Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives: Which is Right for Me?

In America, almost 7 out of 10 adults use a Facebook account. In marketing, you must go where your customers are. With such a high rate of potential buyers on Facebook, their advertising is a valuable platform to promote your brand through engaging ads. To find success on Facebook, you’ll need to be strategic about your ad campaigns. Facebook gives you many different objectives to choose from, so it’s important to choose the right objective and strategy to reach your marketing goals.

Facebook Advertising Basics

Once you decide that you are ready to advertise on Facebook, you’ll need to outline your campaign. For more information about creating your Facebook ad campaign, be sure to check out our Facebook advertising guide.

There’s more than meets the eye when you run ads on Facebook. You have to consider goal, audience, messaging, where the ads will show (Facebook has a lot of digital real estate to work with), budget, graphics, and more! However, build this strategy with your objective in mind.

Three Objective Categories

Facebook offers 11 different objectives for your ad campaigns. These objectives break down into three categories based on the three stages of the marketing funnel: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

• Awareness: The awareness stage is, in many ways, the first touchpoint a brand has with its customers. The goal is to gain exposure for your brand or new service(s). Your key metrics for awareness include reach, impressions, and ad recall.
• Consideration: Next, we have the largest category: consideration. This stage is for middle-of-the-funnel customers that may have seen your business or your company name, but they haven’t acted yet. The campaigns in this category encourage customers to seek more information and travel to your website or Facebook page. Key metrics differ based on objectives, but some common KPIs include clicks, engagement, views, leads, or messages.
• Conversion: Finally, a conversion-based campaign should target bottom-of-the-funnel leads. These campaigns typically are the most expensive Facebook campaigns based on the nature of the lead funnel. You are asking warmer leads to convert by making a sale or visiting a store.

Now let’s break down and further discuss the eleven objectives.

Awareness Campaigns

Brand Awareness

If you’ve never invested in PPC or social advertising, you should consider starting with an awareness campaign to help you understand how users respond to your ads. Brand awareness is one of the two awareness objectives. In this campaign, you measure ad recall, or how likely someone is to remember your ad that they saw on Facebook. This is key if you are starting to go after a new market, or have only relied on word-of-mouth marketing in the past. You want people to remember your brand.

Reach

Reach is a common and cost-effective campaign strategy because you are trying to reach the most people as possible for the lowest cost. If you are promoting a giveaway or boosting a highly engaging organic post, reach gives you the most bang for your buck. You may not get as many conversions from this campaign compared to other objectives, but you will reach a lot of people for just dollars a day.


Consideration Campaigns

Traffic

We know the value of content marketing, but you can boost your content by running a traffic-based Facebook ad campaign. This is perfect for driving users to key landing pages or content on your website. You can track clicks or landing page views, based on the needs of your campaign. Plus, Facebook allows you to customize your calls-to-action that work best for your business such as “Call Now,” “Get Directions,” “Learn More,” or “Contact Us”.

Engagement

If you seek to humanize your brand or show social proof on your Facebook, target an engagement-based campaign to increase comments, likes, and shares. If you have an organic post that your current audience is acting on, boost it to garner more engagement. While this may not necessarily warrant many conversions, people who engage with your brand once are more likely to engage again or move into the next stage of the funnel.

App Installs

This campaign is fairly obvious to decipher. If you recently designed a mobile or desktop application for your brand, you should create an app installs campaign to encourage downloads.

Video Views

Videography is one of the best examples of digital storytelling. Videos can invoke an action, inspire a movement, or simply tell the story of your organization. Many campaigns center around an anchor video. If your goal is to increase the views of your brand video, video views are the best objective for you as they deliver the video to users that are the most likely to watch it.

Leads

Lead generation is a key component of your business strategy and one that can be supported by your Facebook ads. If you have a content offer or want to grow your email subscribers, lead ads are the best way to capture leads in the middle-of-funnel that an email campaign or marketing automation can nurture. Make sure you know your target audience, as this objective is a more expensive option.

Messages

Lastly, message-centered Facebook campaigns connect with your audiences on a personal level. If you want people to directly message your Facebook page to get started or learn more, these ads are a great way to begin the conversation. Be wary, though, as you’ll need to stay on top of these messaging connections to create traction.

Conversion Campaigns

Conversions

Now that we’re in the bottom-of-the-funnel objectives, you are actively seeking your warmest leads who are most likely exposed to your brand and may even follow you on social media. Conversion ads encourage people to convert directly on your site. This should be highly targeted and thoroughly developed to maximize conversions. Targeting who previously engaged with your ad, and your current followers or site visitors helps push more conversions.

Catalog Sales

For e-commerce businesses, you want to take advantage of catalog sales ads that show your products to interested customers. This allows customers to look at your products without ever leaving Facebook. Plus, if you give them an enticing offer (“new customers receive XX% off first order”), they are more likely to convert.

Store Visits

Finally, you can run a store visits campaign to promote brick and mortar stores on Facebook. This campaign promotes your business to people that are geographically near. If tourism heavily influences your business, a great strategy is to target people visiting your area. This campaign is also useful if you have multiple store locations. Because the conversion happens offline, this campaign’s results are harder to track compared to others.

Navigating Facebook Advertising With PHOS Creative

Facebook advertising continues to be a valuable way to connect with new customers and engage with current ones. Deciding to take the plunge into Facebook ads is smart for businesses of all sizes, industries, and ages. If you need help navigating the vast opportunities that social advertising offers, connect with our marketing team. We’d love to help you craft the perfect Facebook campaign.