Meta advertising can be really effective at accomplishing your larger goals, whether that’s increasing reach, sales, leads, followers, or other options. And while that’s true, if you select the wrong objective you can end up wasting a lot of time, energy, and money.

Here’s how to consider these objectives and make sure you’re choosing the right one for your campaign while taking other steps to optimize it.

Meta campaign objectives

Image source: facebook.com

Historically, advertising on Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram came with many more objectives. Now there are nominally fewer, but none of these past objectives actually went away — they were just recategorized as Meta has evolved their advertising systems.

Here’s how current simplified ad objectives are organized now, and the old objectives included under their umbrella:

• Awareness: Includes past objectives brand awareness, reach, video views, store traffic
• Traffic: Traffic
• Engagement: Engagement, video views, messages, conversions
• Leads: Lead generation, messages, conversions
• App promotion: App installs
• Sales: Conversions, catalog sales

As you can see, some of the simplified objectives encompass a broader category of many old objectives, whereas some are practically a one-to-one replacement of just one or maybe two related old objectives, such as the traffic and app promotion objectives.

When to use each objective

Image source: facebook.com

While choosing an “official” objective on Meta might make it feel different than your approach in other marketing mediums, in reality, it’s all the same principles. Whether you select “awareness” on a Meta campaign or consciously choose approaches designed to increase awareness on another digital or physical campaign, it’s the same thing, really — one of these is just doing a lot of the work for you.

To some that can be more intuitive than others so, if it helps, we recommend visualizing the marketing funnel here. This can help you more clearly conceptualize where your audience is at, and how to best approach them to meet their objectives.

Image source: ahref.com

As a refresher, the marketing funnel is simply a diagram to help visually clarify people’s decision-making process — also called the customer journey — that leads to them purchasing (or converting in any other way, i.e., filling out a form for services, etc.) a product or service.

The most basic version goes from:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty

Some versions won’t include the loyalty stage — although you should always keep that in mind to build upon for the future — and many will include sub-stages in between awareness, consideration, and conversion. As a basic visualization tactic though, these are a good baseline.

Also worth remembering is that each stage is “smaller” than the one before it; there are more people who exist at the awareness stage than those who will continue on to consider the product or brand, fewer still will convert, and fewer will remain brand loyal. (Hence the marketing “funnel.”) This is important to keep in mind because the deeper you go into the funnel to target, the narrower your scope.

So, when in doubt, a good process is to identify which stage of the funnel your intended campaign audience is in and select a corresponding Meta-objective from there.

If you’re trying to reach people who are at the top of the funnel — AKA to get them into the awareness stage — you will, intuitively, want to choose Meta’s awareness objective.

To bring users who are in the “middle” of the funnel — i.e. already aware of your product and who you want to engage them to consider converting on it — the traffic or engagement objectives are appropriate.

For people who have been considering your product or brand and who you would like to convert, the sales objective will almost always be your choice. (There is also the app promotion objective, but that will apply to very few with how specific it is; the sales objective is pretty much always the right selection.)

As you can see, the objectives generally correspond quite straightforwardly with different stages of the marketing funnel.

How your objectives and goals influence the best ways to optimize

Image source: ahrefs.com

It’s probably intuitive that, in principle, anyway, the correct optimizations for a conversion campaign for example will be different from the optimizations for an awareness campaign.

Ergo, when you select “sales objective,” the steps to optimize will look different than those same steps if you were to select “awareness” or “leads” — whether those optimizations are automated by Meta or from your own manual tactics, is a whole other thing.

With Meta’s current setup, the optimizations are more automated than ever; the act itself of selecting a certain objective informs Meta automatically of how to “act” best for your ads and campaign to best achieve your objective. Also, while offered optimization methods can change depending on your objective, many of the same performance goals are available across objectives.

Despite the greater automation, there are still actions you can take to complement the workings of your selected campaign objective.

For example, say you’re an ecommerce business. You have a compelling video about who you are; naturally, this helps build audience awareness and potentially even consideration one after the other. But, as an ecommerce business, you of course ultimately want to have increased sales. With this engaging video as the centerpiece, we’d recommend you run a campaign based on the engagement objective with the performance goal of maximum video views. Then alongside that, we’d recommend a complementary sales campaign to build on that foundation.

Another example: Maybe your business is a bakery. As a brick-and-mortar-based business, you aren’t aiming for online sales — but you’d like to get people to visit your site and see what you offer, your location, etc. Here, we’d likely recommend something like an awareness campaign to increase people’s awareness of your brand plus a traffic campaign to increase site visitors. The two are similar but not exactly the same and help the other work more effectively.

In the end, the key is clearly outlining what your end goal is — both of the campaign itself and how that campaign fits into your larger goals. From there, consider what assets you have — case studies, videos, imagery, etc. — and how those could work towards what you want to achieve.

Consider the marketing funnel and customer journey, where most of your audience or potential audience is in that regard, and how that relates to your goals; it’s, more often than not, a good call to have work aimed at the top of the funnel, the middle for consideration, and the bottom for conversion, going concurrently. As your customer base becomes more concentrated in different areas of the funnel than before, you may rearrange your resources to better reflect that.

And of course, as we always harp on: Test your work to see what’s working well, what’s not working well, and how you can adapt to be as effective as possible!