Facebook ads reach 2.5 billion people a month. Advertisers are attracted to the platform because of its large audience. Over 7 million advertisers to be exact.
To get the most out of your Facebook ads, start by thinking about why you want to use them and what your goals are. Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve will help you create ads that are more effective and have a higher ROI. The first thing Facebook will ask you when creating an ad is your campaign objective.
Your Facebook campaign objective is a determining factor in who the platform shows your ad to.
There are 11 objectives in Facebook Ads Manager that are split up into three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversions.
The following text will provide a breakdown of the best options to make determining the right objective less overwhelming.
What Are Facebook Ad Objectives?
The objectives you set for your Facebook Ads are the goals you set for your ad. The ad objective you choose should be based on how you want people to interact with your ad The objective you choose for your Facebook ad will determine who Facebook shows the ad to. You should base your choice of objective on how you want people to interact with your ad.
These objectives fall into three broad categories:
- Awareness: Facebook Ads with the Awareness objective aim to grow interested in your product or service with people who don’t know about you yet. The Awareness category has two objectives — Brand Awareness and Reach.
- Consideration: These objectives try to get people to think about your business and learn more about it. The Consideration category includes Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, and Message objectives.
- Conversion: Conversion ads target people already interested in your brand and try to get them to buy your product or use your service. The objectives in this category are Conversions, Catalog Sales, and Store Traffic.
Which Objective Is Best for Facebook Ads?
The best Facebook ad objective for your business depends on the specifics of your business and what your goals are. There is no one answer that fits all businesses.
The Conversions objective was used the most frequently, with nearly 40% of all respondents choosing it. Small businesses were more likely than large businesses to say that brand awareness is the most important metric. The most recent research we conducted on Facebook ads shows that conversion is the most important metric for agencies, while brand awareness is more important for small businesses.
The objectives that survey participants most frequently used should not be used without understanding why. We spoke with agencies and small businesses to better understand their decision making process.
How to Choose an Objective for Your Agency’s Facebook Ad Campaign
The majority of our respondents were agencies and marketing consultants, and their preferred Facebook Ad objective was Conversions. Many of the people interviewed explained how their goals as an agency related to the Conversions objective.
According to Katie Mellers-Hill from Cake Agency, the conversion objective is not only aligned with the goals of clients in the most relevant way, but is also one of the most versatile campaign objectives. This allows us to then focus on a range of specific actions taken by users and vary these optimizations based on the level of intent we may expect from different audiences.
This objective is all about encouraging people to take some kind of action on your website – whether that’s buying something, downloading something, or anything else. Agencies that are versatile and able to meet their clients’ needs tend to be more successful.
” Patrick Hodgson of AdMax Local spoke about how the Conversions objective is good for tracking progress. He said that most of his clients are small business or franchise owners who care mostly about generating revenue and leads. To make sure we are meeting our goals, we usually select conversions as our objective. This allows us to run ads that send traffic to the client’s website and fill out a form that is visible without scrolling. We can use ROAS and revenue data to track how successful a campaign is in terms of a client’s bottom line.
Morejon believes that the Conversions objective can help agencies improve their client experiences. ” We want to get the best results for our clients at the lowest possible cost. Conversions are key to increasing ROI and sales for eCommerce clients. The majority of our clients want us to improve bottom-of-the-funnel goals, so we concentrate on conversions,” Morejon explains.
Kelly Hawthorne Smith has a similar experience at Twelve Three Media. ” I find that the Conversions ad objective works best for our purposes, as we often deal with clients who are interested in direct response. The Conversion ad objective is the best option for a campaign that is focused on lead generation, according to Hawthorne Smith.
Choosing the Right Objective for Your Ad
Here are four tips that agency professionals and consultants shared for choosing the right objective for your ad.
Know Your Objective Before Working on Creative
Creating your ad before working out your Facebook campaign details could benefit you. Work on your ad objective before you create your ad for the best results. If you want your ad to be successful, make sure it is creative and has a clear purpose.
According to Amber Reed-Johnson from Giraffe Social Media, the content of your Facebook ad will be greatly affected by your objectives for the ad, so it is important to establish those objectives before creating the ad.
It takes a lot of thought to choose your goals. There are three categories of Facebook ads: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. This describes the typical marketing/sales funnel, which starts with the widest target audience in the Awareness stage, then narrows down to the Consideration stage, and even further to the Conversion stage. First, you will need to decide which part of the funnel you want to target, according to Reed-Johnson.
Reed-Johnson continues describing how to choose your objective: “If you’re aiming for brand awareness and reaching as many eyes as possible, an Awareness objective is best aligned with your goals. Using a Consideration objective is the best way to increase web traffic or promote an informative video to an audience that is interested in your product or service. When you are at the forefront of people’s minds, they are more likely to buy from you. The Conversion objective is designed to reach the smallest number of people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.
Use copywriting that matches your customers’ intent once you find the objective that best matches your campaign goals. Use more subtle language if you want people to be aware of your brand rather than using sales language.
