How to Choose The Right Ad Campaign Objective

Your first step in creating a Facebook ad campaign is to select your campaign objective. This lets Facebook know which event to target and optimize your budget and bidding for.

Think of it like telling Facebook what it is you wish to achieve and they’ll provide the best tools to use.

Be sure to select the Facebook campaign objective that aligns best with your current advertising goal and what you wish to achieve.

Facebook Campaign Objectives

The full list of 11 Facebook campaign objective are separated into 3 categories.

• Awareness: Objectives that create interest in your business.
• Consideration: Objectives that get potential customers thinking about your product or service and go seeking for more information.
• Conversions: Objectives that target interested buyers and navigate them to your online store or physical location to purchase from you.

For each Facebook Campaign Objective we’ll explain the following.

1.) Brand awareness: campaign objective

When to Use The “Brand Awareness” Objective?

The “Brand Awareness” campaign objective is a good option if you’d like more people to become aware of your business and brand.

2.) Reach: campaign objective

When to Use The “Reach” Objective?

The “Reach” campaign objective is a good option for when you would like to show your ad to the most amount of people, multiple times in a somewhat short period of time.

3.) Traffic: campaign objective

When to Use The “Traffic” Objective?

The “traffic” campaign objective is a good option for when you’d like to bring as many interested people to your website as possible as an affordable price.

4.) Engagement: campaign objective

When to Use The “Post Engagement” Objective?

The “post engagement” objective is best for when you’d like as many people as possible to like, comment and share your post.

Since Facebook can’t charge you for engagement you get organically from when someone shares this is a great option for creating “viral” posts and getting more page likes.

5.) App installs: campaign objective

When to Use The “App Installs” Objective?

The “app installs” objective is great for when you’d like to target people with a tendency to download apps and bring them off of Facebook to the Apple or Android store to download your own app.

6. Video views: campaign objective

When to Use The “Video Views” Objective?

The “video views” objective is a good option for when you are trying to get as many inexpensive video views as possible.

This is a great option for cold audiences as you can then later retarget users based off how much of your video they watched.

Example: A conversion ad targeting those that watched at least 70% of your original video ad.

If you would like to learn more about retargeting ads on Facebook, check out our What is Facebook Retargeting post!

7.) Lead generation: campaign objective

When to Use the “Lead Generation” Objective?

The “lead generation” objective is great for when you are trying to collect qualified customer information cheaply and at a high conversion rate.

This objective allows you to created your own forms and fields to collect things like name, email, phone address, custom fields, multiple choice questions, etc. all without the user leaving Facebook.

8.) Messages: campaign objective

When to use the “Messages” objective?

The “messages” objective is a good option for when you like to start private conversations with potential customers.

This can be effective for things like RSVP events, sales conversations, and awareness building

9.) Conversions: campaign objective

When to Use The “Conversions” Objective?

The “conversions” objective is by far the BEST campaign objective for getting as many site events as possible. This includes adds to cart, initiate checkouts, purchases, contact forms, etc.

If you have an eCommerce store and wants sales to come from your ads you need to try this objective.

10.) Catalog sales: campaign objective

When to Use The “Catalog Sales” Objective?

The “catalog sales” objective is great for when eCommerce stores you use the Facebook Shop feature and have their inventory uploaded to their Facebook page.

This campaign objective delivers ads for your products to people interested in them or those who have already interacted with your business (aka retargeting).

11.) Store traffic: campaign objective

When to use the “Store Traffic” objective?

The “store traffic” objective is a good option for when you’d like interested customers in your local area to come visit your physical location.