Meta Ads Campaign Objectives: What is the best choice for you?
Do you want to use Facebook or Instagram for advertising? In this article, you will learn what Meta ad campaign objectives are, the types of ad objectives, and when to use them.
Meta advertising can help you accomplish your business goals, from raising awareness, getting reach, driving website visits, or generating sales and leads. Before you start using Meta advertising, you need to understand the ad objectives in Meta Ads. Meta ad objectives are goals you set for your campaigns in Meta Ads when you start advertising your brand, product, or services. That is the first thing you will have to choose when you start setting up your campaign. Meta-ad objectives guide your ads to the specific outcome and help you achieve your goal. Every Meta-ad objective significantly influences how the algorithms optimize the delivery of your ads. They trigger specific ad optimization mechanisms, which are different for every objective.
Meta Ad Objective Categories
Meta Ads used to have their ad objectives categorized into three main categories: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Under the Awareness category, you could choose between Brand Awareness and Reach. Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, and Messages were in the Consideration category. Conversion, Catalogue Sales, and Store Traffic were in the conversion category. This category correlated with the customer journey. Customer journey refers to the experiences that individuals have before they decide to purchase a product or a service.
- Awareness: The target audience first learns about your brand, product or service
- Consideration: The target audience becomes interested in your brand, product or service
- Conversion: The target audience decides to buy your product or use your service
In 2022, Meta decided to simplify ad objectives, so they redesigned the objective selection experience when creating new campaigns for both Facebook and Instagram. Instead of choosing between 11 objectives, they consolidated them into six on the first step when creating new campaigns. Now Meta categorizes ad objective selection with ODAX – Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences. Advertisers can select their ad objective based on their business goal, and the interface will guide them to the optimal campaign setup. With ODAX, Meta aims to achieve three main goals:
- Simplify objectives, aligning them closely with marketing goals.
- Allow cross-channel campaigns (for example website+app, website+shop).
- Provide better guidance on the platform when creating campaigns.
The picture shows how old ad objectives correlate to the new ODAX-based ones.
Types of Ad Objectives
Meta ad objectives or Meta campaign objectives are limited to the following options:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- App Promotion
- Sales
Each has its unique optimization method, and not every ad objective is for your business. When choosing your ad objective, consider what part of your target audience the customer journey is. Are they in Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion? In the following chapters, you can see the difference between ad objectives and learn what ad objective you can use to achieve your goal. When you know who your target audience is and in what part of the customer journey your target audience is, you will need to target them; learn more about audience targeting on this link.
Awareness
When using an Awareness ad objective, you prioritize getting your ads in front of people. This objective will help you reach many target audiences within your budget and leave a lasting impression on them. It is ideal for businesses that showcase business products and services and enhance brand recognition and visibility. It is mainly used for the audience in the Awareness part of the journey to show the target audience what your business offers and your brand is all about. It is useful when you want your audience to remember your brand, product, or service rather than take immediate action.
Traffic
With the Traffic ad objective, you aim to drive the target audience outside Facebook or Instagram to visit your website, landing page, or app. This objective seeks to drive the target audience to your desired landing page, increasing the number of website visits and clicks on your ads. It is used to reach an audience in the Consideration part of the journey, people interested in your brand, product, or service, so they can get more information about them and potentially take action, like buying your product.
Conversion location for Traffic objective:
- Website: send the target audience to your website
- App: send the target audience to your app
- Messaging Apps: send target audience to Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp
- Instagram profile: send the target audience to your Instagram profile
- Calls: get target audience to call your business
Engagement
The Engagement ad objective will help you gain more shares, likes, and comments on your ads and posts. It will also reach people who interact with your brand, Facebook or Instagram page, ads, or posts. This objective is best used with existing posts on your Facebook or Instagram pages because you can see what type of posts perform well with your target audience.
Engagements can be achieved:
- Messaging Apps: drives engagement on Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp
- On your ad: get the target audience to watch a video or interact with your post or event
- Calls: get target audience to call your business
- Website: get the target audience to engage with your website
- App: get target audience to engage with your app
- Facebook Page: drives engagement on your Facebook Page
Leads
The Leads ad objective will help you generate leads for your business. There is a wide array of possible leads, some of the most common one are: getting the target audience to sign up for your newsletter, getting mail addresses, downloading a white paper or requesting a demonstration of your service or product. It is used in the Consideration and Conversion part of the journey when the target audience is familiar with your brand and has demonstrated interest in your product or services. You will most likely generate leads on your websites or through instant forms.
Leads could be gathered on:
- Website: generates leads through your website
- Instant forms: generate leads by asking target audience to fill out a form
- Messenger: generate leads by starting chats in Messenger
- Instant forms and Messenger: Generate leads by asking target audience to fill out a form or by starting chats in Messenger
- Instagram: generate leads by starting chats on Instagram
- WhatsApp: generate leads by starting chats on WhatsApp
- Calls: get leads by asking target audience to call your business
- App: generate leads through your app
App Promotion
App promotion objective is used to drive installations of your mobile app or you want the target audience to take a specific action within your mobile app. The main usage of this objective is to target an audience who are more likely to install your mobile app. The goal of the App promotion objective is to show ads to the target audience that is interested in your mobile app. Conversions are happening in the mobile application.
Sales
Sales objective is used to enhance sales of your services or products directly. It best works with the audience in the Conversion part of the journey, targeting an audience who need one last, slight push to buy your service or product. The audience you target with these ads are already very familiar with your brand, services and products and they have already shown interest in your brand. This ad objective is the most important one for e-commerce businesses whose business goals are to drive sales of products or services.
Conversions for Sales objective can happen on:
- Website: drives sales and conversion on your website
- App: drive sales and conversions on your app
- Website and app: drive sales and conversations on your website or app
- Messaging apps: Drive sales and conversions through Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp
- Calls: drive sales and conversions through phone calls
How to choose the right type?
Choosing the right ad objective is critical for all successful campaigns, and it is not easy. When choosing the right objective, consider your business goal, who your target audience is, what part of the customer journey they are in, and what action you want them to perform. Choosing the right ad objective helps you target your desired audience and measure the right metrics to track your success.
If your business has just started or you have some new product or service, focus on awareness and objectives to familiarise the audience with your brand. Start building awareness about your brand. After that, you can move on to the traffic campaigns to drive people to your website or app so they can see more about what you are offering. You will choose a lead objective for collecting email addresses for the newsletter, gathering contact information for sales follow-up, or a free consultation or demo. If you are e-commerce business, you own a web shop, you will choose sales objective. You will probably have to use more than one ad objective to achieve your business goal; it all depends on the mentioned factors. In what part of the customer journey is your audience? Do they know about you and your brand, etc?
Choosing the right objective is the first step to a successful campaign. If you want to use Leads or Sales as your ad objective, it is not enough just to start advertising, you will need to track the conversions and events through Meta Pixel and Event Tool, you can see how Kontra boosted business revenue with effective Facebook advertising strategy. Setting up the conversions, pixel and event tool is a theme for another blog.
Contact us if you need help figuring out where to start with advertising. We are a full-service digital agency that can help you achieve your business goals.
