How to Choose The Right Facebook Campaign Objective

Key Takeaways

the first thing that you're asked to do when you set up a new facebook ad campaign is to choose an objective and that objective that you choose is going to have a massive impact on the actual outcome of your campaigns so without sounding too dramatic the objective that you choose can literally make or break an entire campaign so that's why in this video i'm going to show you how to choose the right campaign objective for your facebook ads every time i'm also going to show you the objective that we use about 80 of the time and i'm also going to show you the campaign objectives that we basically never touch because they're pretty much a waste of money so make sure you stick around for that as well if you're new to this channel hi my name is andrew hubbard i'm the founder of hubba digital we're a facebook and instagram advertising agency and education company and we focus on online course creators coaches consultants and membership site owners and helping them grow using digital marketing before we get into the content all i ask if you enjoy this video is that you hit that like button and give it a thumbs up if you do want to hear more from me hit the subscribe button hit that little bell you'll get notified whenever i release a new video on facebook advertising or digital marketing and you'll also get notified when i go live on youtube i do that where i share some different content there that i don't put in these videos and that content only stays up for a day or two normally so the only way to see that is if you do hit that bell make sure you get notified so you can catch those live videos okay so when you go to create a facebook ad campaign they're going to ask you to choose your objective and they'll give you a list of 11 different ad campaign objectives and facebook organizes those objectives into three different columns basically those columns are designed to kind of represent a customer journey so you've got awareness consideration and conversion that that being that people start in the awareness phase then they move into considering a product and then they convert into a lead or a customer that's the theory there and why they structure it and they just do that to make it a bit easier for new advertisers to understand and to visualize and to make the right choice unfortunately it's not a perfect system and i'll often use these campaign objectives not necessarily in this order or in this way that facebook kind of lays out for us and you'll understand why as we go through this video so what facebook wants you to do and the purpose of these objectives is for you to tell facebook what it actually is that you want to achieve so that the system can then go out and help you achieve that objective so in theory if you choose the right objective then they will get you the result that you want and that generally happens the problem is when you actually don't choose the objective that is aligned with your end goal so here's how it works facebook basically know an incredible amount about each of their users i'm talking thousands and thousands of data points and this goes way beyond just you know knowing what pages you've liked and who your friends are they even know which users tend to click a lot of links on facebook they know if a user is more likely to engage with posts so if they click the like button on a lot of posts and they comment on a lot of posts facebook knows that about that person they know which people are likely to click ads and then go and enter an email address and sign up for something they know which users are more likely to purchase so they know if user a is somebody who regularly clicks ads and goes off and buys things straight away or maybe user b they might know that that person very rarely purchases products from ads they have these big profiles built for every user and they use that when they're targeting their ads and that is where the facebook campaign objectives come in basically you tell facebook what your objective is and they'll put your ads in front of people who are likely to go and complete that objectives so we just said for example facebook knows who is likely to click on an ad so if you tell facebook you want traffic it's going to go and put your ads in front of people who are likely to click links and go off to visit websites after they see an ad what you need to make sure you do here is choose an objective that actually aligns with your end goal and not an objective that aligns with something that's further up in the process or higher in the process so don't worry if you don't know what that means i'm going to walk you through an example now to clarify exactly what i'm talking about let's say you want people to register for a webinar and so your objective is for people to click on your ad go to your landing page enter their name and email click the submit button and register for an upcoming webinar now the first step in that process is to get a person to click the ad and go to the landing page so you want traffic to your landing page but a really common and easy mistake to make here would be to choose traffic as your objective and say well i want traffic to my landing page it makes sense right but what happens then is if you choose traffic as the objective facebook is going to go out and show your ads to people who are likely to click links so those people might be very likely and they will be very likely to click on a link in an ad but those people are not necessarily the same people who are likely to convert into a lead meaning they're not the people who often enter their name and email and sign up for things so you've told facebook hey i want traffic facebook is going to show your ads to people who are likely to click on a link and you're going to get exactly what you asked for so facebook in that case will send you a lot of traffic to your landing page but what you will find is that very few of those people and i'm talking very few like less than five percent will actually register for the webinar they won't take that final step because you've told facebook you want traffic and they're giving you traffic but you actually want conversions what you really want the end goal is for people