Facebook Campaign Objectives

Every campaign you set up, on Facebook or anywhere else, should have a clear objective. Ask yourself: What do you want users to do as a result of seeing your ad? What metrics will you use to indicate whether your campaign is successful? Maybe it’s traffic to your website, shares of a specific post, downloads of an app, local store visits or sign-ups for a newsletter.

Facebook broadly distinguishes three different kinds of objectives that follow the traditional user journey from awareness to action or conversion. For each type of objective, they give you multiple campaign objectives you can choose from. Read through all the different objectives below. Please note that sometimes not all objectives are available to all users or the names are slightly different from the ones below.

Awareness

Brand awareness

Pick this objective if your goal is to raise the awareness of a brand or product in your target audience. Facebook will optimize the delivery of your ad to reach those users who are most likely to remember what they have seen. This is also called “recall”. When you pick this objective, you care less about people engaging with your ad (such as liking or sharing it) or taking direct action (such as going to your website or buying the product). For that reason, brand awareness ads will be billed based on the number of impressions (CPM) that are served to users, not based on their engagement or actions taken.

A consumer goods company, for example, could use this campaign type to make people aware of a new soft drink they introduce in supermarkets. By frequently showing an ad to their target audience, the consumer goods company hopes that the consumer will be more likely to remember the drink once they are in the supermarket, and might then be interested in buying it.

Reach

Similar to the brand awareness objective, the aim of the reach objective is to generate awareness, not engagement or action. When choosing the reach objective, however, you want to maximize the number of people seeing your ad and you care less about strong recall. Facebook allows you to set the frequency of your ad, i.e., how often the ad will be shown to the same person. Since you pay per impression, showing an ad less often to the same people allows you to reach more people with the same budget.

Typical use cases for the reach objective include political campaigns or advertisers who use a Facebook campaign to supplement a traditional TV or print campaign that already builds a strong brand recall.

Consideration

Traffic

This is the right objective if you aim to drive traffic to a specific destination inside or outside Facebook, such as a blog post or product information page. Facebook will deliver your ad to the people inside your target audience who are most likely to click on the link. The destination does not necessarily have to be on your website. Depending on your goal, you can also direct your audience to a news article or online review that someone else has written about your offering.

Engagement

The engagement objective is designed to get more people to engage with your Facebook posts or your Facebook Page. Once you pick this objective, Facebook asks you which type of engagement you want to optimize for. You can choose between:

• Post engagement – drive the number of comments, shares and likes of a specific Facebook post
• Page like – increase the number of people who like your page
• Event responses – promote events people can register for
• Offer claims – get people to redeem a discount you offer to them (such as percentage off; amount off; ‘buy one, get one free;’ or free items)

Engagement ads can be a great way to build and grow an audience on and outside of Facebook. One important note, though, if you are considering buying Page likes: While it may sound like a great idea to buy a lot of Page likes as cheaply as possible, by targeting certain audiences that are less expensive to reach, this tends not to be a good idea. Whenever you share something with the people who like your page, Facebook will share it with a sample to determine how relevant it is to your audience. If many people engage with your content, Facebook will show it to more people. But if not, Facebook will not. When you increase the number of people who like your page, but who do not engage with your content, you might end up losing reach even within a segment that cares.

App Installs

The purpose of this campaign objective is to send people to an app store where they can download your app. App install campaigns will only be placed on mobile and come with a “Install Now” call to action button, so interested users can download the app right away.

Video views

The video views objective is for advertisers who aim to get people to watch their trailer, image film or other type of video right in their Facebook or Instagram feed. Companies distributing movies, TV shows, or music often use this objective, but also firms that have engaging commercials or want to explain their product in a video. Facebook will let the advertiser choose whether they want to pay on a per 1,000 impression (CPM) basis, or based on the number of video views (defined as a 10-Second Video View).

Lead generation

The goal of lead generation campaigns is to collect contact information such as the email address of your audience, so you can follow up with a specific offer or a newsletter. You can customize the contact form, depending on what information you are interested in, and also choose from among different call to action buttons (e.g., Sign Up, Subscribe, Apply Now, Get Quote).

Messages

Drive more communication to your business in Facebook Messenger with the Messages objective. Whether it be facilitating questions, offering support, or driving sales, this goal can lead to more interaction with your customers.

Conversion

Conversions

The conversion objective is designed to get people to take a certain action on your website or app, such as buying a product, filling out a form or downloading a document. A typical use case is an online store that advertises different products on Facebook and wants their audience to ultimately purchase an item. To track whether a user who clicked on an ad has ultimately taken an action, you have to prepare your website or app.

If you want to set up conversion tracking for your website, you must add a few lines of code to your website, which will then implement the Facebook pixel on your site. To learn how to create a Facebook pixel and how to add it to the code of your website, take a look here or watch the video provided by Facebook below. In the Facebook Advertising project, you will run an actual Conversion campaign. We have already set the Facebook pixel up for you on our landing page, so you can get started right away.

If you want to track the actions that happen inside your mobile app as a result of your ads, your developer must implement a piece of code called App Events. Point them to this site to learn more.

How to create and install the Facebook Pixel

Catalog sales

The name of this objective can be confusing. The aim is not to sell catalogs but to dynamically promote products out of a bigger catalog to people who have engaged with a web store or shopping app before. Each ad that users see is individualized, using templates and according to the products they have browsed before. The content of the ad – keywords, images, and descriptions – is pulled from a product catalog the advertiser has uploaded to Facebook. This campaign type also requires the implementation of the Facebook pixel or App Events, as described above. To learn more about product catalog sales, click here.

Store visits

If you're an advertiser with multiple business locations and want to drive users into the stores, you can use the store visits objective to build dynamic ad campaigns that are locally relevant to each store. To set up this campaign type, you must have a Facebook Page per location and connect your local pages to your main page. Learn more about managing different store locations here.