Choosing the Right Facebook Ad Objective for Your Campaign
Facebook boasts an impressive suite of business tools, particularly when it comes to advertising. It opens the doors for even folks new to the digital marketing game to get started quickly, helping them reach their advertising goals with a concise and effective formula.
If you’re new to marketing your business, campaign, or app on Facebook, it can be a little overwhelming trying to decide which ad objective is best for your goals. We’ll break it down for you, including how to set an objective and what each one has to offer for your advertising purposes.
Setting an Ad Objective
This part is easy because it’s the first option that pops up when you create a new ad set. First, you’ll need to be set up with a Facebook Business Manager account. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out our article, “Facebook Marketing 101: How to Create an Ad Account.“
Once you’re in the business tools suite, you’ll need to navigate to the Ad Manager. It’s the first option in the lefthand navigation bar. This will serve as your hub for any ads you create, giving you the power to design, run, cancel, and budget for marketing in one convenient location.
Once you’re on the Ad Manager main page, click “Create.”
This brings up a popup box, in which the first step is choosing your objective!
Which Facebook Ad Objective Should You Choose?
Before you decide on what you want your ad’s objective to be, you need to understand the purpose of each category and subcategory available.
Awareness
This category is built to get your business, product, or service in front of as many people as possible. It allows you to showcase what makes your business unique, valuable, or favorable over the competition.
- Brand Awarenessis perfect for those who want to get the word out that their brand exists. It’s most ideal for those seeking new demographics to market to or for new brands looking for an initial audience. It hones in on audiences that Facebook’s advertising algorithms have decided are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. This is not the right choice if your overall goal for the audience to take action, like clicking through to your website or downloading your app, but it is a valuable first step in increasing your overall reach.
- Reachis less precise than brand awareness, in that it doesn’t necessarily target based on interest but more precise in the location of the audience seeing the advertisements. With reach, you show your ads to as many people as possible, without a budget that you set, with the option to only show up to people within proximity of your business.
Consideration
Increase engagement with your Facebook page, website, ads, or Messenger with Consideration ads.
- Trafficobjectives have the goal of funneling your audience to a particular webpage, such as your site’s homepage, a newsletter signup form, or a landing page showing off your latest deals. This also works if you want to increase the number of people to message you on Facebook.
- Engagementincreases comments, likes, and shares on your page and your posts. Businesses can also use it to compel your audience to claim an offer that you have on their page.
- App Installs is pretty self-explanatory. If you have an app and you want to increase installs, this is the ideal objective. It works with both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
- Video Viewsurges audiences to watch a video that you’ve posted. Once they’ve watched the video, Facebook offers retargeting advertising, wherein your brand can send put reiterative ads in front of the audience, reminding them of who you are and what you have to offer.
- Lead Generation encourages people to spend some time checking out a particular resource or site, then signing up to learn more. After all, an email address is one of the most valuable digital currencies available to businesses.
- Messages is the objective that sends folks who engage with your ads to a Facebook Message-based conversation with your business.
Conversion
If following through on a particular call to action is your end goal, you’ll want to choose a Conversion objective.
- Conversionstake engagement a step further by giving a particular call to action that you want to take place. That includes everything from registering for an event to donating to your political campaign to actually making a purchase. Often, conversion-optimized ads include some kind of offer to help sweeten the deal.
- Catalog Salesshowcases your online catalog by placing particular products in the newsfeeds of the people who are most likely to be interested in whatever it is you’re selling. So, if you have an online clothing boutique, it might showoff your latest stock of colorful ties to men aged 25-40 who work in the business sector because that is the audience group most likely to be in the market for a new tie.
- Store Trafficencourages people to visit your brick and mortar building with offers, opt-ins, and perks that they can’t get through your online storefront.
With all of the options available to you regarding Facebook ad objectives, choosing the right one, creating the design, writing a message that gets your point across, and ensuring that every element is perfectly in harmony with the end-goal is a tough job. That’s why we’ve spent so much time perfecting the art of social media advertising… So business owners like you can spend more time running their business and less time running their ad campaigns.
We’d love to chat with you about how NATIV3 can help you make a move towards more successful digital marketing, so drop us a line, and let’s get started!