The first step in creating Facebook ad campaign is selecting Facebook Campaign objective. On Facebook, ad objectives are grouped into three categories based on what stage in the buyer’s journey the people you want to target are in: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
We can use Facebook to advertise our products or services on Facebook and Instagram using a Facebook advertising platform known as Facebook Ads.
You can read more about how to use Facebook to run Sponsored ads.
The best part about Facebook Ads is that you can choose from multiple campaign objectives to achieve your specific marketing goal. You can use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website or blog, or you can also use them to generate leads.
In this article you’ll learn the 11 Facebook advertising campaign objectives, what they are, and when best to use them. There are also some example ads to give you some inspiration for your next campaign.
What are the 6 objectives of Facebook ads?
Facebook has recently simplified the process of choosing the campaign objectives and reduced the list of available objectives from 11 options to 6.
| Ad objective | Your business goal is to: | Previous ad objective |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Create awareness of your business. This objective will help you reach the largest number of people who are most likely to remember your ad. For example, if your business is brand new or has been recently renamed, awareness may help potential customers become more familiar with your business. | Brand awareness Reach Video views Store traffic |
| Traffic | Increase traffic to an online destination of your choice. Send people to a destination, such as your Facebook or Instagram shop, website or app. For example, if you’re having a flash sale in your shop or want to send potential customers to a web page that describes your services, this may help drive traffic to those destinations. | Traffic |
| Engagement | Find people more likely to engage with your business online, send a message or take desired actions on your ad or Page. For example, if you want people who are interested in your products or services to start a conversation via Messenger, this objective can reach potential customers more likely to do so. | Engagement Video views Messages Conversions |
| Leads | Collect leads for your business or brand via messages, phone calls or sign-ups. For example, if you want potential customers to sign up for a monthly newsletter, this objective can help you reach people willing to share their information with you to learn more about your business. | Lead generation Messages Conversions |
| App promotion | Get people on mobile devices to install or take a specific action within your app. For example, if you want potential customers to make a purchase through your app or try a new app feature, you can create an app promotion campaign. | App installs |
| Sales | Find people likely to purchase your goods or services. For example, if you want to reach people most likely to make a purchase, such as through an e-commerce site, you can use the sales objective. You can also optimise for other actions, such as adding an item to their basket. | Conversions Catalogue sales |
The 11 Facebook Ads campaign objectives
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement – Post Engagement, Page Engagements, Event Promotion
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Product Catalogue Sales
- Store Visits
What is a campaign objective?
Your advertising campaign objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads.
Setting your campaign objective is the first action you take when creating a new campaign. It’s at the top level of the
[UPDATE] Facebook has introduced 3 over-arching categories which all ad objectives now sit under. From the top of funnel Awareness to the middle of funnel Consideration and bottom of funnel Conversion.
Awareness
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
Consideration
- Traffic
- Engagement – subcategories: Post Engagement, Page Likes, Event Responses & Offer Claims
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
Conversion
- Conversions
- Product Catalogue Sales
- Store Visits
Awareness Stage
#1 Brand Awareness
Reach people who are more likely to pay attention to your adverts and increase awareness for your brand.
When to use it: On larger scale branding campaigns where there is no specific action you want a user to take. This objective will appeal to larger businesses that can afford to run pure branding-only campaigns. If you’re a small business, however, almost every other objective will produce better and more meaningful results.
#2 Reach
Show your advert to the maximum number of people.
When to use it: Similar to the brand awareness campaign objective, the reach objective is designed to show your ads to the maximum number of people in your audience.
What’s great about the reach objective is that Facebook has introduced Frequency capping, meaning that you can set the minimum number of days before the same person sees your ad again.
This objective is going to be particularly useful when you have a small audience size and want everyone to see your ads, but now you’ll be able to control how regularly they see them thanks to the frequency capping controls
Consideration
#4 Traffic
Use the Clicks to Website objective to send people to your website.
When to use it: When you want to send people from Facebook to your website and they don’t need to take a specific action such as sign up for a guide or webinar. Best used when promoting content, particularly blog posts.