to enter their name and email and sign up for your webinar so the correct campaign objective here would be conversions because then you're telling facebook okay i want people who are going to convert into a lead meaning a webinar subscriber so if you choose conversions facebook is going to show your ads then to people who are likely to register for the webinar who are likely to actually convert into a lead and you are going to get much better results so that's what i mean by focusing on your end goal look at what the final thing is that you want users to do the main thing in this case it was convert into a webinar subscriber so we choose conversions don't focus on that first step which is traffic or an earlier step in the process focus on what you actually want them to do in the end and it's that conversions objective that i find myself using 80 of the time because most of the time what we're doing is we're running ads on facebook and we want people to either become a lead or a customer so make a purchase from us conversions encompasses all different types of conversion events so whether it's signing up for an email list where so that could be a webinar a pdf a cheat sheet a checklist it could be booking a call with you so converting into a lead that way it could be purchasing a product so converting into a customer so that's where you'll see e-commerce companies advertising products they'll send you to a product page people enter their credit card details and buy the product that's where you would go with conversions wanting people to convert into customers so you might be wondering well how does facebook know the difference between a conversion that is a lead and a conversion that is a purchase and the way they do that is at the ad set level so when you choose conversions as your campaign objective facebook will ask you at the ad set level what conversion specifically would you like to optimize for and that's where you can choose to optimize for a lead or for let's say a booking an appointment or booking a call or it could be optimizing for a purchase and that's where you tell facebook exactly what it is that you want and they can then optimize for that conversion event for you now if you're thinking what the heck is a conversion event i've got no idea what this guy's talking about i made a video on conversions as well so there should be a link that pops up at the top of this video now you can click that after you watch this video or click it now in a new window whatever you want to do and check it out after this that'll explain conversion events and how to set them up as well okay so now you know that you know conversions are going to be the bulk of your campaigns most likely because you're going to be wanting a direct response from your customers you're going to want them to click an ad and then go ahead and do something but there are several scenarios and several campaigns that we're running quite regularly that use different objectives so i'll walk you through a few of those now in a few common situations that you might run into first let's look at a situation where you might use the traffic objective the traffic objective can be really handy when you simply want people to go to a page on a website and consume the content so for example if we're running traffic to blog posts if we want to get people to read our latest blog post then we'll simply choose the traffic objective and then put the link to our blog post in that ad and facebook is going to send us lots of traffic to that post we don't want people in this case to enter a name an email or purchase something all we want to do is send people to that page so they can read the blog post and so that's a situation where the traffic objective would be perfect and it works really well for that so another example where we might want to use a different objective is video views so there's a video views campaign objective and that's perfect and we use this quite often for when we want to promote a video on facebook so we upload a video to our facebook page natively so when it linked to the video we actually upload the video and we turn that video into an ad and all we want to do is get people to watch the video and consume the content and so the objective that works best there is video views and remember this is going back to just telling facebook exactly what it is you want so in this case if we just want people to watch the video and we don't want them to click a link and go and check out a blog post or visit a website we just want them to consume that video content right there on the facebook platform then video views is perfect for that and we use this for videos where we're just giving content like this one just helpful information and we want to share that so that's where we would use a video views objective and another fairly common objective that i will use is the reach objective and this is a good example of an objective where we're not using it in that order that facebook lays their objectives out at the start so we had the awareness phase at the start and the reach objective was under awareness but i tend to use the reach objective quite differently to that and where i find myself using the reach objective is at the bottom of the funnel so after people have seen our offers and we're trying to remind them of something or get a particular message in front of them i will use the reach objective especially when it's a small audience so the reach objective what we're telling facebook there is hey i just want this ad to reach as many people in my target audience as possible now this is important because you'll remember from earlier in the video i talked about how facebook will show your ads to specific people based on the objective that you choose so let's say you have a target audience and you you say i want to target everybody who has visited my website or engage with me on facebook or instagram or who's liked my page in the last 12 months when you do that and you say i choose the conversion objective there might be a million people in your target audience but when you choose the conversion objective facebook says ah but only 200 000 of those million people are actually likely to convert so i'm going to show these ads not to