Match Your Objective to Your Actual Goal
Facebook Ad objectives are more straightforward than you think. Your goal should be aligned with your overall advertising goal.
” When choosing an objective, it is best to select the one that will help you achieve your goal. Facebook Ads are very effective at achieving the desired result when they are properly configured.
Kossoff offers a few examples to illustrate his point, saying, “For example, let’s say you want to sell a digital product. When you select the “Traffic” option, Facebook will serve your ads to users who are most likely to click through to your website. If you were hoping that this traffic would produce sales, you’re likely to be disappointed. When you tell Facebook that you want more traffic, it will give you more traffic. It doesn’t give you anything else. If you want to track sales, create a conversions campaign, and Facebook will give you that information.
It is best to not try and think outside the box too much when trying to select the best Facebook ad objective according to Veronica Moss from A Plus Insurance. ” What is your goal for marketing Facebook to people who are not already using it? Synchronize your Facebook campaigns with your current advertising campaigns.
Moss continues, “Are you trying to get people interested in your product or service? Pick Awareness. Do you want people to think of your business as a whole or just as a brand? Then consideration objectives should be your goal. Choose something that is in line with your current business efforts.
If you are unsure about your Facebook Ad objective, go back and look at your overall advertising goal. What do you want viewers to do when they see your ad?
Awareness Facebook Campaign Objectives
Awareness objectives are designed to generate interest in your product or service.
Brand Awareness
These ads are designed to increase people’s awareness of your business. If you want to introduce your brand to new audiences, this can be a great option. This is because Facebook will target ads towards members of your target audience who are more likely to pay attention to and remember the ads.
Facebook is predicting whether users will remember seeing an ad by polling them and analyzing their behavior and interactions with ads.
The purpose of these ads is only to make people aware of your brand, so you shouldn’t expect many people to engage with or click on them. They will help you become familiar with the brand and get the attention of your target audience.
It is important to use ads that will allow customers to remember your brand, and to also highlight what makes your business unique. This will help you to attract more customers and keep them loyal to your brand.
Reach
Reach ads on Facebook are designed to show your ad to as many people in your target audience as possible, while staying within your budget constraints. You can customize your ad so that it only reaches people who are in a certain location near your business. The bonus of these ads is that you can choose how often someone will see them.
This strategy allows for more people to see your ad. One the one hand, Facebook doesn’t take into account the user’s likelihood of paying attention to the ad. If you’re not careful, you could end up paying for your ad to be displayed to people who will scroll right past it.
Traffic
The traffic objective plans to move people from Facebook to any website of your preference, for example your homepage, online store, app, event page, etc.
Facebook shows your ads to users who are likely to click on them based on their past behavior on the platform. If you can get more visitors to your featured destination, it will increase the chances that they will take an action that you want on your landing page.
Facebook is only responsible for collecting clicks on ads when the traffic objective is selected, and cannot measure any action a user takes after leaving the platform.
Engagement
The platform predicts which users are more likely to engage with your ads, and then shows those users ads that are more likely to receive likes, reactions, comments, and shares. There are three types of engagement ads: those that encourage engagement with a post, those that promote page likes, and those that generate responses to an event.
Engagement on your post and likes on your page will improve the engagement of your ad and your Facebook business page. Event response engagement ads are a great way to promote your event and get people excited about attending.
Engagement ads are more likely to be noticed and interesting to users if they see how others interact with it first.
If you were to choose between two ads, one with 473 likes and one with 14 likes, which would you spend more time considering? I’ll take the former, please.
When other people engage with your ads, their activity will also be shared with their Facebook friends, which will reach even more people. Their validation will help your online word-of-mouth marketing.
App Installs
The objective of this is to help drive mobile app installs by taking users directly to where they can download your app, whether that be the App Store or Google Play store. Facebook shows these ads to members of your target audience who have previously downloaded similar apps to increase the chances of your app’s installation.
Video Views
Facebook will target your ad campaign to people who are most likely to watch videos, in order to increase the number of views. Telling your brand story or demonstrating your service through advertising can be an effective way to engage and inform your audience. A HubSpot report found that over 50% of consumers want to see video content from brands, so it’s important to include video in your marketing.
The value of video view ads is that they help you target people who have already watched your video. If you want to increase brand awareness and conversions, you can target people who have already watched your video content. This will remind them of your brand and product/service.
Lead Generation
Lead generation ads allow you to embed lead magnets on Facebook and collect leads without the user having to leave the site. People give you their contact information in exchange for something your business offers, like a promotional email or workbook.
The fact that the user can stay on Facebook while the ad is playing is a big plus for this type of ad. The ad’s form is easy to fill out and the user never has to leave the page, which creates a seamless UX. This can increase the chances of conversion.
If you have your contact information entered into your Facebook account details, Facebook can automatically fill out forms for you with that information. All you have to do is click “Submit”.
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