#5 Engagement – Post Engagement
Use the Page Post Engagement objective to boost your post.
When to use it: If you already have an organic post that is performing above average in terms of engagement and you want to get it in front of more of your Facebook page audience or a completely new audience this is the objective for you.
Additionally, use the boost post objective when you have a small audience size that requires a low daily budget, such as £1 per day, to reduce ad frequency problems.
#6 Engagement – Page Likes
Use the Page Likes objective to promote your Facebook Page.
When to use it: If you want to build awareness for your business by increasing the number of likes on your page.
WARNING: Page likes are a topline (vanity) metric, if people don’t actually ENGAGE page likes are essentially worthless, a better objective to build awareness is content-based boost post and website clicks campaigns.
#7 Engagement – Event Responses
Use this objective to get more people to see and respond to your event.
When to use it: You can only use this objective to promote events specifically created on Facebook. Not many businesses still use events on Facebook but if you are one of the few that do, then this will allow you to get your event in front of more people.
If you run events using software other than Facebook such as your own website or Eventbrite then you’ll want to choose a conversion campaign objective.
#8 Engagement – Offer Claims
Use the Offer Claims objective to promote your offer.
When to use it: Like with the event objective, this applies only to offer posts created on Facebook. Having run both offer and website click/conversion campaigns for clients we’ve found that straight offer campaigns perform worse than website click or conversion campaigns. So, stick to website clicks or conversion campaigns if you are running a special offer on Facebook.
#9 App Installs
Use the App Installs objective to get people to install your app.
When to use it: When you first launch an app the first 72 hours are critical and you want to get as many downloads as possible to increase your app store ranking. An app installs campaign is a great way to kick-start your downloads.
#10 Video Views
Use the Video Views objective to get people to watch your video.
When to use it: Video content is becoming more and more popular, people love it, that’s why Facebook sees over 8 billion video views every day. It’s no surprise then that video views are now an advertising objective.
If you have an awesome video that you want to share with the world, you should use the video objective. It’s a relatively new objective so the cost per view is extremely low, we’ve seen views cost £0.001.
#11 Lead Generation
Use this objective to create a form that will collect info from people, including sign-ups for newsletters, price estimates and follow-up calls.
When to use it: Lead ads simplify the mobile signup process. When someone clicks on your lead ad, a form opens with the person’s contact information automatically populated, based on the information they share with Facebook, like their name and email address.
Automatically populating the contact information that people share with Facebook makes filling in the form as fast as two taps: one click on the ad to open the form and another to submit the autofilled form.
The issue though is that people don’t keep their email addresses up-to-date from when they first signed up to Facebook. Therefore, the response rate post signup isn’t as high as when you use conversion campaigns pointing to a specific landing page where information isn’t automatically populated.
Lead ads also don’t allow you to provide as much information about your offer as if you were to use a specific landing page. Therefore, for signups that require a heavier cognitive investment from someone, such as a strategy session, phone call, etc a conversion campaign will have better results.
Conversion
#12 Conversions
Use the Website Conversions objective to promote conversions on your website
When to use it: When you want to drive people from Facebook to your website to take a specific action such as signing up to a webinar, downloading a guide or purchasing a product.
#13 Product Catalogue Sales
Create adverts that automatically show products from your product catalogue based on your target audience.
When to use it: if you are an eCommerce company and want to show specific product remarketing ads to someone after they have viewed that product on your website.
#14 Store Visits
Promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby.
When to use it: similar to the reach people near your business objective but best used when you have multiple business locations.
You can use the Store Visits objective to build dynamic advertising campaigns that are locally relevant to each store.
Conclusion
To recap the 11 Facebook advertising objectives are:
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement – Post Engagement, Page Engagements, Event Promotion
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Product Catalogue Sales
- Store Visits
The 4 main advertising objectives we use for the majority of our clients, where we’re generating new leads and sales for them, are website clicks, conversions, post engagement, and video views.
What’s been your experience using the different Facebook objectives?
