Building brand awareness, boosting engagement with your page and increasing catalogue sales are just a few of the possible marketing outcomes of Facebook Ads. The choice of objectives means you can tailor your Facebook advert based on the content selected and your long term-goal, all within Facebook’s handy Meta Business Suite – and without the need to go through a Facebook advertising agency to get started. [Clever, right?]
But if you select a campaign objective that doesn’t align with the results you’re looking to achieve, your campaign is at an automatic disadvantage and won’t reach its full potential. In today’s blog post, we offer our insightful expertise as a Facebook Ads agency to help you identify the best Facebook Ad campaign objectives to meet your goal.
Why is it [so] important to get Facebook advertising objectives right?
Facebook is constantly gathering information about its users’ interests and behaviours to inform its Ads campaign objective data. Each objective conveys information to Facebook about your campaign goals and the action you want viewers of your ad to take. This information is key to Facebook’s algorithm, which determines which people in your target audience are most likely to take the specified call to action. So, building increased brand awareness among existing customers will be pretty ineffective compared to driving new and profitable traffic towards your website and encouraging them to become repeat customers. By selecting the right Facebook Ad campaign types, you’re telling Facebook what you want your audience to do with the information in your ads and letting it do the leg work.
Informing your target audience: understanding unique metrics
Unique metrics count the number of people who took an action rather than the number of actions taken based on factors such as whether a person operates a single account, or has both a personal and business page.
When a Facebook user has more than one account and engages with a post or page on their different accounts, these actions may be counted separately. So, if a user was to interact with a post whilst signed into their business page, then switched to their personal account and saw the same post, Facebook is likely to count this as two people reached.
If you’d like to find out more about Facebook Ads campaigns, give us a call on 0115 671 3868 or email hello@ketchup.marketing.
A straightforward guide to Facebook Ads campaign objectives
Campaign objectives for building vital brand awareness
Awareness objectives are designed to show your Facebook ad to the maximum number of people that fall within your target audience based on the budget you set by optimising impressions. Though engagement with awareness-building objectives tends to be low, and they’re unlikely to drive traffic that will lead to sales, they will build valuable interest in your business with a new audience, which is an asset in the long run.
Brand awareness
As this campaign objective optimises for impressions, you should select it if you’re looking to build a memorable brand and want the ability to measure ad recall lift.
Not only does this objective show your ad to the people who are most likely to remember your brand, but it also shows you ‘estimated ad recall lift’ data to provide you with an estimate of the number of people who would remember your ad two days on from first viewing it [impressive, we know]. This is generally more effective for larger brands that have the budget and ability to carry out brand-lift studies to garner the most accurate forecasts.
Reach
Like the brand awareness objective, you can also optimise your Facebook ad for impressions with the reach objective. Though this objective will increase the number of people within your target audience who see your ad, it’s unlikely to encourage them to take immediate action. For this reason, it’s best to use the reach objective to get the word out about an event or a sale, but not to encourage sales themselves.
Consideration objectives
Consideration objectives optimise for actions taken by your target audience after viewing your ad by displaying to the people who are most likely to take your selected action, such as liking, commenting or link clicking. Because these are such low-intent actions, the likelihood of your target audience completing them is fairly high – but unfortunately isn’t likely to bring about any high-quality leads.
Traffic
Want to increase your site traffic? This is the visit-boosting campaign objective for you. Facebook will show your ads to the members of your target audience most likely to click links or view landing pages based on their previous activity.
You should select this objective if you’re looking to direct people to your website to read your content and can encourage this by selecting landing page views and the destination URL at the ad set level of your campaign.
Engagement
If you want to increase engagement with your Facebook page measurably, this objective will show your ad to members of your target audience who are most likely to sign-up for a Facebook event or become a fan of your page.
Under this campaign objective, you can select three engagement type options. Selecting page likes will grow your Facebook page followers by reaching people likely to perform the target action of liking your page. Post engagement will help to build social proof on a post or ad through likes, comments, shares and clicks, whereas selecting event responses will increase the number of responses to your Facebook event. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they will attend, but it will certainly increase the reach of your event, and it’s definitely worth a try.
Video views
Created an Oscar-worthy video that the world needs to see? The video views campaign objective will prioritise showing your ad to relevant people within your target audience that is most likely to watch it and increase your video views.
If you select this campaign objective, you can also create retargeting audiences based on the length of time your audience watched your video, to further engage them with your page, and draw them in for more.
Lead generation
By adding a contact form to your Facebook ad, this objective allows prospective customers to easily submit their details to your page without the need to access your website.
With the ability to customise the form to collect more targeted information from your audience, this is a straightforward method of gaining valuable customer data. When a Facebook user clicks on your ad, they will be prompted to provide their details, many of which will already be stored on Facebook, such as name and email address. This makes it a quick and convenient way to collect new customer information.
App installs
Want to increase downloads of your app? This Facebook ad campaign objective will ensure that your ad is shown to your target audience members most likely to install it. By offering them a direct link to your app in the app store, it’s a shortcut to greater app engagement [capturing those busy scrolling thumbs].
The automated app adds subcategories designed to make the process even simpler by offering a Dynamic Creative feature when you set up your ad campaign. Facebook will then cleverly create ads based on how your audience responds to a range of images, videos, text and headlines you select.
Conversion objectives
By encouraging people that are interested in your business to buy or use your product or service, conversion objectives optimise for higher-intent actions. Although they often lead to higher costs for impressions and link clicks, the cost per conversion may end up lower overall when you take all costs into account, as your ads will be shown to a select segment of your audience most likely to make a purchase, therefore holding a more valuable investment.
Conversions
This is typically the best objective to reach people who will take a specific action on your website. Whether you’re wanting them to purchase a product or sign up for your newsletter, the conversion objective will direct identified leads to your website and streamline the conversion process.
At the ad set level, you can choose to optimise for the most relevant conversion events to show your ad to the members of your target audience most likely to take the desired action.
Catalogue sales
For a product-based business, the catalogue sales objective showcases a variety of your products through dynamic product ads. Creating a digital catalogue in this way allows you to show the products you offer to potential customers based on their previous interactions with your business – this is especially useful if they happened to stop scrolling to watch one of your videos or clicked through to your website without making a purchase.
Facebook selects the images from your catalogue and strategically designs eye-catching ads to encourage users to engage with the content. You can also retarget your target audience with specific products based on a user’s previous activity on your website [bonus].
Placements
As the name suggests, this campaign objective allows you to select where your ads appear on Facebook and Messenger. To specify a placement for your ad, choose your ad objective in Ads Manager and go to the placement section. Automatic placements will be pre-selected, however, you can choose to edit your placements or select the devices drop-down to limit your placements to mobile or desktop depending on what you fancy.
Now that’s all the Facebook campaign objectives explained, we look forward to seeing your ads flourishing on feeds. If you need a little help along the way from a creative hive of marketing experts, a skilful Facebook marketing agency such as ourselves can take the guesswork out of launching a successful ad campaign. Find out more about our social media marketing services.
If you’d like to find out more about Facebook Ads campaigns or help with your social media marketing, give us a call on 0115 671 3868 or email hello@ketchup.marketing.
