Picking the right Facebook ads campaign objectives will be critical to your sales.
The Technical Difference Behind Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives
Why is the Facebook Ads campaign objective you pick so important? Because Facebook optimises each campaign budget, by finding the most relevant people to target for each particular objective.
Examples: So if you’re running a traffic campaign, Facebook will distribute your ads towards people more likely to click. If you’re running a conversion campaign, Facebook will put your ads in front of people who are more likely to purchase online. Basically, the Facebook algorithm will work to get you your desired result for as low a cost as possible.
So if you’re concerned about which Facebook ad campaign to select, you’re in the right place. Deciding which Facebook Ads campaign objective to pick is actually a lot simpler than it may seem, however. You’ve just got to ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve?
Running a Facebook ads campaign puzzles business owners across the world, who have little to no experience with the end-to-end process. In addition, some of the world’s biggest brands make mistakes when constructing their Facebook ad campaigns. Thanks to a plethora of targeting options, objectives, and formats, it’s easy to see why this is so. Besides the obvious challenges that are experienced by Facebook ads beginners, the range of options and functionality available is great news for us marketers.
The following article provides a detailed breakdown of the different Facebook ads campaigns, to help you make informed decisions that drive your desired results. We dissect each campaign, providing you with everything you need to know about each campaign objective.
Continue reading to achieve Surge Pilot growth.
You May Need to Use Multiple Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives
Why Are There Different Facebook Ads Campaigns Objectives? Simple answer… The reason why there are different Facebook ads campaign options is to allow businesses to achieve specific objectives. But it’s not only different businesses that have different goals. Most businesses choose to run a number of campaigns with the purpose of achieving different outcomes. Much of the time, these different campaign objectives complement each other in the sales funnel.
Many brands will firstly use an awareness campaign, traffic campaign, and conversion campaign that aims to convert the same people. We will get into the details of the sales funnel later in the article, however.
Set Up Campaign Goals and Achieve those Goals
Without defined goals, however, your business will be facing an uphill battle to fulfill expectations. Emphasis is placed on ‘defined goals’ here. Setting goals is the first step, but those goals need to be SMART goals to get the best results. This means they should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.
Common goals are to boost brand awareness, increase sales, and drive a greater volume of traffic to your website. To turn them into defined goals, you need to include a KPI and a timeframe.
Example: A fitness equipment e-commerce store aimed to attract more people to subscribe to their newsletter, so they could retarget them. Instead of setting the objective, ‘increasing newsletter subscribers’, they set the goal of ‘generating 500 new subscribers in the next 30 days’. By writing down clear objectives, you can hold yourself or your team accountable for achieving these goals.
Likewise, you might look to boost traffic to your website by 25% in the next 3 months rather than just ‘growing your traffic’.
The Secret Behind Business Success
Setting short-term goals brings clarity to your Facebook marketing efforts. When your business reaches its goals, you’ve done a great job and have the blueprint to set the bar higher for even better results moving forward. If you are unable to achieve your goals, it’s easier to identify what works and what needs improvement for a more well-rounded strategy in the future. As such, setting defined goals is truly a win-win scenario.
The more small short-term goals you’re able to achieve, the quicker you will grow your business. By achieving these small goals, you will feel more satisfied with your business’s growth. Not many people discuss this, but building a brand is an emotional and challenging journey for everyone. You need to keep yourself encouraged whilst being on the journey – accomplishing these small wins, brings some satisfaction to that journey.
Not only that, but the short-term wins are also the secret key to the long-term success of a business.
What Types of Facebook Ads Campaigns Can You Choose From?
With a better understanding of the rationale as to why there are different types of ads in the first place, let’s take a look at the different ad types that you can choose from when setting up your Facebook ads campaign.
There are 3 high-level ad types that each consist of multiple subcategories. These 3 levels represent the 3 stages of the sales conversion funnel:
These are awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Stage 1: Awareness Ads
With 2.6 billion active monthly users on Facebook, chances are that over 99.9% of those people do not know your brand by name. Setting up awareness ads is your business’ way of targeting people at the top of the marketing sales funnel, at scale.
This means Facebook place these types of ads in front of people so that they are familiar with your business and the products or services you offer. You’re playing the long game of connecting with people who are not necessarily ready to buy now but will think of you before your competitors when they have a need for what you’re selling in the future.
Under the awareness umbrella are the following types of ads.
Brand Awareness Campaigns
Definition: Brand awareness ad campaigns are for advertisers that want to make their ads more discoverable by people who are most likely to have an interest and therefore recall their brand in the future.
Reach Campaigns
Definition: Reach ads have the ultimate goal of simply reaching as many people as possible within your chosen target market. There is also the option to drill down and only broadcast the ads to people that are physically within a certain radius of your business location.
