Whether you’re a new user of Facebook Ads Manager or have extensive experience with the program, we’re here to lay the groundwork for what you need to know to create a successful campaign. Welcome to the first part of our series on Mastering Facebook Ads Manager. In this introduction, we’re discussing arguably one of those most essential parts, the campaign objective.
If you’re new to Facebook Ads Manager, there are some basics you’ll need to know before moving forward. And if you’re not new to Ads Manager, use this as a refresher course because we all need a refresher sometimes.
To make this even easier on you, we’ll remind you to solidify your business goals (or your client’s goals) before you start creating your campaign. By having your goals in mind, you can directly translate them into your campaign objective for a more effective campaign.
With that, let’s jump in. The three components that make up an ad campaign within Ads Manager are the campaign, the ad set, and the ad(s). When you begin creating your campaign, you’ll have to choose an objective, which you’ll see in a window like this:
As you can see, Ads Manager classifies these objectives into three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. We’re here to help you understand these categories and the objectives which fall under each so you can make an informed decision.
Here’s a brief breakdown of the campaign objective categories:
Now let’s take a deeper look into each objective, so you know how to translate your business goals into your next campaign with Facebook Ads Manager.
The first objective category we’ll be breaking down is awareness. If you’re looking to spread the word about your brand, product, or service to a broader audience within your target market, awareness might be for you. Two objectives fall under awareness in ads manager: brand awareness and reach.
Brand awareness is for just that, increasing awareness about your brand, product, or service to an audience within your target market. This is the only objective on Facebook that gives you access to a unique metric called ad recall lift. Ad recall lift is the estimated number of people that will remember seeing your ad if asked about it within two days. Use this objective if you want to increase brand awareness or change brand perception, show your ad to as many people in your audience as possible, or share videos of your business with people who are likely to watch.
Reach is an objective that also falls under this category. Choosing reach as your objective will allow Ads Manager to show your ad to as many people as possible within your target audience. To get the most out of this objective and minimize ad fatigue, we recommend you use reach when targeting smaller audiences.
The second category is consideration. Consideration will reach people interested in your brand or similar brands and encourage your audience to think about your business and seek more information.
In Ads Manager, this category has several objectives: traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and messages. Let’s get to know each objective.
Want to direct your audience to a specific place? Traffic is an excellent choice for an objective. You can choose where to direct customers with each ad set, such as a landing page. To take it a step further, you can even add an offer, such as a discount code, that users can utilize when visiting said page. This is a great objective if you wish to optimize your ad sets for click impressions, landing page views, or unique daily reach.
Engagement is the objective to choose if you wish to reach people more likely to engage with your post. When selecting this objective, you can choose from three types of engagement you’d like your campaign to achieve: post engagement, page likes, or event responses. If you wish to optimize your ad sets for post engagement, impressions, or unique daily reach, consider engagement for your objective.
Have an app and want to encourage your audience to download it? The app install objective allows you to select a call-to-action that optimizes your campaign for app installs, app events, a combination of both, or even for revenue per install.
Are you promoting a product or service via video? The video views objective helps you share your video with those who are most likely to watch them. This objective optimizes your ad set for short, continuous views or complete plays, depending on how you desire your audience to interact.
Want to collect more information from the people you’re reaching? Lead generation allows you to do so through an instant form option that has people sign up right within the page of your ad. You can even choose from a list of call-to-actions that will help increase prospective customer inquiries.
The last objective within the consideration category is messages. This allows your brand to connect with potential or existing customers to generate interest in your business. You can choose where your audience can message you for information (such as Facebook Messenger, email, etc.) and optimize your ad sets for conversations or lead generation.
The third campaign objective category in Ads Manager is conversion. Through conversion, you’re reaching people who have already intended to purchase your product (or similar products) and encouraging them to take action. Under the conversion category lies the objectives of conversions, catalog sales, and store traffic.
The conversions objective encourages people to take a specific action on your website, such as account creation or purchase of a product. You can choose where you direct traffic from each ad set and optimize your ads for conversions, conversations, clicks, impressions, or unique daily reach.
Note: To utilize this objective, you’ll need to take it a step further and install either Meta Pixel on your website or the Facebook SDK on your app.
If you want to display your products and generate sales, catalog sales is your objective. With this objective, you’ll need to upload your product catalog and create product sets to display the range of products in each ad set. Additionally, you can add an offer, such as a discount code, or use the dynamic ad creative option to show different versions of your products. This objective allows you to optimize your ads for conversion events, clicks, and impressions.
Want to encourage people to visit your brick-and-mortar location? Store traffic may be your objective of choice. You can promote your location to people nearby, even selecting a radius around your store that you’d specifically like to reach. Do you offer collection or delivery services? There’s a call to action for that too!
Congrats, you’ve reached the end! We hope this guide will help you when creating your next campaign. Enjoying this series already? This is just Part 1! Stay tuned for more guidance on utilizing Facebook Ads Manager for your digital advertising needs.
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