What is your Facebook objective?

Facebook offers a range of advertising objectives and it can be confusing to know where to start. If you’re a business that “boosts” all of your posts directly from your business’ Page, keep reading! Using the other advertising objectives can save you dollars and allow you to better fulfill your marketing goals. 

Because the algorithm for different advertising objectives varies, choosing the right one is an important part of social media strategy. For example, if your goal is lead generation or growing your email marketing list, you’ll likely want to choose a lead generation or conversion objective over an awareness objective. 

What Facebook Objectives Are Available?

Let’s talk a little bit about those different objectives. They’re broken down into three categories with additional options under each of the umbrellas of Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. You can think of these as different stages of your marketing funnel. Awareness is the top of the funnel, Consideration is the middle, and Conversions are toward the bottom where users are more likely to act.

 
Which Facebook Ad Campaign Objective Should You Choose?

As an agency, we juggle a lot of different objectives across an array of campaigns, so we created a handy flowchart to help frame our decision making when choosing an objective for different client campaigns. It’s an easy way for us to think through the process and smartly align social ad spending with client objectives. We start by asking ourselves “does the client care about traffic on the website?” From that point, the flowchart leads us to the objective that is most likely to fulfill the client’s goal, easily framing whether the campaign is for awareness, consideration or conversions. 

The objectives in the flowchart are what we use most often to align social media ads spending with our clients' marketing goals. Read on for a brief summary, with objectives listed from less to more measureable objectives, as well as less to more expensive per CPM (generally speaking):

Brand Awareness

The Brand Awareness objective is an inexpensive way to reach a lot of people. It can be helpful for businesses that don’t necessarily want a prospect to take an action but want their ad to be seen by many people in their target audience, as the cost is low compared to other “clicky” objectives. Brand Awareness should often be paired with other lower funnel “Consideration” objectives to ensure alignment with your ultimate marketing objectives.

Video Views

If you have video content, you can use it as creative in most of the other objectives listed above. So, it really depends on what your end goal is for the specific campaign. If you want general engagement and many video completions, video views is a good option because it optimizes for people who are more likely to watch your video. It is generally less expensive than those objectives geared towards those expensive “clicky” users.

Engagement

Likes, comments, shares, offer claims = Engagement. Facebook will show your ad to people who are more likely to react.  This is a good option for businesses that are trying to drive discussions on their Facebook posts. Engagement is the objective that is automatically selected when you use the “Boost” button on your Page. An important thing to remember is that Facebook studies have shown 2 important facts: 1. “Clicky” Users are 5.5x more expensive than 50% of users that are least clicky. 2. There is NO significant correlation between Click Rate and Brand Awareness or Purchase Intent. So you are paying 5.5 times more for actions that don’t drive your business forward.

Traffic 

After choosing the Traffic objective, you can drill down even further to further improve your campaign’s traffic quality. That’s where you’ll find the option to optimize for Landing Page Views. A landing page view is when a person lands on the destination URL from your ad. It is different from a link click because it doesn’t count pages that were closed before they loaded. Read more about this optimization technique here. 

Conversion Ads

This optimization will drive measurable actions online or offline. Have a lead form or specific action that you want people to take once they reach your destination URL? This is the optimization for you. Online conversions require a pixel be installed on your website or app. Offline conversions require integrations with your POS system but can be great though often more complicated to set up.

Lead Generation

Your business can capture leads directly on Facebook or Instagram by running a lead generation campaign. Instead of clicking through to a landing page, the ad leads the user to a pop-up form directly on the platform. The nice thing about these ads is that they pre-populate the form with the user’s profile information, minimizing the effort it takes to complete. Made with mobile in mind, Facebook lead ads are a great option for businesses looking for leads. An important note: if you plan to collect leads, strategize how you will respond to them promptly upon receipt of their information.

Learn More at Marketing Edge

Interested in learning more about social media strategy? Join our Social Media Advertising Director Kate Nilsen at Marketing Edge. The one-day conference hosted by the AMA is bringing together top marketers from across the nation on September 27th. Register today and catch Kate’s breakout session at 11 am!