So here I am, once again, talking about Facebook Ads and how valuable they can be for your business. And I really mean it. Having worked with large advertising budgets, I’ve had the chance to experiment and work with different types of campaigns and witness the extraordinary impact that these can have, when implemented correctly.
The Facebook advertising platform, also known as Facebook Ads Manager, is a complex multi-layered solution that allows advertisers to create sophisticated campaigns aligning business objectives with marketing objectives, audiences and ultimately ad creatives.
Lots of people tend to put much time, money and effort into the latter, expecting the creative to do all the hard work for them. Unfortunately, that’s just not how it goes and the reality is that each of these elements require a high level of knowledge, understanding and attention to achieve the desired results.
We have already discussed the targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads so for today’s post I have decided to guide you through the very first step of a campaign creation process: choosing your campaign’s objective.
To ensure your ads perform at their best, you need to have a clear idea of what it is that you are trying to achieve. This will help you select the right campaign objective and ultimately reach your business and marketing goals.
Start from your business goal – what is it that you ultimately want to achieve with your campaign? Answering this question will make choosing your objective much easier and straightforward.
Currently, in Ads Manager there are 11 ad objectives which fall into 3 main categories:
- Awareness: These types of objectives help you that generate interest in your product or service and tend to reach a broader audience.
- Consideration: These objectives get people to think about your business and look for more information.
- Conversion: At the very bottom of the funnel, Conversion objectives encourage people interested in your business to buy or use your product or service.
Keep in mind that the algorithm will try to optimise your campaign’s performance according to the chosen category as well as the chosen ad objective so you need to pay attention to both.
Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives
Once you have settled upon one category, you are ready to move on to the next step, which is the campaign objective itself. Let’s take a closer look at what options are available and what their main features are.
- Brand Awareness: This objective can help you show your ads to the people who are most likely to remember them. It sits at the very top of the conversion funnel so you should aim for a large yet targeted audience.
- Reach: Similar to brand awareness, but designed to reach the maximum number of users within the set maximum budget. This is probably the best choice if you have a specific target audience that you want to reach and get your message across.
- Traffic: This objective is particularly useful when your aim is to get more people to visit a specific destination. This can be a website’s page, a Facebook event or even a Messenger conversation. Make sure you have the Pixel installed on your website and use custom UTM parameters to better understand the post click user experience.
- Engagement: Reach users who are more likely to engage with your ad content. This includes post likes and reactions, comments, shares as well as event responses.
- App Installs: If you are looking to drive app installs, this is probably the best objective you can possibly choose. It is in fact designed to show your ads to people who are more likely to download your app and engage with it.
- Video Views: This objective will help you drive video views by reaching users who are more likely to watch them to completion. One thing to note here is that whilst other objectives don’t optimise for video views, they do support the format so you will be able to use video ads elsewhere.
- Lead Generation: Choose this objective if your goal is to collect valuable leads for your business at a competitive cost. Lead generation ads come with easy to set up forms that work both on desktop and mobile that are extremely user-friendly and designed to simplify the signup process.
- Messages: If you want to start conversations with your audience you can use this objective to create ads that allow people to directly communicate with your business or brand on Messenger, Whatsapp or Instagram Direct.
- Conversions: Reach users who are more likely to complete a specific conversion action on your website. You can either select a Facebook standard conversion event such as ‘Add to cart’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Page View’ or create your own custom event. This allows the algorithm to optimise your campaign’s performance accordingly.
- Catalogue Sales: Show products from your ecommerce store catalogue to drive sales. This is particularly recommended if you are looking to re-engage with previous website visitors or existing customers. Consider combining product-centric ads with tailored offers to increase your conversion rate.
- Store Traffic: Target users who are close to your physical stores to encourage them to walk in and boost sales. To use this objective you need to have one or multiple locations set on your business’ page on Facebook.
Conclusion
So as you can see, whatever the type of business, there is so much potential for growth and expansion thanks to the many campaign objectives available on Facebook Ads Manager.
Remember to start from the user and ask yourself what actions you want him/her to take. Knowing what your goal is is the first step to campaign success, so take your time to identify that before planning your strategy.
If you are keen to learn more about social media advertising, then visit our blog for more useful guides and actionable tips on how to optimise your online campaigns.
