Choosing The Right Facebook Ad Objective When Setting up Facebook Campaigns
Choosing the right Facebook ad objective can be very confusing and overwhelming, especially when you are new to Facebook advertising.
When you login to your Facebook ads manager to set up a advertising campaign, choosing an objective is the first place to start and can be a campaign ‘stopper!’
It’s easy to sit there staring at your computer screen procrastinating about which objective to choose!
Facebook give you 11 options to choose from but to be completely honest with you, there is really only 4 that we focus on using that I consider to be the most commonly used.
Although they all work in their own way, the four that we will discuss today I believe will benefit you the most. If you check out the image above, you will see that Facebook has categorised the 11 objectives under 3 columns.
They have AWARENESS, CONSIDERATION and CONVERSION
Today, I am only going to discuss the objectives under the ‘Consideration’ column and the ‘Conversion’ column and not the ‘Awareness’ at all.
When you are deciding on which objective to choose ask yourself the following questions:
- What is YOUR Objective?
- What are YOU trying to do?
- What is the PURPOSE of the Ad?
- What action are you trying to get the person who is looking at the ad to do?
Now this is a very important decision that you have to know the answer too before you choose the right Facebook ad objective for your campaign.
Ok! Now let’s get into it…
Top 4 Facebook Ad Objectives Most Commonly Used Day to Day
Conversions
Conversions is a great objective which helps you track what action the end user is taking when clicking on your ads.
For example, conversions is a great objective to choose when running your Facebook ad to a Lead Magnet (Freebie, Freemium, Free Download etc) because Facebook can track the people who opted in for your lead magnet PLUS Facebook’s Algorithm will start to optimise the ad and start to show it to other people that are similar and likely to take the same action that the original people who were converting took.
You just need to give Facebook’s Algorithm the time it needs to start getting smarter and optimising your ads for the best results.
You can also choose conversions for the following types of ads:
- Ads leading to a Webinar registration
- Ads leading to purchase a product
- Ads leading to a coaching or consulting call
- Ads leading into a challenge or contest
These are also considered as a conversion and we use this objective because we are trying to get our prospects to take that specific action. You’ll more than likely use this conversion a lot when setting up your campaigns.
Video Views
Video Views is another great objective to use when choosing the right Facebook ad objective for your campaign because this can build really good brand awareness.
Running a video ad allows you to get in front of a large audience of people to let them know who you are, what your are all about and help build that ‘know, like & trust’ factor.
The great thing about using the video views objective is you can take that number of people who have viewed your video for a specific length of time and retarget them based on how long they watched it which really measures their interest in you and what the video was about.
For example, recently I registered for a webinar where there was a promotion at the end to purchase a course. At that time I did not make a purchase but afterwards for a series of days I was retargeted by that same person where they posted additional videos answering questions to objections that a prospect may have.
This is an awesome strategy because it gives the prospect more confidence when finally making their purchase if they decide too.
The objective of using video views is that Facebook will try to get your ad the most views at the lowest cost. It is also a powerful objective because you will have the option to retarget them even if you didn’t give a CTA (call to action) in your video.
Once you retarget them, you give that audience a second chance to get to know you better and what you are all about or have to offer.
If you are trying to grow a Facebook Group there are several strategies but running a video and using video views as the objective is a great way to quickly start building your community.
Simply introduce yourself and talk about your group and why your group could be a great fit for them and give a CTA (call to action) by instructing the viewers to click the Facebook Group link in the first comment. Just don’t forget to go and add your link as the first comment AFTER you have started running your ad.
Engagement
Using engagement as an objective is very similar to video views but we use this objective when creating an ad with an image oppose to a video.
For example you could be creating an image ad with a long form post (great for story ads.) The goal really is to get people to click on the ad, ready the post, like, comment or share or even check out our name to see who we are (go and like our Fanpage etc)
Again just like the video views objective we can go ahead and retarget them later and the great thing is we can even carry over that engagement (ie likes, shares, comments) to our new ad which is great social proof.
Traffic
The traffic objective is a great one to choose when you are wanting to direct traffic to a great piece of content ie your webite, an article, blogpost etc and wanting the person to click.
When choosing the traffic objective, just keep in mind that it doesn’t mean that the person will click and buy like the goal when you use the conversion objection (it’s possible) but the goal here is to get a person to click and read more and check out your content etc
It’s great when you are wanting to get some more eyeballs on your blogposts, hopefully some comments on your blog and also when you are trying to scale your Facebook ads and you have already maxed out on your conversion campaigns.
Choosing the traffic objective is also good when for some reason you can’t put the Facebook Pixel on a page and can’t track the conversions. Also the traffic objective is really easy to set up so a great one for beginners if you haven’t got your pixels in place and you just to test out some ads to see what happens.
Conclusion
So basically, I have outlined here the 4 most commonly used Facebook ad objectives and like I said right at the start of this post, the key element here to to know exactly what YOUR objective is for running a Facebook ad in the first place and from there it will make it really clear to match which Facebook ad objective to choose.
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