Surge Pilot Insight: The difference between brand awareness and reach Facebook ad campaigns – Reach campaigns are often confused with awareness campaigns. The fundamental difference between reach and brand awareness campaigns is that brand awareness campaigns aim to reach a lot of people that are likely to care about your ad, whereas reach campaigns don’t take into account if the audience viewing is likely to care about the ad.
Also, brand awareness campaigns are more likely to hit the same people multiple times, whereas reach campaigns are less likely to. If you’re a small business, we’d recommend utilising brand awareness, as oppose to reach campaigns, because it will help you to make the most out of your smaller budget.
Use Cases of Awareness Ads
Awareness ads are for e-commerce businesses that are looking to increase brand visibility and start building relationships with an audience, with the intention of making them become future customers. Effective ways to get the most out of awareness ads is by using quality visual elements such as attention-grabbing images, infographics, or videos that are interesting. By making the awareness ads memorable your business can move more leads further down the marketing funnel.
Awareness Ad Example – Athos Smart Clothing
Most people who are serious about the science behind fitness will at least pause if they come across such an ad in their feed. It features an attention-grabbing hero image, effective and simple accompanying copy, as well as appealing infographic content. The image and its accompanying caption will really stand out in most newsfeeds.
Stage 2: Consideration Ads
At the consideration stage, you should establish your brand as an expert in your field, to influence people to take a further look at your business, as well as the types of products or services you have on offer. You can use consideration ads to drive intent and to provide value to your customers.
Consideration ads help your business target people in the top-middle of the marketing funnel. Anything from articles, email newsletters, general website content, and customer testimonials are great ways to get the most out of this type of ad.
Consideration ads consist of the following objectives for your business.
Traffic Campaigns
When you choose the traffic objective, the Facebook algorithm’s primary goal to drive more traffic to your website or app. That means it will sacrifice finding someone who is likely to convert, with someone who is likely to click.
By creating a website visitor custom audience, you can deliver ads from people who have clicked on your website in past traffic campaigns.
Surge Pilot Insight: Remember to optimise your traffic campaigns for landing page views. How? When setting up or editing your campaign, simply scroll to the bottom of your ad set pages and select ‘Landing page views’ under the heading ‘Optimisation and delivery’. This will enable you to get people who actually go to your page, rather than people who just click. If you don’t do this you will waste money and may receive more bot traffic clicks.
Engagement Campaigns
Engagement ads have the main purpose of increasing the level of engagement your Facebook page, Instagram account, or post receives. With these types of ads you can set the objectives below:
- Post engagement – boost your posts to improve the number of post engagements
- Page likes – promote your page to increase the number of Facebook page likes
- Offer claims – attract people with a compelling offer they can’t refuse
- Event responses – increase the number of people that attend your event
App Install Campaigns
As the name suggests, the app installs objective is meant for businesses that have an application and would like to get a greater number of their prospects and customers to install it.
Video View Campaigns
As you may have guessed, Facebook video view campaigns involve serving your videos to people who are most likely to watch most of your ad. Despite this, you need to make sure every second of the video is engaging.
Surge Pilot Insight: Facebook can’t perform miracles though – ensure your video content is of high quality and captures the attention of viewers in the first 3 seconds. Unfortunately, we humans have smaller attention spans than squirrels. Know who you are talking to and what they want to hear. Or even what they don’t want to hear. As long as your first few seconds trigger an emotion in them, you’re on to a good start.
Although video content requires more time and effort to produce compared to image ads, it’s a worthwhile investment with 84% of people buying a product or service after watching a brand’s video. As such, if you’re a business owner who wants to increase the number of views your video ads receive, the video view objective is the way to go. Our team of experts at Surge Pilot utilise video in all campaigns we do. Why? It’s simple. In nearly every scenario, they’re more effective.
Video allows you to deliver more information in a smaller time, and get the attention of your audience for longer. Remember, attention is like gold. The more attention you’re able to take, the more valuable your brand equity becomes. That’s why we’re very happy that you’ve made it this far into the article :).
Not only that, but you can also target video watchers with custom audiences to add an extra dimension to your sales funnel.
Lead Generation Campaigns
Lead generation ads are the goal your business sets when you want to boost the number of leads coming into your marketing funnel. Here, the objective is to get personal details, such as email addresses from a targeted audience that is more likely to be interested in the products or service your business provide.
Message Campaigns
This option is aimed at getting the people your business targets through Facebook advertising to contact you via Messenger. It’s an excellent way to interact with your audience, build a sense of loyalty, and increase your overall reach on social media.
Use Cases of Consideration Ads
To maximise the impact of your consideration ads, you could use the valuable content it has already created. If you have an article on your website that’s resulting in a high number of enquiries or sales, you can use a traffic ad to drive even more people to it. Or maybe you have an unmissable event coming up? An event responses ad that leaves no doubt as to why people need to be there will increase attendance.
