What are Facebook Campaign Objectives and how to choose the right one

Picking the right Facebook campaign objective is the most important step for any marketing agency or marketer starting to run Facebook or Instagram ads. Each of the campaign objectives is optimized for a specific type of event, and your choice will also tell Facebook what kind of audience they need to show your ads to. Picking the wrong objective will mean a massive increase in costs and cause your marketing budget to be spent ineffectively.

So what are the different campaign objectives, and which one should I pick?

Awareness Objectives

Awareness objectives are best for a new brand. If you just opened a restaurant for example or started a new company, awareness objectives will work great.

They specialize in getting your ads shown to as many people as possible for the lowest cost. These people are not likely to convert, but they are good to start getting data on your Facebook pixel or to start building brand recognition.

Awareness objectives can also work well if you are running a retargeting conversion campaign, where you can use awareness objectives for your beginning of funnel ads and then retarget to the group that made some sort of action on those ads for your conversion campaign.

Consideration Objectives

Consideration objectives are best for small actions. This means actions like filling out an email list, typing your information into the site for a quote, or just clicking onto your site. While using objectives like these are unlikely to convert to purchases just off of your ads alone. They can also be good for a new pixel that you are still trying to get more data for.

These ads can be good if you need to build up traffic on your site quickly or if you are trying to build things like your email list. While these ads can makes sales, they are going to be ineffective unless they are leading into another form of marketing like an email list.

Conversion Objectives

Conversion objectives are the go-to options when you are looking to make sales. These objectives tell the Facebook algorithm to target people who have a propensity towards your product and are likely to make a purchase or hit another conversion event like adding a product to their cart. They typically are not the best for things like email lists or sign-up forms however, as they are needlessly targeting a more expensive audience.

The downfall for conversion objectives is that they can be pricey to use. Conversion objectives typically target audiences that are likely to make a sale, which also means that each action taken on your site is going to come at a higher cost.

Because of this, we typically suggest using something like a consideration objective if you are marketing on a very low budget so that you can get out of the Facebook learning phase.

How to Choose

If you are working with a solid budget, you can pretty much choose whichever objective you want. The objectives are typically labeled based on what goal they search for, whether that be link clicks or sales, so just choose whichever objective will meet your goal.

If you are working with a small budget however, I would suggest you choose whichever objective you can get out of the learning phase with. For some very small budgets, you may only be able to get out of the learning phase with an awareness objective, so you shouldn't go for the pricier conversion objectives. Try to get as close to your ideal objective as possible while still being able to get out of the learning phase.