If you’re trying to find the right Facebook campaign objective to choose when you create a new campaign, you’ve come to the right place.
Picking an objective sounds easy enough, but it isn’t. Saying “I want to get more sales” just isn’t specific enough and Facebook won’t accept that either – they want specific. Do you want to get more sales by increasing brand awareness, or maybe by getting more website traffic?
In this post, we’re going to be going over how you can choose the best objective for a Facebook campaign.
Types of Facebook Campaign Objective
The first thing to note is that there are three types of Facebook campaign objective:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
Fun fact: I almost never use the awareness category. Whatever you’re trying to do – getting traffic to your site, running a video view campaign, or running a lead gen campaign – your campaign will fit into one of these groups. Each of them have pros and cons.
“Which Category Should I Use?”
Setting aside the Awareness group, at KonvertLab we usually focus our Facebook campaign objectives around the Consideration group. Under this group there are sub-groups including:
- Engagement. This would be for things like getting likes or comments on a post, or anything else where you want users to engage with the ad.
- Video Views. Self explanatory – if you’re actively posting videos to your Facebook page, this goal is to get those videos more views. You could also use an ad with this goal to retarget people and show them future videos.
- Traffic. You can go for an organic traffic approach, like with SEO, or you can run a Facebook ad with the goal of generating more traffic.
- Lead Generation. One goal which we see used a lot is lead gen. Getting leads can be difficult but dedicating an ad campaign to this goal, which uses Facebook lead forms, can go a long way.
Facebook Campaign Objectives - Breakdown
Just to break down these objective groups a little bit more…
- Awareness Objectives. These are at the top of the funnel, they can generate interest in what you’re offering, and push people towards the consideration stage. I rarely use these objectives and typically I’ll just jump ahead to consideration straight away since I find them more useful.
- Consideration Objectives. In the middle of the funnel are consideration objectives. These are perfect for reaching people who already have some interest in what you’re offering and who want to find out more.
- Conversion Objectives. At the bottom of the funnel you’ve got conversion objectives. Use these to reel people in who are on the brink of converting – get them to register, opt-in, download, or purchase your offering.
Best Practices
Like everything else when you’re learning online marketing, it’s good to take on board some of the best practices. This helps to cut away bad habits early on and helps your understanding of Facebook campaign objectives.
- Pick the objective that most resonates with what your goals are. So if you’re running an eCommerce store, you’ll obviously want catalog sales or conversions. In this case, a conversion would be when someone makes a purchase.
- If you want to get people in the sales funnel first, do a video view campaign. This has worked really well in the past for eCommerce businesses we’ve worked with. With a video view campaign you can retarget or push them towards the purchase from the campaign itself. Because these have such a big reach they’re also great for retargeting.
- If you’re doing something like software, I’d recommend going with either a video view, lead gen, or site traffic objective. Note that traffic is going to be a little more expensive, but you can retarget those clicks to get conversions later.
- Get cheaper leads with lead gen forms. Once you have a big enough sample size, say a thousand leads from a lead gen form, you can retarget them with high friction offers.
How Do I Choose a Campaign Objective?
So if you’re sitting there wondering, “Well I still don’t know what the right Facebook campaign objective is for me”, it really comes down to the product or service you offer. And when you’re choosing the objective, ask yourself what it is exactly you want to achieve.
Are you trying to warm someone up before pushing them towards a high-friction landing page which says, “Hey, book a one hour demo call with me!”? If you’re doing something like that, though, I’d suggest starting with something lighter like a free eBook.
I prefer starting with free material to get people interested and into a lead gen form, and then retargeting them after they’ve opted into the form before moving onto higher friction offers from there.
Overall though, I’d highly recommend sticking to the Consideration group of Facebook campaign objectives. Regardless of what the industry is, you’ll be running campaigns to generate traffic, video views, or leads, and this group of objectives is great for that.
I’d also recommend avoiding brand awareness, reach, store traffic, and app installs. I’ll even go a step further and say avoid running Engagement campaigns unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
Conclusion
That wraps up our post on deciding which Facebook campaign objective to choose, and we hope it can help you better set up your campaigns.
If you want to find more out about Facebook objectives then go ahead and watch our recent video on the matter (you’ll find it at the top of this page).
Understanding which situations call for each type of objective can be difficult, and it isn’t something everyone can do. By not knowing which objective to choose you won’t be fully utilizing the tools that Facebook Ads provides.
That’s why it can be a good idea to seek help from a professional Facebook Ads agency like KonvertLab. Our years of experience will greatly benefit your business and in just a few clicks, you can book a call with our team and find out how we can drive more sales your way.