How to Choose the Most Relevant Facebook Ad Objective

Which Facebook ad objectives would work best for your business?

Choosing an objective is quite possibly the most difficult aspect of setting up a Facebook Ad.

Facebook users are constantly providing information about their behaviors, interests, and actions, and Facebook uses this data to serve ads to the most relevant people. Your campaign objective tells Facebook what you want people to do.

Selecting the correct campaign objective is vital and picking the wrong one can lead to Facebook showing your ads to the wrong people at the wrong time.

So how can you choose an apt objective that is ideal for your business or customer? What do you have to remember when you settle on such a choice?

Discover what each Facebook Ad objective is for and find out which one is intended to convey ideal outcomes or results for your business and how you can optimize them.

When you pick a goal, Facebook dissects its client information and serves your ads to individuals in your interest group who are probably going to make the move you need.

Regardless of whether you need your target group or potential customers to download your application, make a web-based buy, or visit your store, Facebook Ads can assist you with associating with the right client. But choosing an objective can be daunting as Facebook does not give too much information and that can leave you confused.

Facebook splits objectives up into three classifications based on the sales funnel:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Conversion

How to choose from the top 3 Facebook ad objectives?

Step 1

• Know where your potential customers are

• In the first place, pick the classification that works best in your sales funnel.

Awareness objectives:

This is usually the 1st touch-point that we create with our customers.
Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) objectives to create interest in what you have to offer.

Consideration objectives:

These clients are placed somewhere in the middle of the funnel. They are warming up to your brand but still far from conversion.
Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) objectives target consumers who are open to knowing more about the brand.

Conversion objectives:

These consumers are placed right at the bottom of the sales funnel. They might be narrow or few in number, but could eventually be the most relevant audience for your business.
Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) objectives for driving sales, enrollments, and visits.

Step 2

• Pick the objective that aligns most with the right funnel stage.

• Then, align it with the desired action you want your audience to take.

• But if anyone has run ads and is into marketing, they would definitely know by now that it is not so easy and just choosing objectives as per the funnel does not make sense all the time. Marketers mostly use a mix of funnel and strategies to reach their potential audience. Most of them end up using the conversion funnel objectives as that results in direct action.

• Like we mentioned before, it might look simple but it’s definitely more complicated than it appears!

Awareness objectives for Facebook ads

Assuming you need to create intrigue or expand your brand visibility or consumer reach, then you can choose two awareness objectives:

1. Brand awareness

You can use this objective when you have broader brand visibility as your marketing goal.

This Facebook objective is ideal when you need to stay on top-of-mind of your potential customers.

When you select this objective, don’t expect your customers to immediately take some action or convert. Initially, they might not even take note of you and may end up ignoring your ad completely!

To get the foremost accurate ad recall data, though, you’d got to perform a brand-lift study. For this reason, brand awareness campaigns are mainly employed by larger brands with bigger budgets and therefore the ability to live these results.

Small businesses that want to extend awareness can typically get more tangible results with other campaign objectives.

When to Use It: The Brand Awareness objective may be a good option if you would like to create a memorable brand and have the means to lift ad recall value. You are charged on CPM basis for this.

Later on, you can run Consideration or Conversion ads to the customers who saw your awareness campaigns and move them through the funnel.

2. Reach

As the name suggests, the mission is to reach as many potential customers as possible within your ad budget.

If you are running a hyperlocal ad, then Facebook lets you run ads to a limited audience set.

The objective lets you adjust the frequency of your ad campaign depending upon your budget and location.

For instance, in case you're running advertisements for a big brand, then serving ads at a lower frequency is likely to meet your objectives.

However, on the off chance that your business is new to the market, you might have to serve ads all the more often or at a higher frequency to guarantee it sticks to the clients.

But there is a downside to serving ads too many times to the same audience, which is called Ad Fatigue.

Why is audience fatigue such an issue?

Imagine if you were to see the same ad 5-10 times. Isn’t it annoying? Also, if you’ve seen the ad so many times and haven’t clicked on it yet, you’re probably not interested anyway.

When you bombard the same audience with the same ad set, you get a drop in performance, AKA “audience fatigue”. And if you want to avoid it, you should set frequency capping to limit the number of times a person sees your ad within a given period.

In a recent example, Zomato was running the same ad on YouTube for the longest time ever and to the same crowd, the consumers were actually miffed and started bombarding their social media handles to stop showing those ads! Zomato took an opportunity here and ran a contest for users to create ads for them! But they as a big brand could salvage the moment, that does not guarantee everybody can do it.

When to Use It: The Reach objective may be a good selection if you’re organizing an area event and therefore the goal is to inform as many people as possible about that event. However, if people got to book tickets beforehand, this wouldn’t be the most suitable objective. Then you would have to run conversion campaigns.

Consideration objectives

These objectives are designed for low-intent actions therefore the percentage of individuals in your audience who are likely to respond is going to be fairly high. If your goal is to drive sales and conversions, a low-intent action brings the danger of low-quality leads.

There are six consideration campaign objectives

• Traffic

• Engagement

• App installs

• Video views

• Lead generation

• Messages

1. Traffic

Use the Traffic objective when you will likely send your target group outside of Facebook such as the website either to a blog, video, or podcast, landing page, or an app.

