Understanding Meta Ads: A Breakdown of Campaign Objectives

Meta ads is a paid social platform that allows users to place ads across stories, reels, feeds and other placements across Facebook and Instagram. Meta can be the perfect platform for any businesses looking to target ads towards specific audiences as it allows you to reach people based on location, age, gender, interests and much more.

Similar to other paid platforms, Meta uses campaign objectives to drive users towards your ads. Meta has six main campaign objectives: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion and sale. Selecting your objective is the first part of setting your campaign up, so understanding what they are is crucial for the success of the campaigns.

Choosing a campaign objective will be different case by case and these objectives may change as your business and strategy grow. Before choosing your campaign objective, it’s important to evaluate what results you want from the campaign. This will then help you decide on the main objective for the campaign. 

So, let’s get started…

Awareness

If the business goals are to promote the brand, video views or store location then the awareness objective would suit the needs best. This goal seeks to reach as many people as possible within your allocated budget while focusing on the audiences most likely to remember your brand.

There are many instances where awareness would be a suitable objective for your campaign, for example if you are a new business or a start up, you have a new product launching or a new store launching.

Traffic

The objective for traffic is commonly used when the aim is to send people to your website, apps or event. The traffic objective is most commonly used to gain more engagement in relation to link clicks, landing page views, messages and calls. This objective can also encourage people to interact with the posts by commenting, liking and sharing.

Setting your campaigns up using the traffic objective won’t necessarily turn into conversions as it focuses more on the number of people it can reach. If conversions are your goal, then there are more suitable objectives. If you are considering using the traffic objective, we would recommend having a high quality landing page as this is what your consumer will interact with when they come onto site.

Engagement

Choosing the engagement objective is best for targeting customers who are in the consideration stage of the funnel. By using the engagement objective you can get your content in front of the relevant users who already have an interest in your product or service.

Engagement can also help boost your social proof and reach – the more people engaging with your post, the more likely others will.  A big advantage to using engagement is that it can increase organic reach as well as reaching a wider audience, which will enable you to create more specific audiences. Retargeting is always a great option when advertising on social platforms.

Leads

The lead generation objective allows you to get leads for your business via in platform lead forms, messages or phone calls. This enables you to collect customer data without sending them directly onto the website. Information such as names, email, address and phone number are accessible via the lead form on the platform.

The lead forms can be customisable so you can ensure you get the correct information you are looking for. Rather than just collecting the basic information you can also ask users to expand on their points, this way you will be able to profile a potential customer.

The lead generation objective can also be used for website conversions, this allows users to visit your site and become a potential lead via the site rather than on meta. This can be used for if you want to get people to visit a specific page, view a specific product or another action. Using this campaign objective will encourage them to visit your website.

App Promotion

You can promote objectives within your app with the app promotion objective. This objective will work well for you if you want to increase downloads or promote a new feature. It is most effective at driving app installations, which gives you the opportunity to connect with new people who might otherwise never download your app. 

This aim can help you target people who will complete an activity you want within your app, especially if your goal is to increase awareness. If you wanted users to sign up or try out a new feature, this objective would work best.

Sales

An effective way to achieve your goal if you want to boost revenue is to use the sales objective. Finding users who are more likely to buy your products or services is the intent of this goal. If you want to sell more products, this objective encourages people to make that purchase from the ad or website.

You may also use the sales target if you are running promotions, this will help you generate a sense of urgency and motivate customers to buy before the deal finishes. When attempting to upsell or cross-sell products, the sales target can also be helpful. This strategy is most effective when it comes to encouraging current clients to make additional purchases.

Conclusion

Having a better understanding of the objectives will enable you to choose the best strategy to reach your goals. Identifying the objective you want to use is only the first step towards a successful meta campaign; other factors to take into account include audience targeting, creative, and budget.

Struggling to identify which objective would work best for your strategy? Talk to a member of the team today to discuss more!