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Many entrepreneurs are surprised when the question arises when planning a Facebook campaign: what advertising goal is the campaign supposed to have? After all, it seems obvious – we want to promote our business and reach more potential customers.
Facebook Ads
however, encourages us to choose a target tailored to our needs, which will make advertising even more effective. We can choose various factors: contact acquisition, brand recognition, ad frequency, app installations and many others. Which target to choose in the ad manager?
Why is it important to think carefully about the purpose of an advertising campaign?
Facebook campaign goals literally translate into actions you want someone to take on your platform. They also determine to whom the ad should be displayed. Of course, reaching the right target audience guarantees the success of your campaign.
When using Facebook, users constantly provide the platform with information about their interests, behaviors and activities. Thus, the platform is constantly analyzing which actions are most likely for a particular user. That’s why choosing the right campaign target in the ad manager is essential to ensure that your ad is displayed to people who typically take the actions you want.
Facebook campaign goals – how many are there?
Currently, Facebook provides us with as many as 6 advertising targets. If this number of options intimidates you, here’s a guide to choosing a target that fits your business needs.
Advertising objectives – Brand awareness/recognition
This advertising target should be chosen by companies that are new to the industry and want to make customers aware of a new product or service on the market, thus increasing brand recognition. An advertising target will also work if you want to reach new audiences, for example, in a new region. The campaign aims to make our offer a little more familiar and show it as a potential option to people who are interested in products in our industry. The main goal at the campaign level is to increase people’s interest in your company by displaying your ad to more people.
The detailed targeting options in this ad target are optimized for impressions, so your ads can display to as many people in your target audience as possible. As a result, clicks and engagement with ads using this target will tend to be low. So it will not be a good campaign for companies that want to increase sales or website traffic.
Advertising Targets – Traffic
This advertising target should be chosen by those who want to redirect the target audience to a page outside Facebook with the help of a link. So the ad will be displayed to people who tend to click on external links. It is an ideal choice for companies that need more website hits. However, displaying a page does not necessarily mean taking action on it – we will use other purposes for that.
At the advertising level of your campaign, select the target URL, which can be any selected target site. It is worth optimizing it first for this campaign goal. Setting up advertising will increase our chances of contacting potential customers.
Advertising objectives – Engagement
If the main goal of your Facebook ads is to increase engagement, choose…just Engagement. Facebook will display your ads to the people in your target audience who are most likely to perform your planned activities. When configuring an ad with this target, you can choose from three engagement type options:
Commitment to fasting
For this goal, it’s all about reactions, comments, shares, giving likes and emoticons on
social media
. Such activity about specific posts helps build a relationship with the brand. Of course, the post must encourage the audience to engage and give them a reason to leave a reaction.
Page/profile likes
If your main goal is to increase the number of Facebook page followers, choose the engagement type of Page Likes to reach people who click “Like” on your site.
Responses to events
If you are organizing a Facebook event, you can use this type of engagement to encourage more people to respond. Keep in mind, however, that 100 people clicking on “I’ll attend” does not necessarily mean that so many people will show up at the event. So if you’re more interested in encouraging users to buy a ticket or attend an event, you can get better results by using the Conversions ad type and referring users to your site.
This advertising objective is ideal for increasing engagement with your brand and getting people to interact with it by liking, commenting and sharing your content.
Advertising Targets – Contacts/Leads
Target allows you to acquire contacts by adding a contact form to your Facebook ad. You can also customize the form to ask other questions if you want to gather more information from a potential customer. When someone clicks on your ad, they will be asked to provide detailed information, such as their name, email address and other contact information. Much of this data is already stored on Facebook, so the user can quickly add this information to the form.
You can download the information collected from the form via your website or automatically upload it to your CRM via Facebook. This target is created for brands for which contact acquisition is most important, meaning those that need leads to send offers. Contact acquisition works better with users who already know our brand and product and are interested in buying it.
Advertising purposes – Application installations
If you want to increase the number of downloads of the application you have created, for advertising purposes of the ad manager, it is worth selecting App Installations, of course. Your ads will then be displayed to the people in your audience who are most likely to install the app. Clicking on the ad will redirect them directly to the app store. In order to get the best results in achieving this goal, you need to register your application with Facebook.
If you want your campaign to succeed, try to convince potential users of the benefits of downloading your app. The website should be tailored to the needs of the campaign.
Advertising Targets – Sales
Tailor-made goal for those who want users to perform actions that result in conversions on the company’s website. This is, of course, about selling services or products, so this target is most often chosen by e-commerce stores. This advertising target “works” best when it is aimed at people who are already familiar with our offerings.
With this goal, we are not promoting a single product, but the entire product catalog. By choosing the Carousel structure for this purpose, we allow Facebook’s algorithm to autonomously select products from your catalog. The platform will select the most suitable ones for a particular user, thus increasing sales.
Which Facebook Ads targeting is most effective?
As you probably already understand, there is no single right answer to this question. It all depends on the type of our business, how much it is on the market, whether we want to increase awareness, website traffic or maybe sales. So there is no one right answer, so we may choose different advertising targets at different stages of running our business.
