Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
There are many Facebook ad campaign objectives and if you don’t understand what they all mean, it can be difficult to choose which one is the best one for you.
The easiest way to choose the best campaign objective for your business is to understand what they all mean and how they are actually set up so that you can reach your goals easily.
And, to make sure you don’t make all of the mistakes we have, I’m also going to be sharing with you the number one mistake entrepreneurs make when they are setting their objectives for Facebook ads and how you can avoid it.
Finally, if you’re reading this blog, I presume you want to make your Facebook ads successful and actually want to make money online so I’ll be also sharing with you a simple secret that literally takes five minutes to create and has the power to triple the performance of your Facebook Ads.
So regardless if you’re new to online marketing and eCommerce or if you’ve been in the game for a while, read until the end, because this information will most likely change the way you think about Facebook ads, their objectives and their performance.
Campaign objectives for Facebook ads: A step by step cheat sheet on how to choose the best one for you
Altogether there are six objectives for Facebook ads and if you don’t know what they are, it can seem so confusing and like a big deal. In reality, there are only three of them you need to pay attention to and if you want to make sales, only one that’s really going to matter.
But let me step back a little bit and deep dive into these Facebook ad objectives so that it’s easy for you and actually makes sense in helping you reach your business goals.
There have been a lot of changes in Facebook recently, and I know that some of you have been misguided in how to actually choose the objective of the campaign of your Ads and how to run it effectively to make sure you are getting sales.
1. Awareness Campaigns
When you start creating your Facebook Ads, you will see that you can choose an objective and there will be three columns to choose from and you’ll see awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Let’s start with the campaign objective called Awareness first.
Inside the awareness option, you will have brand awareness, reach and video views, which essentially means that Facebook will try to get your ad in front of an audience that will take you into awareness but nothing more than that.
In other words, this is the first and most basic level of Facebook ads objective and running your ads.
You will just get people who will be looking at your ads. They’re scrolling through their feed and they will see your ad and it’s the beginning and the end of the relationship.
2. Traffic and Engagement Campaigns
Now that you understand the first basic campaign ad objective for Facebook ads, you’re probably wondering what are the objectives called “Traffic” and “Engagement” and why am I grouping them together.
These two campaign objectives for Facebook ads are very similar because they will be reaching people who are clicking but they won’t necessarily be buying. These are people who have a history of clicking on an ad and visiting the promotional website or they could be people who have a habit of liking, commenting or sharing Facebook ads.
They’re more likely to take action or buy something comparing to the people you reach through the “Awareness” campaign objective, but at the same time, they’re not very likely to do that either.
Choosing this campaign objective for your Facebook ads just means that you’re reaching an audience who has a history of clicking, that’s all.
3. Leads Objectives Campaigns
Looking at the campaign objective for Facebook ads called Leads, there are a couple of things you need to consider before you claim this is the best one for you.
When you see the word “leads” and you run a business that relies on collecting the leads before you convert those into sales, you might think that this is the right campaign objective for your business.
However, what you want to consider before giving this a green light, is that ideally, Facebook wants you to collect those leads inside their Facebook app so that people do not leave Facebook.
This lead option is called “Instant Form” and personally, I don’t think it gives a business enough visibility and space for optimisation. When it comes to “lead campaign objective”, businesses also have a very limited option to customise their collection forms which are not great for converting those clicks into leads, in my opinion.
If however, you choose to collect those leads inside your own website or a landing page, then you could be choosing this campaign objective for Facebook ads and in that case, it would actually be exactly the same as choosing the objective “sales” and then optimising it for a lead collection (but more on that further below).
4. App Promotion Campaigns
This campaign ad objective is easy and if you’ve got an app and your goal is to get as many app downloads as possible, this ad objective is best for you, no questions asked.
5. Sales Objective Campaigns
It might be a big presumption, but since you’re here and looking at what is the best campaign objective for Facebook ads, I presume that you actually want to make sales in your business.
And if you are a small business that doesn’t have a lot of resources, you want to make sure that you are not just getting traffic from these Facebook ads, but that you’re actually reaching quality audience and turning the traffic into sales.
If that’s the case, then I would always suggest choosing the Sales objective for Facebook ads over any other objective.
The thing is that these Facebook ads objectives are actually quite simple, but for some reason, Facebook has been overcomplicating it for us showing us all of these options that seem very different but in fact are very similar.
What I always keep in mind when I’m choosing the best campaign objective for my Facebook ads is that I want to actually reach an audience who will complete the step that I am after.
When a Facebook user completes a step that you want them to, it’s referred to as a conversion. But this conversion doesn’t always have to be a sale, it can be a lead (collecting information such as name, email or even a phone number) or it can be someone adding a product to the cart inside your store or just someone visiting your website.
Therefore, when it comes to running a small business, this is my favourite campaign objective for Facebook ads as I always want to make sure that we maximise our budget and spend it on reaching the right person who is ready to take action and move to the next step with us.
The #1 Costly Mistake When It Comes To Choosing Objectives For Facebook Ads
I’ve promised to share with you the number one mistake that business owners make that completely stalls their sales and prevents them from making money.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen that many people, choose “Awareness” as their objective or Facebook ads because they feel that no one has heard of them yet and they need to tell everyone about their store yet. Also, people falsely expect that when they tell people about their store or their business that customers will naturally come and buy products or services.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way online as when you’re choosing the objective, you’re essentially deciding if you’re buying quality or quantity from Facebook.
An awareness campaign ad objective will always seem cheaper than the Sales objective but only at the first glance. Once you start actually comparing the quality of the clicks and how many of those turn into sales, you’ll be able to look at the real side-by-side comparison.
Many small business owners waste a lot of money on “just getting some traffic” or just focussing on “brand awareness” and “reaching” more people.
Personally, we have invested over half a million dollars of our own money into Facebook ads and from my personal experience of running a lot of tests, no campaign objective has ever outperformed “Sales” and “Conversion” objectives in terms of the cost it takes to acquire a new customer.
So now that you’ve chosen the best campaign objective for your Facebook ads, you can revisit our step-by-step guide on Facebook ads for eCommerce so that you can make your ads even better and more profitable.
Otherwise, do leave us a comment below and let us know what you took out of this blog so that we can create even more great content for you in the future!
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