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How do you select an ad objective?
Selecting the right Facebook ad objective is essential because it helps determine how Facebook optimizes your ads to achieve your specific goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to select an ad objective that aligns with your marketing goals:
1. Define Your Campaign Goal
The first step in choosing an ad objective is clearly defining what you want to achieve with your ad campaign. Your objective should align with the stage of the customer journey you’re targeting.
- Awareness: Do you want to introduce your brand to a new audience or raise general awareness about your product/service?
- Consideration: Are you looking to engage people who are already aware of your brand and encourage them to take an action, like visiting your website or watching a video?
- Conversion: Is your goal to get people to make a purchase, sign up for a service, or complete a specific action on your website?
2. Consider the Stages of the Sales Funnel
Facebook’s ad objectives are categorized based on the customer journey or sales funnel. Each stage of the funnel requires different tactics, so you’ll need to match your objective with the right stage.
- Top of the Funnel (Awareness): This stage is about getting your brand in front of a large audience and making people aware of your product or service.
- Brand Awareness: Choose this objective if you want to create broad awareness of your business.
- Reach: Use this objective if you want to expose your ad to the maximum number of people possible.
- Middle of the Funnel (Consideration): This stage is where you engage potential customers, drive traffic to your website, and encourage people to learn more about your brand or product.
- Traffic: Use this objective to drive clicks to your website, app, or landing page.
- Engagement: Choose this if you want to encourage more interactions (likes, shares, comments, etc.) with your content.
- Video Views: Select this objective if you want to increase the number of people watching your video content.
- Lead Generation: Use this to collect lead information (such as emails) directly within Facebook or Instagram.
- Messages: Use this to encourage conversations through Facebook Messenger (good for customer support or sales inquiries).
- Bottom of the Funnel (Conversion): This stage is focused on encouraging actions that drive sales or specific conversions, such as purchases, sign-ups, or downloads.
- Conversions: Select this if you want people to take specific actions on your website, like purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a file.
- Catalog Sales: Use this if you’re running an e-commerce business and want to show products from your catalog to people most likely to purchase them.
- Store Traffic: This is ideal for brick-and-mortar businesses, driving physical foot traffic to your store locations.
3. Evaluate Your Resources
Some objectives may require specific resources like Facebook Pixel or product catalogs to function properly. Make sure you have the right tools in place before selecting an objective.
- Facebook Pixel: For objectives like Conversions, Lead Generation, or App Installs, it’s helpful to have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website to track actions users take.
- Product Catalog: For Catalog Sales, you’ll need a product catalog uploaded to Facebook to showcase your products.
4. Match the Objective with Your Campaign’s Desired Outcome
Now that you’ve identified your campaign goal and sales funnel stage, choose the ad objective that most directly aligns with your desired outcome. Here’s a quick guide to match your objectives with your goal:
Goal | Sales Funnel Stage | Facebook Ad Objective |
---|---|---|
Raise awareness about a new product or brand | Awareness (Top of Funnel) | Brand Awareness, Reach |
Get more people to visit your website or landing page | Consideration (Middle of Funnel) | Traffic |
Increase interaction with your posts or videos | Consideration (Middle of Funnel) | Engagement, Video Views |
Capture contact details or leads | Consideration (Middle of Funnel) | Lead Generation |
Encourage users to install your mobile app | Consideration (Middle of Funnel) | App Installs |
Generate sales or specific actions on your website | Conversion (Bottom of Funnel) | Conversions, Catalog Sales |
Drive foot traffic to your store locations | Conversion (Bottom of Funnel) | Store Traffic |
5. Test and Refine
After selecting your ad objective and running your campaign, it’s important to monitor your results and adjust accordingly. If the objective isn’t delivering the desired outcomes, you can tweak your strategy or try a different objective for future campaigns.
- A/B Testing: You can run A/B tests to compare different ad objectives, ad creatives, or target audiences to see which works best for your goals.
6. Consider Your Audience
Your ad objective should also align with the audience you are targeting. For instance, if you’re targeting people who are already familiar with your brand, engagement or conversion objectives may be more effective. For people who don’t know your brand yet, awareness or traffic objectives will help get their attention and bring them into the sales funnel.
Conclusion:
Selecting the right Facebook ad objective is critical for campaign success because it dictates how Facebook optimizes your ads and delivers them to the most relevant audience. To choose the best objective, you should:
- Define your campaign goal (awareness, consideration, or conversion).
- Match your objective with the stage of the customer journey.
- Ensure you have the necessary resources (like Pixel or catalog) for your selected objective.
- Continuously test and optimize your campaigns to refine your strategy.
By selecting the right objective, you can optimize your ad spend and get the best possible results from your Facebook advertising campaigns.