Is Your Brand Choosing The Winning Facebook Ad Objective?

Ever created a Facebook Ad?

Then you will know how daunting and confusing it can be to start a brand-new ad campaign from scratch. With over 13 ad objectives to choose from, more time is often spent discussing and choosing the right one.

And even in that case, you might not be making the best choice.

Need a helping hand? Here’s a quick guide on all 13 Facebook ad objectives, when to choose each and how to maximise its potential for meeting those KPIs!

What are Facebook Ad Objectives?

Essentially, your Facebook Ad Objectives is based on what specific action you want your target audience to do upon seeing your ad.

Ad objectives are the backbone of every campaign – choosing the right one from the get-go is going to largely impact the way that Facebook prioritizes and optimises your ad in the feeds of users.

Are you ultimately looking to generate leads to your website? Increase brand awareness in regard to your next product launch? Drive conversions and sales? Or boost attendance at an upcoming event?

The 13 Facebook Ad Objectives

There are currently 13 ad objectives available for brands to choose from, broken down into 3 main categories:

• Awareness: When you want to generate interest in your product or service.
• Consideration: When you want to engage users who have already expressed interest in your product or service and want them to look for more information.
• Conversion: When you want users to complete a specific action, such as a download or purchase.

The best way to think about these 3 main categories is to imagine your customer journey, and relate it back to your marketing goal – which part of the funnel do you want your target audience to take part in most?

With your marketing goals in mind, let’s now dive deeper into each objective and when is the best time to utilise them:

1. Reach

Use this objective when your goal is to reach the maximum number of people repeatedly over a short period of time.

Especially if you are a small business owner who has just started advertising, or if you have a limited-time offer that you wish to promote, this could be the best option for you.

In fact, brands with a broader audience will benefit most from this objective, while those with a more niche audience will benefit more from more targeted objectives. The only caveat with this is that Facebook will only optimize for the highest number of impressions, which may not really mean much in terms of conversion.

You pay for the impressions that you get, and define your frequency to match your needs.

2. Store Traffic

Use this objective if you want to drive local awareness and store visits to your brick-and-mortar store.

This objective is most beneficial to businesses with multiple stores or chains, since you can use this objective type to reach people within a set distance of your location to help them find you.

Other than being able to create customized ads for each location, this objective is great for driving new visitors who have previously not engaged with your store before – expanding your customer base almost instantly.

3. Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a term that is well heard of in every company, and every brand at one point uses this objective.

Use this objective when you are looking to simply increase awareness of your brand and increase brand recall. By staying top-of-mind, people are more likely to buy from you when they are ready, and can be extremely valuable when you are a bigger company with multiple competitors.

Similar to the Reach Objective, you’ll be charged based on the number of impressions that you get.

4. Traffic

Use this objective when your goal is to drive traffic outside of Facebook, such as to your blog post or landing page. Facebook will then show your ad to the people most likely to click your link based on their past behaviours.

However, if there is a specific action that you want users to complete once they land on the external page, you might want to use the Conversion objective instead.

This objective is still overall great for educating potential customers and start building remarketing lists for retargeting campaigns in the future.

Something to take note of: make sure that your landing page matches your ad – you don’t want to come off as unreliable and untrustworthy to users.

5. Engagement

Use this objective if you are trying to drive engagement rates with your ad. This includes factors such as likes, reactions, comments and shares.

This is the secret to generating more Page Likes, Event Responses of Offer Claims – these ads work well to create powerful social proof that is going to work wonders to your bottom line further down the funnel.

6. Lead Generation

Use this objective when you want to collect information from potential customers.

When paired with the appropriate content, this objective can be extremely versatile – capturing email addresses, quotes or pricing requests and using the information to later enhance your retargeting campaigns.

7. Video Views

This is pretty clear cut – use this objective when you want to accelerate your video reach.

An extension to the reach objective, this is going to be ideal if you have invested in an awesome, educational video showcasing your product or service in action.

Facebook allows you to then create audiences based on whether users have watch 25%, 50% or 75% of the ad for retargeting them with specific offers later on.

Once again, if simply getting video views is not your final goal but instead, getting more traffic on your website – then review your objective and optimize based off the Traffic objective instead.

8. Messenger

Use this objective when you want to start conversing and communicating with potential customers.

If there are crucial pieces of information that users need in order to make a decision in regard to your product or service, then messenger campaigns can help bridge that gap.

Messenger ads are great because they allow you to create customized welcome messages and use an automated chat system to speak and ask questions directly to interested buyers.

9. Catalog Sales

Use this objective when you have an e-commerce store and would like to promote your products from a catalog.

In order to pull this one off, you are going to need to integrate an existing product catalog with Facebook so that you are able to generate product feeds to showcase specific products when creating your campaign.

You can use this campaign to cross-sell, upsell or even source out potential customers who may be interested in your best-selling products, for example.

10. Conversions

This is probably the most common objective that brands tend to lean towards, simply due to the fact that every business can relate to this goal.

Use this objective to encourage people to visit your webpage and when users are most likely to convert.

If you think that most of your users are still in the consideration stage, then perhaps it might not be the best time to put the Conversion objective to work.

In order for this objective to be successful, you need sufficient data to be able to effectively track and measure conversions on your website, page or mobile app.

This means you’ll need to have a Facebook Pixel installed. Not quite sure how to do it? Get our Social Media Marketing Agency to help you to install your Pixel and track your campaigns so that you can focus on your bottom line work instead.

11. Event Response

Another self-explanatory objective, use this objective if you want to promote an event in order to drive awareness and attendance.

Facebook will then allow you to optimise based on event responses, impressions, post engagement, or daily unique reach.

12. Page Likes

Use this objective when you are pumping in a lot of effort and resources into building your social media presence. Especially if you are consistently producing stellar content, you need to utilize this objective to drive reach and engagement to expand the original reach of well-performing content.

As we already know, Facebook’s algorithm largely depends on the engagement that your posts are generating, so optimising for engagement on a well-done post could be the start of a new cycle that brings in organic followers and precious relationships with them.

13. App Install

Use this objective when you want to drive app installations. You can then choose to laser-focus on Retention (target people that are most likely to open your app during a certain time period), or even App Events (target people that are most likely to complete a certain event on your app).

If you have managed to get this far – good on you!

While this guide is simply for general reference, the best way to learn is ultimately to do your own trials and tests to see what works best for your brand. In fact, there may be purposes that have yet to be discussed in guides such as these – and are waiting for you to uncover them!

If you are currently taking a Digital Marketing Course, you will find that there any many nuances that are involved in creating a one-of-a-kind campaign with great results. However, the truth of the matter is that while there are best practices that are often taught, these tend to overlap and there isn’t one best way. In fact, some objectives may work better than others for a specific goal for some, while it may not work as well for others.

More importantly, the ideal marketing campaign will tend to cover all 3 stages of your conversion funnel overtime. This added layer of complexity may even see you applying multiple ad types to accomplish the same objective.

If you have a financial budget, this will create another factor for consideration, and some objectives, such as Video Views tend to be extremely useful when you are just starting out as a business due to its low cost.

Today, we want you to start answering the questions of “Who”, “What”, and “Where”– this is what is going to be pertinent to your campaign’s success, and should be the first step when planning your next one!