the whole million people but to the 200 000 that i know are likely to convert so facebook doesn't show your ads to the entire target audience it shows your ads to the people who are likely to complete the objective that you've chosen so let's run through an example of how i use reach and why it is better in this circumstance if i'm running ads to a webinar registration and then i'm running a second set of ads a second campaign to remind people of the live webinar to get them to attend so these ads would run on the day of the webinar and i would simply say hey don't forget the webinars today at 3 pm make sure you check your inbox the link is there to join mark it on your calendar you don't want to miss it we're going to be live there'll be a q a that ad is going out to only people who have registered for your webinar so it's a very small audience let's say you've got 500 people who've signed up for the webinar you're just going to target those 500 registrants with that ad to say hey don't forget join the webinar so if we were to choose let's say a traffic objective and we targeted those 500 people facebook is going to then say ah you've got a 500 person audience here but you want traffic and i know that only 100 of these people are likely to click links in ads and so i'm going to show this ad to 100 people out of that 500 person audience now the reason that doesn't work in this situation you've probably realized it already is because we want to remind all of our registrants about the webinar we don't want facebook to just choose a subset and show it to them based on our objective that's where reach comes in if we choose the reach objective facebook is going to try and show our ad to as many of those 500 people as it possibly can which is perfect and better still we can set the frequency of those ads so we can actually tell facebook when we choose the reach objective hey i would like to show these ads once per day per person in the case of a webinar reminder i would say i want people to see this ad twice per day per person okay i can set that up and i know that almost all of my webinar registrants are then going to see those reminder ads and that's where the reach objective comes in handy all right so let's move on to which objectives i basically never use and never touch and there are only really two of them one is brand awareness and the reason i don't use brand awareness is because the way that is used what you're telling facebook is i want more people to become aware or familiar with my brand and the way these campaigns work is facebook shows your ads to a ton of different people and of course you choose the targeting as always it shows your ads and then it surveys them after and you may or may not have seen this in the news feed but it will pop up with a little thing to those people after a little box and it says hey which of these brands do you recognize or hey do you remember seeing x brand in the last 24 hours yes or no and it surveys people and so it'll show your ads and then ask them do they recognize your brand do they remember your brand do they have they seen it before and it measures brand uplift so it basically says okay based on this campaign your uplift was 10 like 10 more people or whatever recognize your brand like for most businesses small and medium sized it's it's just useless and it costs to run one of these effectively is a six figure us dollar spend right it's very expensive and you're basically measuring how much of an uplift your brand got and um that really is only useful for brands like coca-cola and huge brands like that okay they're the ones using these brand uplifts can uplift campaigns for us it's largely irrelevant now the other campaign objective that i never use is engagement so i have used this in the past and i used to use it but you know things have changed things have moved on and the facebook landscape is very different to what it used to be and so i just don't use engagement campaigns anymore basically with an engagement objective what you're telling facebook is you want people to engage with your ad and that means it could be clicking the like button it could be adding a comment if it's video ads a three second video view is considered an engagement so you might run one of these ads to a video and then you get a bunch of people watching for three seconds and facebook's like hey i got you you know 100 engagements um basically the theory is you're building social proof on the ads so building lots of likes comments and whatever on the ads and you may have seen there's strategies around this very old sort of stuff now it's just largely ineffective like what happens is if you create a good ad and you choose your actual objective so being conversions or whatever it is you're going to get people engaging with the ad anyway you don't need to pay specifically for an engagement you just choose your actual goal and if the ads are great ad people will like and comment and share it so yeah engagement is just generally it's a waste of money i have heard rumors that maybe facebook will even remove the engagement objective at some point so yeah it's just something that i don't even bother using now all right so hopefully by this point you understand the importance of choosing the right objective and how to actually make that decision and choose the right objective for your facebook ad campaigns if you enjoyed this video please all i ask literally is that you just hit that thumbs up button it really does help a lot even though it's super quick and easy for you to do it means a lot for the channel it helps us grow and it tells me what kind of content you enjoy and what i should keep creating if you decide you want to hear more from me click subscribe and click that little bell and you'll get notified whenever i release a new video on digital marketing or facebook ads and also when i do those facebook lives where i do things like q and a's and put content out there that i don't share in my regular videos and that stuff's only around for 24 to 48 hours so if you're not on the notification list there then you probably won't see those all right thanks again for watching as always i really appreciate your time and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you