Advertising on Facebook — How to Choose the Right Facebook Campaign Objective

ForgeBIT
  • Date Published
  • Categories Blog, Guide, Tutorial
  • Reading Time 10-Minute Read

In this blog, we are explaining what each of the campaign objectives on Facebook means and when to use each one.

When creating an advertising campaign on Facebook, you start by creating a campaign in your Ads Manager. In this blog, I will cover the first level – campaign creation and choosing the goal of your campaign. I’ll explain what each of the objectives you can choose from means and when to use each one.

Brand Awareness

This objective is used when you want people to find out about your brand or your new product/service/activity and recall them some time after seeing it. Brands with big budgets may find this objective useful. However, if you run a small- or medium-sized business, you won’t get much out of this campaign objective since it can only guarantee you that people will see your ad but without any promises of any further interactions with it (such as clicks, engagements, conversions…). Normally, everyone wants some interaction with their ad to know for sure people saw it and took their time to react on it, and by using this objective, you won’t really get much of that.

Reach

If you set up your campaign goal to be increasing reach, your ad will be shown to a greater number of people than with any other objective. You can also set the minimum number of days before the same person sees your ad again – this is called frequency capping. However, with this objective, there is also no guarantee that any of those people will react to what you show them in your ad.

Traffic

Unlike the previous two campaign objectives, this one can get you some (re)action on your ads. Facebook will make sure that your ads are shown to people in your audience that are most likely to click on them and come to your website. You can run this type of ads on Facebook, Instagram and in Messenger. You can also further optimize your goal in this campaign to get the most:

  • Landing Page Views
  • Link Clicks
  • Daily Unique Reach
  • Impressions

For some time now, I like to optimize for landing page views when I do traffic campaigns. I don’t know about you, but unless I need to show a client some huge number of clicks for a certain budget, I find landing page view more valuable than just a click. Landing page view means that people who click will stay on your website at least until it fully loads, and link clicks means you get only a click and not necessarily anything after that.

Use this campaign objective for blogs, case studies and any other informative website contents, but bear in mind that if you want people to take some action on the landing page you’re leading them to (for example subscribe for a newsletter, buy something etc.), this is not the best choice of objective.

Engagement

Engagement is probably the most commonly used campaign objective on Facebook (at least in Croatia). When you’re using this objective, Facebook shows your ad to people that are most likely to like, comment, share or watch more than 3 seconds of your video (if your ad is a video or slideshow). When you choose Engagement objective, you need to also choose whether you want post engagement, page likes or event responses. As with the traffic objective, here you can also optimise your goal in the ad set level for:

  • Daily unique reach
  • Impressions
  • Post engagement
  • Page likes
  • Event responses

Personally, I like to combine Post engagement and Daily unique reach for the same ad/post, if the budget and duration let me. You don’t need a huge budget to do so, I even do it with, for example, 10€ and 5 days duration. I leave it on Post engagement optimization for, let’s say, a day and a half and then switch it to Daily unique reach for 2 days so more people see it once I already have a good number of engagements (likes, comments, etc.). And on the 4th day, I usually switch it again to Post engagement objective. This gets you far bigger reach than you would get if you have your campaign optimised solely for Post engagement for 5 days, and your engagement still remains relatively inexpensive and you get lots of it. 

You can see that the average cost per 1 person reached is 0.0005€, while for this page it’s usually 0.0015€ when the campaign is optimised for Post engagement only. Cost per post engagement is 0.05€ in this case, and for this particular client, it is usually 0.03€ if the campaign is optimised for Post engagement throughout the whole campaign duration. I don’t really “feel” this loss in engagement when I’m looking at the overall Facebook page numbers. The only thing that suffers is engagement rate, that I am very fond of, but I’m also fond of getting clients products out there, in front of the biggest number of people while still getting something in return from that audience.

Any thoughts on this? Please let me know your way, or pros and cons for this way of managing “long(ish)-term” post engagement campaigns, I’d really love to hear them and learn something from you.

I won’t get into the page likes and event responses campaigns now but I’ll cover page likes campaigns in a separate blog in the upcoming weeks.

