What is the Difference Between Facebook Ad Objectives? (2022)

The first thing you will see when you go to run an ad on facebook is a question asking you to select your ad objective. Selecting the appropriate objective can make your campaign or break your ad budget. It is important to think heavily about why you are running your ad and what kind of results you want before you pick your objective. You want to make sure your objective to aligns with your desired results. Once you publish your ad, your ad objective can not be changed. 

Let's take some time to get familiar with the different objective options you will see in ad maker:

Facebook’s New 2022 Ad Objectives

Facebook has recently unveiled a new flow in Ad Manager when creating your ads. Instead of seeing the original 11 ad objectives, you will now see 6. You will still be able to obtain all of the same goals with your facebook ad campaigns however now some of the campaign objectives have been combined.

Awareness

• Select this objective to help more people discover your brand and become familiar with your products/services. This objective is best used for cold audiences that are built off of things like interest, demographics, or region.

  Options under this objective can allow for your ads to be shown to as many people as possible in a selected audience. This approach would be best used to target smaller more specific audiences, like ads for people in a geographic region.

  Selecting this objective will usually not result in catalog or website sales and is best used in campaigns to boost page likes. This objective features the Reach, Brand Awareness, and Video Views options under the previous Ad Manager flow.

Traffic

• This is one of the most used objectives in retargeting ad campaigns. When you select this objective your ads will focus on link clicks and work to drive traffic to your website or landing page.

  Use this objective to retarget people who have visited your website previously and drive them to your new content. You can also use the traffic objective to target people who engaged with your previous ads ran under the Awareness objective and move them off social media to a landing page where you may convert a sale or collect email addresses.

  While running ads under this objective will focus on clicks, and not sales, it may be a cheaper option than the Sales objectives if you have a limited audience.

Engagement

• When you run ads on the engagement objective Facebook will try to show your ad to people who are most likely to like comment, watch, save, or share your post.

  This objective also includes the options for Video Views under the previous Ad Manager flow. These options allow you to increase views on a new video or boost views on a video you already posted.

  Run ads under this objective for campaigns towards the top of your funnel. This campaign is great because it performs well with both cold audiences and audiences who are already familiar with your brand.

  A great strategy is retarget users from your engagement ads with Traffic or Sales ads. This way you are showing your most valuable content to people who have already shown interest in what you are offering.

Leads

• Use this objective to get customers to exchange their contact information for your offer. Lead generation is the only objective that allows customers to fill out an instant contact form without leaving the platform.

  This objective also has options that will direct user to send Messages to your business profile by interacting with your ad. This objective is best used in combination with a chat bot or by setting up the auto-responses within Facebook before running the ad. This way users have a seamless experience when interacting with your ad and you have a higher chance of converting the lead.

  Since asking customers for their information is a hard task that takes trust built over time, this objective is best use towards the bottom of your campaign funnel. Once people are familiar with your brand and you have gained trust it will be easier to ask for personal information.

App Promotion

• This objective will not be used by many business owners and should only be used by people who have an app for their business.

  This objective will work to drive installs and in-app events. This objective is popular with services like Uber as well as mobile games.

Sales

• This is another popular objective for retargeting campaigns. This objective focuses on Conversions by getting people to purchase products from your website or your Online Catalog .

  Running sales ads should only be done as part of a thought out strategy as they are some of the most expensive ads you can run on the platform. Closing a sale is a journey, therefore your sales ads should be shown to an audience of people who are very familiar with your brand already. For instance, you may show Sales ads to people who have been to your website and abandoned their cart.

  When using this objective to retarget web traffic be sure to select an audience that is from your website pixel. You can also try retargeting engagement on a specific post to see if those people are also likely to purchase your products.

Conclusion

It is important to learn not only how the different ad objectives work, but how they can work together. Running a successful ad campaign for your business is not about running one “good” ad. Once you learn to run a combination of ads under different objectives that work to reach your goal you will see a huge increase in performance on your individual ads.

Don’t expect one ad to do all of work of spreading brand awareness, getting post engagement, driving traffic, AND closing the sale. Instead run ads under the appropriate objectives to get your desired result.

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