Facebook by default sets the CPM bid model and hence you cannot optimize bids on your own. You can alternatively opt to bid on:

Landing Page Views: Facebook will deliver your ads to people who are most likely to click on your ad’s link and wait for the website to load.

Impressions: Facebook will deliver your ads to people as many times as possible. (high frequency)

Daily Unique Reach: Facebook will try to reach as many people as possible (low frequency)

If you have the Facebook Pixel or SDK introduced on your site or app, you can follow the audience’s action and retarget them later.

Facebook will show your ads to audiences who are more likely to take an action but that does not necessarily mean they will give in their contact information or complete the action required.

To focus on such activities, you'll need to pick a Conversion objective.

Engagement objectives can likewise assist you with building your Facebook Page Engagement Audiences. You can use these audiences later for retargeting purposes. It can also help in building social proof! Hence very relevant and must-follow objective in today’s time.

3. App Installs

This objective clearly states the desired outcome you want to achieve, so if you are looking for more app downloads then you can redirect the users to Play Store or web app downloads.

You can either choose ThruPlays or Impressions for your chargeable result metric.

5. Messenger

These campaigns work more like engagement campaigns, where the objective is to interact with the audience who are looking out for some information.

When you use messenger ad:

• You can create a custom welcome message

• Use a standard message from the template

• Use automated or bot chat

These campaigns along with bot integration can help you redirect users to the required page and also get their contact details if possible.

6. Lead Generation

This could be one of the most popular objectives used at the MOFU and TOFU levels. The idea here is to collect the contact information of your potential customers.

You can use the standard form from Facebook or customize the form as per your requirements.

The information collected can also be used to help build your email marketing database.

Conversion objectives

This is probably the most important and commonly used objective as the name is synonymous with every business’s end goal.

Facebook’s Conversion objectives—Conversions, Catalog Sales, and Store Traffic—encourage people interested in your business to buy or use your product or service. The intent set here is very clear.

But not necessarily all the campaigns run at different funnel stages will work.

For example, the objective works best in scenarios where:

• The audience is low-funnel and ready to convert. (Retargeting could be an example)
• The audience is high-funnel but the product or service requires consideration
• The audience is high-funnel and the conversion we are optimizing toward is also high-funnel

Sometimes creating micro-conversions can help, such as, instead of directly using Purchase as an event, you can set up Add-to-cart as an event. Don’t let any of this deter you from using the objective – just keep in mind that it will work best if you set it up for success.

1. Catalog Sales

This is commonly used by e-commerce businesses that have connected their catalogs to their business manager. You need to add all the product images to the Facebook catalog for it to run ads.

The objective is to run dynamic product ads based on the user’s search intent or activity on the website. These specifically work when you retarget users as per their search query or web behaviour.

Certain bidding strategies can be tried to optimize for conversion events. You could try optimizing for events such as Purchase or Add-to-cart or optimize for the lowest cost conversion. You can even set a target cost for optimization or use link clicks or impressions as your bidding optimization strategy.

In some cases, you even get to optimize ads for value to achieve certain ROAS.

2. Store Traffic

If you want to drive traffic to your physical store or brick-and-mortar stores, then this campaign works the best. With the store traffic objective, you can create customized ads for each of your locations and deliver them to people nearby to increase store visits and sales.

These generally work well for small businesses or multi-retailers who are spread out throughout the city. This is also beneficial when you want to use language and location-specific content. If you have just one store location and want to drive more in-store visits, Facebook suggests using the daily unique reach objective (that’s the default optimization KPI for the objective).

Then again you can use this campaign for even the awareness or consideration level, as it can be combined with offline events to track in-store purchases and then create a strategy around it.

With this, we have covered all the different types of objectives and campaigns which can be run depending on the funnel stage, and your business goal and requirements.

When it comes to ads and objectives, there is no thumb rule or a perfect strategy to apply objectives as per the funnel. These objectives were created keeping in mind how they can make it easy for the advertiser to determine which objectives to choose, but everybody learns best the trial-and-error way and at what point and junction your business needs are, the objectives can be chosen as per that.

You won’t know this theory holds true unless you test it out! It’s better to mix and match your objectives and give it a good old marketing jig.

If you think that deciding on objectives and the type of campaign to run on Facebook is a little overwhelming for you, and the campaign optimization for Facebook ads is time-consuming and you care only about the end result, then you can even try Mediaqart!

Mediaqart is a performance marketing automated platform that helps you run campaigns across Facebook, Instagram & Google for any business objective! All you have to do is plug-in your business manager account to our platform, select your objective(s), select Audience in just a single click with our AI audience generator for any business/industry, select location, select a plan which will give you an estimate about the results you can achieve before running the ad, upload creatives and your ad is ready for review!

Running ads has never been so easy before and Mediaqart delivers that with efficiency and perfection. Our performance-backed AI platform will help you increase ROAS and get the results that you desire without having to do anything at all! It is a campaign optimization tool for Facebook Ads & Google Ads from where you can run campaigns on auto-pilot mode without any manual intervention. The machine does all the work for you.

If you find this intriguing and want to give the platform a try, then you can always reach out to our digital experts for a call to guide you through the process.