When you want to create an ad campaign on social media, usually you are on a tight budget as an average affiliate or a marketer. That is why you want to be able to reach the most suitable audience in the best way possible. In other words, you want to optimize your ads in a way that they help you reach out to the right people for your business needs.
In this article, we want to go over some of the things you need to keep in mind about your goals while launching an ad campaign on Facebook.
What Are Facebook Ad Objectives
As mentioned, you need to have clear goals for your advertisement campaigns, even before you start preparing the creatives and modifying your ads. On Facebook, you have the opportunity to choose your goals in order to reach out to the exact audience you need. There are many options, or objectives, to choose from on Facebook Ads manager before you launch your ad campaign. You might get confused on which one may be the correct one for the type of product you are promoting, or which one will reach out to more people. Fortunately, Facebook understands the needs of its users, and that is why it has provided us with these options so it can understand the objectives of your campaigns better and help you in the way of achieving them.
Where to Find Facebook Ad Objectives
You can simply log in to your Facebook account, create a Facebook page in order to publish your ads on it, or just choose the page you had created before, and navigate to Facebook Ads manager. Then, go to the Campaigns page and click on the “+ Create” button. A pop-up will open up. This is the first step in the process of creating an ad on Facebook, and right at the beginning, you can see the Ad Campaign Objectives.
Choosing each one of these objectives will affect your campaign settings, and offer you different fields to input information or even more options to choose from. We will go through these in later sections in the article.
How Many Facebook Ad Objectives are there
Generally, there are three main types of ad objectives on the Ads Manager. These three main categories include: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
The awareness category is useful for businesses that want to get their business known to people and cause an interest towards their business. The consideration category is good for businesses that want to give more information about their services or products to users who might already be interested in what they’re offering, so they would consider them. Finally, the conversion category is suitable for businesses that want to drive more traffic or make more sales.
Each of these categories can be narrowed down to several other objectives.
- Awareness includes the options of Brand awareness and Reach.
- Consideration includes the options of Traffic, Engagement, App installs, Video views, Lead generation, and Messages.
- Conversion includes the options of increasing conversions, Catalog sales, and Store traffic.
Most of them are self-explanatory, but of course, you will need to know the data you should provide when it comes to each.
How to Use Each Facebook Ad Objective
Now, let’s go through each objective in detail and talk about who can benefit each the most and what options each objective includes.
Brand Awareness
When you create a brand awareness ad campaign, you need to understand that still not many people will interact with your ads because your main goal would be to get yourself known to them. Usually, if you are on a tight budget, this might not be the best option for you. You can use this objective if you want to leave some impression on users, but that’s all there is to it.
Reach
This objective is good if your budget is tight and you just want to get out and reach a certain audience, for example an audience in your range or a small amount of audience that you think are interested in your business. Facebook will help you reach out to them and not spend more money than you want to. Keep in mind that again, with this objective, you might not get many people to sign up or use your affiliate link or anything else. This will just let people know you are there. This objective actually allows you to restrict your bid amount while reaching out to the maximum people possible.
Traffic
From here on, the objectives in the category of consideration begin. The traffic objective is one of the most interesting ones you could benefit from as an affiliate or an advertiser who is trying to get people to visit a link or a landing page. The good thing about it is that this objective shows your ad to people who have clicked links on ads in the past and are likely to be interested enough in your content to actually visit your page.
For this objective, Facebook will ask you to choose how you want your ads to be delivered and how you want to pay for them. You have the options of Landing page Views and Link clicks (which Facebook charges per each action) and Impressions and Daily unique reach (which you are likely to get charged based on your bid).
Engagement
This type of objective mostly focuses on showing your ads to people who are likely to engage with your content. There are three different engagement types to it: Post Engagement, Page Likes, and Event Responses. These three options allow you to get more social proof, engagements, likes, replies, comments, reactions, etc. So if you need to increase your social engagement with the audience, this one's for you.
If you choose Post engagement, you will need to choose one of your posts as the ad, so it gets shown to people. That’s why you need to make sure your posts are optimized, attractive, and engaging before even getting on with the ad campaign creation.
If you choose the Page likes, Facebook will show your ads with an emphasized Like button telling people to like the page, like the example below.
If you choose the Event Responses option, you need to provide the link to the event you want people to get redirected to. It can be a Facebook event or an event from another website.
App Installs
This one is for businesses that have an application they want to promote, pretty simple. To do this best, Facebook will show your ad to people who are more likely to install apps. When you choose this objective, you are faced with two choices: Automated ads or Manual ads.
The automated one will set up the ad sections itself and run it for you based on how it will best meet your needs. The manual one allows you to set up your ad yourself and run it the way you like to. Facebook also allows you to view the performance of your ad on the app installations.
When you choose the first option, you can select whether you want people to install the app more or take an action in the app more, or both. Keep in mind that you need to install the Facebook SDK in order to track events.
You can also select which platform your app is on on both automatic and manual options.
