You’ve got your Facebook page sorted, your Instagram profile is solid, and you’re now ready to take the plunge into paid ads. You’re thinking you’ve got this, this is going to take like 2 seconds to do and then you’ll be rolling in the dough come the end of the week.

You create your Facebook Business Manager or Ads Manager account, and click “create campaign”. And then stop dead in your tracks. Feeling deflated. You’re probably thinking “seriously? Why on earth are there eleven choices for a Facebook campaign objective?!”

Decisions, decisions. Facebook doesn’t make it easy for anyone. Because their algorithm drills down into the finest detail (and quite honestly, I bet they’re just like Google and have no idea how the algorithm actually works), the selection of campaign objectives can seem a little daunting. Should you choose brand awareness? Or reach? You’ve got a video so should you instead use video views? Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll feel a bit more comfortable about how to start on your Facebook ads journey.

What you should do before you start setting up your Facebook Ads Campaign

Come prepared, because if you don’t you’ll be spending days setting up each of your ads. There’s a few things you can do beforehand to make the set up smoother.

Know what your main goal is

Different goals may mean a different campaign objective. And if you have more than one goal, that’s okay. Just perhaps keep it to a maximum of three, especially if your budget is very small (which is still okay). If you have more than one goal, you might find you want to set up more than one campaign.

Set up your audiences

Having your audience already set up in Facebook is a huge time saver, especially if you have several physical locations you want to target or different types of personas. You can set up your audiences in the Audience Manager tab at the top. In this menu, you can then create audiences based on your Facebook pixel (so an audience based on anyone who has viewed your website, a particular page, made a purchase or searched for something in particular. This all depends on how you Pixel is set up). And if you have different audiences that you’re going to use in the one campaign, why not set up an A/B split test and see which audience works better with your campaign creative? More on that soon!

Have your creative ready

Make sure you have the creative you want to use ready, and in the right format. That means if you’re wanting to do a carousel ad, make sure you have square images. If you’re going to use a video, make sure it’s in vertical format if you’re wanting to push it to Instagram or Facebook Stories. Most importantly, if you are using video, make sure your thumbnail adheres to the 20/80 rule.

Yes, Facebook claims to no longer abide by the 20% text rule on images. But they lied. We have it on good authority they still apply this rule to images and video thumbnails. Not to sure if your creative sticks to the rule? Pop your creative into this handy tool here and you’ll be able to see if you need to shrink the text or go back to the drawing board.

Should I optimise my campaign budget, or set it for each campaign asset?

This question pops up just after you’ve chosen your campaign objective. That’s entirely up to you, however most of the time for our own ads we always optimise the budget, and check our ads’ spend daily. Checking it every day, we can see clearly if an ad is much more successful than another. This could mean that an audience needs a bit of tweaking, or that a piece of creative just doesn’t work for that audience type. It could also mean you have one audience that much bigger to the rest, and so maybe next campaign it should be isolated on its own, with its own budget so it doesn’t chew through a good chunk of your cash.

How to Choose the right Facebook Ad Campaign Objective

So now you’re back to Ad Manager, and you’ve got your list of objectives and everything else. You’re ready to take on this behemoth that is the Facebook Ads Algorithm.

First thing's first. You need to choose an objective based on what you want to achieve (so that goal or goals you have in mind). Think of this in terms of an inverted triangle.

Majority of your audience would be in the awareness stage. This is where you want to generate awareness of your product or service.

In the middle is the consideration stage. You want to get people to really start researching about your products or service. They might have already seen a glimpse of your business, but don’t know you extremely well.

The conversion stage is the bottom of that funnel. It’s the small group of people who are aware who you are, who have started doing their research and shopping, and you now need to encourage and persuade them to use your product of service.

Depending on which stage your objective fits into will help determine which ad objective you should use. So let’s get on with it and list out the objectives, which stage they’re good for and some things you could do with each.

Brand Awareness Objective

This one is really self explanatory. You would use this one to create awareness of your product and service. You want more people to know who you are and what you do. You want to create curiosity and get people to want to find out a bit more about your brand.

Usually it takes someone about 3 times of seeing or hearing something to start to recall that subject, so consider running this for a few weeks if you can and get at least 2 to 3 impressions per person. Don’t go crazy though and run this for a week and smash everyone with your ad. That’s a huge turn off and you’ll be wasting money and annoying your audience in the process.

