How to Choose the Best of the 3 Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives Before you can create Facebook ads, you need to understand and choose your objective. These smart tips can help you evaluate your goals and choose the type of campaign that will work best for you.
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The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Keith Krance and Thomas Meloche's book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising with guest writer Andrew Tweito. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
When it comes to ad campaigns, there are three main types that match up with the three primary parts of the sales funnel: awareness, consideration and purchase. Let's take a quick look to see how these campaigns match up with your objectives so you can create the campaign that will work best for you.
1. Awareness campaigns
Awareness campaigns are used to make customers aware of your product or service. There are two types of awareness campaigns to choose from: brand awareness and reach. Brand awareness objectives are designed to show your ads to people who are more likely to pay attention to them, and reach objective ads are for when you want to reach the maximum number of people in your target audience and control how often they see your ads.
Even though these campaign objectives are designed more for exposure, they both have the option to include call-to-action buttons. Keep in mind that the ads in these campaigns won't be optimized to run to people likely to click the CTA button, but it's a nice feature to include.
If you have a local business with a physical location, the reach objective can help you drive more engagement in a geographically targeted area. By using the "Everyone in this location" selection in your audience targeting, you can target your ad to only people traveling nearby your location.
Related: 14 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page Engagement
2. Consideration campaigns
Consideration campaigns are for prospects who are already considering a product or service like yours. There are five types of consideration campaigns: traffic, app installs, engagement, video views and lead generation.
Traffic campaign objective
The traffic objective is simply designed to get more people to your visit your website or increase engagement with your app. You're looking for traffic, not leads or sales, so this objective can work great when you're using a content amplification strategy to get more people consuming your content.
App installs campaign objective
The app installs objective is almost identical to the traffic objective instead of sending the clicks to a URL, you're sending them to an app store so they can download your app. If you've got a killer mobile app, you'll want to optimize your campaign for mobile traffic so your traffic will go straight to the app store and download your app to their device.
Engagement campaign objective
You would choose the engagement campaign objective when you want to get more people engaged with your page or your posts. There are three things the engagement campaign objective options allow you to do:
1. Boost your posts (post engagement)
2. Promote your page (page likes)
3. Raise attendance at an event on your page (event responses)
Page post engagement ads can be extremely effective to use in a few scenarios. First, you can use page post engagement ads to test content you want to use in conversion campaigns. It will help you determine if a piece of content resonates with your target audience, and then, you can later turn that post into another ad for conversions.
Another scenario to use page post engagement ads for is during a pre-launch phase of a new product, offer or even company. The idea is to create some buzz and excitement before your cart opens, your product becomes available or people can take the desired action you want them to.
Related: Top Tips to Create Facebook Videos to Market Your Business (Infographic)
The next type of engagement campaign objective is promoting your Facebook Page, otherwise known as a "Like" campaign. There are four main reasons why you want to be running a Facebook Like campaign:
1. You'll be able to serve ads to your fans with twice the frequency than you can with non-fans.
2. Social proof works, and the more fans you have, the more social proof you have.
3. You're able to create "Advanced Combinations" so you make sure that whoever sees your ad will have a friend who also likes your page.
4. Your Facebook fans are interested in what you do and are what I would call a warm market, and a warm market always has a higher ROI.
The event responses campaign objective is terrific if you're hosting an event and want to target people who are likely to join your event. This type of campaign objective allows you to boost awareness of your event, direct people where to sign up or join and track how many people are going.
Video views campaign objective
With the video views campaign objective, you can get your message in front of the people who are most likely to actually watch it. And people who watch videos tend to buy more. A lot more. Choosing the video views campaign objective can be a powerful way to launch a campaign introducing your product, offer, or service to a cold audience, which sets them up to move along the customer journey later in the process and gets them one step closer to becoming a customer.
Lead generation campaign objective
If getting leads for your business is a top priority, then testing out lead generation campaigns should be high on your list. This campaign objective allows you to capture information from Facebook users without the user ever leaving the Facebook ecosystem. Your ad looks just like any other ad except when someone clicks the CTA button on the ad, it opens up a form right inside Facebook that gets auto populated with their contact information already mostly filled in! Not losing a prospect from the time they click your ad until the time they opt-in mean no bounce rate here.
Related: The Starter Guide to Facebook Groups for Business
3. Conversion campaign objectives
Conversions are the holy grail of Facebook marketing. The ultimate goal is to convert prospects to paying customers. There are three types of conversion campaign objectives to choose from: conversions, product catalog sales and store visits.
Let's start with store visits. The store visits campaign objective combines your physical location(s), geo-targeting and people with location services enabled on their cell phones. You decide the radius around your location that you want to serve the ad to and choose CTA buttons for your ad.
The conversion campaign objectives are when you want to be able to track and measure conversions on your website, Facebook or mobile app. When you use the conversion campaign objectives, you're basically telling Facebook, "Put my ad in front of people who are highly likely to convert."
If you have an online store or are an ecommerce company, then the product catalog campaign objective is for you. This campaign objective is simply designed to get people to purchase more of your products.
This objective really shines with dynamic ads. With the dynamic ad feature in the product catalog objective, you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your product catalog that you would like to advertise.
Using this campaign objective gives you a few advantages if you're in ecommerce or you have multiple items you're selling (like travel). You can promote your product catalog with unique ads without manually configuring each ad. You can show the most relevant products from your catalog based upon products people have viewed on your website. Best of all, you can reach people anywhere. This objective runs on all Facebook advertising platforms.