Consideration Ad Example – Pardot
Pardot’s Facebook ads campaign is an excellent example of a consideration ad. It references common pain-points faced by their target audience – B2B marketers that want to attract more leads. To optimise the ad, the landing page will likely have a summary of the key points. Alongside this, will be a full guide that is available for download. Visitors will simply need to share a few personal details like their name and email address to access the content, which makes them a lead in Pardot’s funnel.
Stage 3: Conversion Ads
And we’ve got the best for last, conversion ads. These Facebook ad types are designed to elicit a specific action such as purchasing your something you’re selling. You should use these ads to target hot audiences who are on the brink of purchasing from you. Or even, to experiment and find which audience ad sets are most interested in your product.
Conversion ads specifically target people who are towards the bottom of the marketing funnel. This audience, who is in the best position to directly impact sales. The nature of these ads means that they’re the simplest type for performance tracking compared to awareness and consideration ads.
The following types of ads fall into the conversion ad category.
Conversion Campaigns
Looking to generate more sales, checkouts, add-to-carts, or any particular actionable event from a warm or hot audience? Then Conversion Facebook Ad Campaigns are for you.
Definition: Conversion campaigns aim to convert as many people into customers as possible. When you set the conversions goal on your Facebook ad campaign, you should be looking to drive more conversions, sales, or purchases on your website, app, or Facebook Messenger.
Catalogue Sale Campaigns / DPA Campaigns
Definition: Catalogue sales are a great way to sell more products. If your business creates this type of ad, you can automatically display products from your catalogue to specific segments of your target audience based on their browsing behaviour.
Example: A woman views a landing page for a beauty cream brand but doesn’t purchase. Next, she gets shown a similar beauty cream in an ad from the same brand.
Catalogue Sales enable you to be very specific with your retargeting ads – you can target people you know are interested in particular products on your online store.
Store Traffic
Many businesses today have a physical storefront or business premises in addition to their web presence. The store traffic goal is an ideal way to maximise footfall in your store. This is done by targeting people that are within a specific distance of your location.
Use Cases Of Conversion Ads and the Facebook Pixel
To get the most out of conversion ads they must be used together with the Facebook pixel. The Facebook pixel is a snippet of code that is added to your website to track users as they browse on the Internet.
It provides detailed insight into how users are engaging with your website. This also gives you the chance to also implement impactful techniques like remarketing to minimise missed opportunities.
Conversion ads best practice dictates that conversion codes must be placed on the landing page that customers who complete your desired outcome are met with once they convert to accurately track results.
Conversion Ad Example – Slack
Slack is the biggest team communication platform. The Slack Facebook ads campaign above places emphasis on the benefits of the app. It’s clear that the end goal for the company is for their target audience – Android users that need an easy way to collaborate in team settings – to install their mobile application.
Facebook Ads Campaign Formats
Once you’ve chosen the type of ad you want to go with, you’ll then need to make a decision on the format of your Facebook ad. An ad format is simply the way in which you show your ad to your audience. The options for Facebook ad formats are as below.
(It’s important to note that different formats are only available for certain ad objectives. For example, video view campaigns can only use the video ad format)
Photo Ad Format
Photo ads use an image and copy to get your message across to your target customers. The image should be of high quality and be related to the accompanying copy.
Video Ad Format
Video ads use a combination of sight, sound, and motion to tell your brand’s story. The length of the videos can vary depending on the brand and the desired outcome.
Stories Ad Format
You can make your brand more discoverable through story ads. They are proven to drive engagement through a highly effective video format.
Messenger Ad Format
The messenger ad format is ideal for starting the conversation between your business and its customers. A range of automated and interactive features are available to improve results.
Carousel Ad Format
With carousel ads you can your business can exhibit up to 10 images or video as one ad. Each image within the videos can contain their own link for potential customers to learn more or make a purchase.
Slideshow Ad Format
Slideshow ads closely resemble video ads that consist of sound, motion, and text. This format loads faster than video ads. It provides a seamless viewing experience for your audience regardless of their connection speed.
Collection Ad Format
Your target market has the opportunity to discover, browse, and purchase the products or services you’re selling. They can easily click on different options to learn more and encounter an intuitive user experience.
Playable Ad Format
For businesses that have apps, playable ads give your audience an interactive preview of your application. This subtly nudges them towards downloading it.
Choose Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives That Achieve Your Goals
The right Facebook ads campaign will help you reach more of your target customers. Picking the right objectives will be pivotal in getting the desired actions you want from them too.
Always make sure to set clear goals for what your business is trying to achieve. Thereafter select the correct Facebook ad campaign objective. Doing so ensures that Facebook serves your advertisement to people who are more likely to take your desired action. To drive even better results, you’ll need to select an ad format that will present your brand to your audience in the best possible light for enhanced performance.
Thanks for reading this article. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this full guide and are now in the position to select Facebook ads campaign objectives that are best for you.
The Surge Pilot team | Accelerate Brand Growth with Paid Social, today.