In terms of audiences you can use, try a lookalike audience of people who have visited your website, or like your Facebook page. You can also use a saved audience of your target persona. If you’re selling a product, why not try a customer audience based on people who have purchased or viewed a similar product on your website.

Reach Objective

This objective is designed to reach a maximum amount of people in a short amount of time. So, it’s great for limited time offers or sales (hence a conversion stage objective), or if you’re opening a new store in a particular area and want to create some hype around your opening (making it then an awareness stage objective). Like brand awareness, you could also use this to create curiosity about your brand.

This is a great objective to remarket to anyone who didn’t purchase a product, especially if your have an exclusive discount code. You could also use a lookalike audience of people who did purchase your product.

Traffic Objective

The sole purpose of a traffic objective is to drive people to your website. However, in saying this, you’re not driving them to do any particular action on your website. So use this objective when you have a great blog post you want to them to read, or you have a new service or product you’re offering, but not necessarily wanting to push them to purchase. This is ultimately a consideration phase objective, unlike the Reach campaign objective that can be a different stage of the funnel depending on what you’re using it for.

Audience wise the traffic objective is great for a saved audience of your persona that would digest whatever material you’re offering, or a lookalike audience of people who have viewed a similar piece of content.

Engagement Objective

This objective is more of a consideration objective, where its purpose is to reach a large number of people who are likely to engage (like, comment, share, RSVP) to your ad. This is perfect if you want to do a page like drive and bring up your follower numbers, or if you have an event going on and want to create buzz and interest around it.

A lookalike audience of people who like you page is a fairly obvious choice for the audience type here, but a saved audience with similar interests to your event would work pretty well as well.

App Installs

Another fairly obvious objective. You’re driving people to install your app, so this is a conversion stage objective.

You would definitely use a custom audience of people who have been on your page, but in this scenario it would be best to ensure it’s people who have recently been on your page. So perhaps make sure it targets users that have visited your site in the last 30 days. That way, you website is still fresh in their minds.

Video Views

One of our favourite objectives is video views. Depending on the of video, this is either awareness or consideration stage. Want to make a video go viral? This is definitely the objective you should use. If you’ve got a great explainer video of your product or service, definitely use this objective.

A saved audience of your target persona would work great here, along with a lookalike audience of people who have visited your site.

Handy tip with this campaign objective — if your one and only objective is to simply drive up the views of one video, in the ad set section, manually edit your placements so that the video shows only in you video feed and suggested videos. Suggested videos is when someone is in Facebook Watch, Facebook’s answer to Youtube. Anyone who is in this part of Facebook is there to fall into the black hole of video watching, and so it’s the perfect spot to plant your video to get longer views to grow an audience for a later campaign.

Lead Generation

You know those ads you get fed where you have to put in your email address to get a piece of supposedly useful content? Yeah, those are lead generation ads. Therefore you want to use this to grow your email database, to give you a group that may convert to a customer later on.

Saved audiences and even just a custom audience of people who have visited your site, but not purchased, or a lookalike audience of people who have purchased would work here.

Messages Objective

Messages objective is the latest objective Facebook has added to its offering. While its quite versatile, not many use it well. If you want to try this one, it could work if you want to drive event attendance or get people to contact you about a particular product so you can them convert them to a customer yourself. You could also use this to drive awareness, so a saved audience would be worth trying this out on.

Conversions Objective

This is probably Facebook’s most popular objective. Designed to lead people to sign up for newsletters or make a purchase, if you’re in e-commerce and not using this objective you’re seriously missing out!

This objective is the one you definitely should use custom audiences on. It gives you a great chance to convert them from a potential customer to a paying one. You can also try a lookalike audience of people who have purchased to your site to attract new customers.

Facebook Ad Campaign - Catalog Sales Objective: What it’s for, when to use it and suggested audiences to use.

Catalogue Sales Objective

Another e-commerce heavy objective. If you’re frequently bringing in new product or you’re not essentially a niche seller, this is your objective. This gives you the opportunity to attract new customers, or re-attract customers that have shopped with you before for a similar product to your new offering. This is perfect for business that get heavy traffic from Instagram.

Store Visits Objective

Definitely the objective you should use if you have a physical location, and where you need to create awareness of your business. Use an audience created around your persona located near you to attract the perfect customer.

So there you have it, a (hopefully!) decent explanation on what each objective in Facebook and instagram. Got any questions or need to pick our brains about something? Drop us a line, or sign up to our newsletter to get more insightful posts straight into your inbox.

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How to choose the right Facebook Ad Campaign for your Objective