The Basics of Facebook Ads, Part 2

Click here to read The Basics of Facebook Ads, Part 1

Now that you have made a simple ad in Facebook Ads Manager and you understand the platform a little better, the next step is understanding the purpose of Campaign Objectives. Currently there are almost a dozen different choices, so I’m not going into detail on every one. Instead, I’ll cover common objectives that can help you get started, and in future blogs I will dive deeper into the Conversion objective, at the very least.

Objective 1: Brand Awareness/Reach
The brand awareness and reach objectives are not exactly the same, but I would recommend staying away from choosing either one unless you have a large budget. The goal of these ads is to help your brand gain traction and awareness on Facebook and while this can absolutely lead to high quality leads and traffic, that is not the purpose. Instead, Facebook will aim to show your ad to as many people for as low of a price as possible, which sounds great - except if you only have a hundred dollars or so, you probably want to focus on your ideal customer instead of ‘whosoever may come.’

That said, it can be a great learning tool to show you who is engaging with your ads and what kind of audience you may have, so don’t throw the idea out completely. My advice, however, is not to start with this option if you are advertising for the first time.

Objective 2: Traffic
The goal of this objective is to send people to the website you choose, often your own. I like this objective because it gets people to invest a little more time in your business by reading on a different platform than Facebook, and it can help improve your Google ranking since you are increasing web traffic. Facebook will show this ad to people who are most likely to click away from their platform to wherever you want to send them.

Objective 3: Engagement
This objective is hit-or-miss in my opinion, but it can be helpful both to increase engagement on a certain post and to test out an audience. In this objective, Facebook will show your ad to people most likely to like/react or comment on your ad. My best advice is not to use this as a vanity metric just to make one really good post - that does not have sustainable effects! Instead, you could use this type of ad to help establish yourself as the authority on a particular topic, or make people aware of who you are and what your business does.

Additionally, the results from this ad can show you more about your ideal audience, and you can use it to build on your next ad, since there are options for selecting audiences who have engaged with your page recently. The plus side is that engagement ads often (and should) have low cost-per-result, so you don’t need a huge budget in general to make it a success.

Objective 4: Video Views
I think this one is pretty obvious, but it’s worth noting anyways! This did not used to be an option, but as Facebook has promoted video, it was added into the mix. This objective is specifically targeted at video ads, even though you could argue that ‘engagement’ has a lot of similarities.

While this may be the ideal choice for your video, keep in mind that Facebook counts a ‘video view’ if someone watches longer than 3 seconds - even if your video autoplays in their feed as they scroll past, or it’s muted. Don’t get hung up on the high numbers here. Instead, focus on who is watching your video for a long time, and spend sparingly on this type of objective. Also, be sure to add captions to your ad since there will be lots of people watching on silent, whether at work or out and about.

Conclusion
Imagine - I just covered, very briefly, 4 out of 11 objectives - and there are sure to be more in the future! I always recommend experimentation if your budget allows, and deciding what you want your ad to accomplish before you create the campaign. It will pay dividends in the long run if you figure out what exactly you want to do before you figure out how to do it!

Up next? All about creating custom audiences for your ad set! Subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss the next blog.