizes your ads to reach as many people as possible within your selected target group. This ad type is often leveraged by marketers when they are on a tight schedule. For example, you are launching a product or making an important announcement.
3. Traffic
When you choose this objective, Facebook shows your ads to people more likely to click as default. But you can also optimise your traffic ads for landing page views, impressions, and daily unique reach.
In our opinion, the use of this ad type is debatable. Lots of people might be using this ad type not very efficiently. It sounds like a way of generating traffic to your website, but could it be that simple to acquire traffic? Can prospects jump straight to the consideration stage in the buyer’s journey and take valuable actions at a completely new website? Maybe not!
Besides, Facebook has the conversion ad type that can send people to your website more efficiently. In that case, could traffic ads be a better choice for content sites that are on the look for some ad revenue?
4. Engagement
If you have been using social media for some time, you must have noticed the dramatic drop in organic reach, therefore, engagement. Our posts are not reaching that many people organically anymore. That’s where the engagement campaign objective might come in handy.
You can use this Facebook campaign objective to get more likes, follows, comments, shares, and event responses. Your ads will be optimised towards your goal after choosing this objective and selecting post engagement, page likes, or event responses. However, we find it strange that you still can’t choose an “Instagram follower gain” option within the engagement ad type. Most social media professionals are keen to grow their Instagram following, yet you can’t optimise your ads towards this vital engagement goal.
5. App Installs
As you can imagine, thousands of mobile apps are being published in Google Play and Apple App Stores daily; some of them are legitimate startup businesses with a clear growth mission. That’s where app installs campaign objectives can help app business owners to grow their app inorganically. When this ad type is chosen, the ads are optimised for link clicks rather than app downloads.
To get the most out of the app install campaigns, it’s a good idea to register your app with Facebook and implement the SDK. This enables us to pass event data from our apps to Facebook to track further and optimise our campaigns.
6. Video Views
Video ads could be used when you have a special message to deliver in a short video format. You could think of video views campaign objective as using a reach objective with videos in its ads. There is a slight difference, though. As we told you before, different campaign objectives refer to different types of optimisation. Video view objective optimises for actual video views 2 seconds or more, whereas reach objective with video ads will still focus on reaching as many people within the budget.
7. Lead Generation
If you look for a Facebook Ads Campaign Objective to collect new leads, this ad type might be surprisingly effective. When you choose this objective, Facebook optimises your ads to get as many leads as possible within your budget. This campaign objective is very versatile. It could be used for SMEs and big corporations, B2B or B2C. For example, the automobile industry often leverages this ad type to collect new leads, especially after new vehicle launches. It also works brilliantly well for businesses that are working appointment-based.
When your target group clicks on your lead ads, all they need to do is click on submit button since Facebook fills up the simple lead form automatically. That’s really cool! People tend to react to this ad type, so why not use it? We must warn you that it might be a challenge to keep the cost per lead under control in some cases.
8. Messages
Integrating messages into Facebook Ads could be one of the most innovative things come to life in the world of digital advertising in the last decade. When you choose this campaign objective, Facebook optimises your ads so that you can get the most replies to your Facebook messenger, Instagram direct, or WhatsApp.
It’s worth mentioning conversational marketing, which is a funnel hack. Since you start chatting with your prospects right away, you can start selling within minutes. It significantly simplifies your digital marketing processes and sales funnel. If you haven’t tried Facebook messages ads, we strongly recommend you roll up your sleeves and do so. You will see right away how effective these ads are for all sorts of niches.
9. Conversions
Conversion ads in Facebook are a sophisticated advertising objective type. To use it, you need to install Facebook pixel to your website and send important website events to Facebook Ads Manager.
You created a couple of custom conversions such as; add to cart, abandoned, payment page, payment made, add to favourites. Then you can create a conversion campaign. Once you do that, you can choose the desired outcome, such as add to cart so that Facebook can show your ads to people who are most likely to add your items to their carts.
When you can apply the same strategy for other important events on your website, you end up targeting each step in your funnel. If you adjust your content according to the funnel step you are targeting, that’s even better! As we discussed in the traffic objective, conversion ad type might be an excellent choice to increase relevant traffic to your website.
As you have just read, the possibilities are endless when you use different types of Facebook Ads. The variety is spot on, but our favourite ones are definitely brand awareness, messenger, conversion ads.
Have you also been using different Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives? Don’t hesitate to comment below let us know! Or if you need a hand with your ads, give us a call on 1300 168 311!