App Installs

This is the one I’ve never used, so I can only tell you what I’ve read from some smart(er) people on the Internet. Generally, if you want people to download or use your app, this is the objective to go with. This could also count as a conversion campaign if your goal conversion is app install. There are also some further optimization options:

  • App Installs
  • Link Clicks
  • App Events
  • Video Views

Video Views

This one is, obviously, used when you want to get as many views of your video as possible within your budget. I’m not sure what to think about this one, maybe if I’ve ever had any client whose purpose is to get video content out there, this would be my go-to campaign objective. Otherwise, I see this as more of an awareness category than consideration.

Lead Generation

I love this one. This can be very useful for a wide variety of businesses and business sizes. You use this when you want to get information from your audience, such as name, email, phone number and so on. In any case, you should offer your audience a value which they can immediately use, whether it’s an e-book or a promo code to use on your webshop. Whether they’re going to use it, it’s on them, but you will get better results with collecting your contact details.

People don’t need to exit Facebook when they click on this ad, it just opens a form that’s still within the Facebook’s platform and Facebook even automatically fulfills this little form (since Facebook already has everyone’s contact details). People just need to click “Submit” and voilá. You can choose which information you need and add it in the form.

But, beware: it’s not that hard to get people to leave their email address, but they are very sensitive with leaving their phone number, so carefully weigh the value you’re offering them and the value you’re asking them to give.

Messages

This is an interesting objective. If you want people to get in touch with your Facebook Page and ask you questions about your products/services, this is a great solution for you. If you don’t have a website or a webshop, this campaign type can serve as a conversion tool. It can also be a customer relationship tool. When someone takes their time to actually send you a message, it definitely means that they are very interested in what you’re offering. But bear in mind that you or your community manager has to answer relatively quickly to those messages because people expect instant replies. 

I’ll tell you about my experience with a client that will show you the wrong way to use this type of campaign. So the agency provided this client only with advertising services, and not with overall Facebook Page management and community management. Amongst other types of campaigns, the client asked for this one. Of course, we’ve told him that the messages will start to come more frequently than usual and that he’ll have to find the time to answer all those inquiries (or pay us for the community management services, which he declined). What happened was that he called us 3 or 4 days into the campaign and asked us to shut it down because he doesn’t have the time to answer all those people all day. He didn’t answer any of the messages people sent him during those 3 or 4 days.

So think carefully before setting up this campaign. You don’t want people to have a bad experience with your brand, that they’re clearly interested in. Don’t push away potential customers by not answering them when they want to communicate with you.

Conversions

Under the conversion objective, you get to tell Facebook what conversion is to you. Is it an add to cart or purchase on your webshop? Is it a lead that you get when someone fulfills your website contact form? There are lots of options and which one you’re going to choose depends on what you want to achieve with this conversion campaign. Further optimizations available for delivering your ads are:

  • Conversions
  • Landing Page Views
  • Impressions
  • Link Clicks
  • Daily Unique Reach

This type of campaign can get you amazing results for your overall business goals, but you need to invest more budget in conversion campaign than in, for example, post engagement campaign. After all, you are expecting an actual sale or lead out of this campaign, and that’s far more than just a like on a post. When you compare the value of those two actions for your business, you can’t expect that the cost you are willing to pay for them will be the same.

Catalogue Sales

For this objective, you need a webshop. And you need to fill your catalogue on Facebook with the products from your webshop. I’ve had some good experience with this type of campaign, and this can (and will) also be a topic for a whole blog. You choose this objective when your goal is conversions, mainly purchases. Further optimization options are:

  • Conversions
  • Impressions
  • Link Clicks

You can also use this type of campaign to retarget your webshop visitors with ads that are tailored just for them.

Store Traffic

Store Traffic objective is used when you want to show your ads to people around your business in order to get more visits. I’ve never used this one, so I can’t really tell you anything more, but if you have used it, I’ll be happy to hear what you think.

This covers the first of the three levels you need to set up. The second level is ad set, where you choose your audience, location(s), placement(s), budget and duration. The third level is creating or choosing your ad. I’ll cover all of it in the next few blogs.

If this is already overwhelming and you think you may need experts to run your Facebook campaigns, then you are welcome to contact us at ForgeBIT and we’ll be happy to help you get the most out of your social media presence!