Video Views
If you are the type of affiliate or business that has videos in need of more views, this one might be for you. Facebook will show your videos to people more likely to watch videos. There are two choices that you have here: ThruPlay (which helps your videos get played for at least 15 seconds) or 2-second continuous video views (which will help you reach out to more people who are likely to watch your video for 2 consecutive seconds. That is why you need to leave an impression right in the beginning.
Keep in mind that choosing both will use your entire budget to reach the goal of reaching out to more people vs. reaching out to people who will watch your video more.
Of course, you don’t have to worry too much if you don’t have a video, because Facebook allows you to create a video for yourself.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is a good objective for affiliates or businesses that want to receive information from their users but want to do it on Facebook rather than their own website. You can advertise your services and then offer users to enter their contact info so you can email them, send them something, etc.
You can also choose how you want to connect with people, whether it’s calls, chats, or forms.
Each one will have a different pricing model related to the way it connects you with people.
Next, you can create a form on Facebook with all different options and settings to allow users to submit their data.
You can absolutely modify your creatives, add a headline, a description, and a CTA (call-to-action).
After doing all of that optimization, your ad will look like something like below. Keep in mind that this is just a sample, and you can add images and videos to your ad.
Messages
If you have a business or an affiliate product you want to promote but you also want to establish trust between you and the user so the user feels like they are connecting with a real human, you can use this objective. This will show your ad to people who are likely to start a conversation with you on Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct. However, keep in mind that doing so will need you to answer people’s messages quickly.
Again, you can choose where you want people to message you. You can also choose how you want to bid, which can include: per conversation, per leads, or per link clicks.
Facebook will allow you to choose among several templates and layouts for your ad.
Below you can see a sample of how that might turn out. You can also give users the option to open the chat in a new window, if you think that is more comfortable.
Conversions
Here on, you can see the objectives in the category of conversions. For this objective, you need to give Facebook the ability to track the conversion. For that, Facebook uses events, and it tracks those events via Facebook Pixel. That’s why you need to install Facebook Pixel.
This objective is great for you as an affiliate or an ecommerce website if you want to redirect people to your website so they can make a purchase.
For this purpose, you need to choose where you want people to take an action so Facebook can track that event using Facebook Pixel.
Catalog Sales
For Catalog sales, you will need to create a catalog on Facebook first, and then you can opt in for Facebook to show your catalog to people. If you have many products and you want people to consider all of them for purchasing, a catalog is your way to go. You can create your catalog in various types, including: Ecommerce, Travel, RE, Auto, and Media.
Store Traffic
In order to use this option, you need to first have physical stores, and then, you need to add them on the Business Manager. Then, you can proceed to show people your nearest locations to them. This will likely include targeting people in your own area rather than people globally, so keep that in mind. This objective cannot be used for online-only businesses.
How to Choose the Right Facebook Ad Objectives
Now, you have many options to choose from. Even though you might already have some ideas of which objective is what you need, let’s double check your priorities and which objective will help you get better results according to your own needs.
Understand Your Goals before Working on the Ad
Most people start coming up with creatives or ad copy before even knowing where they are going to be promoting their app or how their app will look like. That will cause you to waste lots of time looking around at the design aspect of your ad, rather than reaching the right audience. First, you need to establish your audience, your budget, what exactly you want users to be doing, etc. Then, you can proceed to designing the creatives for your ads.
Additionally, you need to think about your business goal. Do you want to promote an affiliate product? Do you want to introduce your affiliate/influencer page? Do you want to promote an app?
Each of these goals will need to be matched with your correct audience. For example, does my audience want to see a video? Do they want to read an article? Do they want to fill out a form or contact me? To begin, it’s important to have the answers to these questions ready.
Understand How Each Objective Corresponds to Your Marketing Goals
Now that you have your goals sorted, you need to understand which objectives on Facebook Ads can/might correspond to your goals. For example, if you are trying to promote your website and let people read an article on your blog, the conversion objection might not be the best for you. Or if you are trying to get people to purchase an affiliate product, brand awareness might not be the most budget-friendly option for you.
Narrow Down Your Options
When you go through the objectives and compare them with your marketing goals, try to narrow down your options for Ad objectives to a few. Usually, you might come down to 2-4 options that need to be broken down. In this case, you have to start understanding what each one will require from you, whether they are feasible or budget-friendly, and whether the audience that Facebook will show your ad to is the correct audience.
Pay Attention to Your Immediate Needs
After having your narrowed-down list of objectives ready, knowing that they are the objectives you need to focus on, just to make sure you are not getting off-track, you should check whether your objective meets your immediate needs or long-term business goals. Are you choosing an objective to get brand awareness or reach as an affiliate who has just started out and doesn’t have much engagement or background to establish trust? In that case, your options might be a little far-fetched. Try to keep narrowing down your options to reach one that meets your immediate needs.
Conclusion
Among the Facebook Ad objectives, each option corresponds to a certain category of businesses. For example, the conversion objective can be best used by ecommerce affiliates or shops. Make sure you understand the outcome thoroughly and keep your ads running on a budget if you are just starting out as an affiliate or small business owner. Don’t be afraid of trying out different objectives for a few days just to test how they will work comparatively.
