Choosing the Right Campaign Objective on Facebook

When you’re setting up Facebook ad campaigns, choosing the right campaign objective is critical to finding success.

The Facebook algorithm does an amazing job at optimizing each campaign for exactly what you tell it to. 

But you need to make sure you are feeding it the right data so it knows which direction you want it to take your campaigns.

So let’s jump in and cover the top campaign objectives here.

Facebook Campaign Objective Types

There are 11 different types of ad campaign objectives you can choose from:

Here at our digital advertising agency we run campaigns lead generation and direct response marketing funnels. 

So we focus mainly on these five campaign objectives:

1. Conversions
2. Traffic
3. Post Engagement
4. Video Views
5. Lead Generation

And pretty much in that order too.

Conversion Campaigns

Roughly 70 – 80% of the campaigns we run are conversion campaigns. 

This is when we have a specific conversion event that we want Facebook to optimize for.

Usually this is a lead or a sale in a marketing funnel.

Let’s take a webinar funnel for example…

We want to send leads to a landing page and have them sign up for a webinar.

We can tell the Facebook algorithm to optimize for people who are going to register for the webinar, and then Facebook will go out and optimize the campaign for people who are going to register based on the data we are sending it through the Facebook pixel.

What about a lead generation funnel….

We can tell Facebook to go and optimize for people who are going to opt-in and become a lead for our business.

When someone arrives at the thank you page, we use the Facebook pixel to send a little bit of data noting that person did become a lead and Facebook will go out and find more people like that person who just became a lead.

And finally a tripwire funnel….

We can tell Facebook to optimize this campaign to find people who are going to purchase our tripwire offer.

When someone purchases the product Facebook learns through the pixel and goes out to find more people like that one.

The Key To Successful Conversion Campaigns

The key here is to be able to feed the Facebook algorithm with enough data to know what event to optimize for.

This means having conversion tracking set up with the Facebook pixel so it knows who is converting for your chosen even so that it can go find more people like that.

How Do You Know What Event To Optimize For…

We don’t have to guess which event is best. Facebook tells us in their documentation.

“When choosing the right event to optimize for … we recommend getting about 50 optimization events within your conversion window per week. These 50 have to be attributable to your ads”

If the event you are optimizing for does not get at least 50 conversions that are attributable to your ad campaign, it’s not going to have enough data to optimize properly. 

So, choose the event deepest in the funnel that will be getting enough conversions

Traffic Campaigns

When you are not able to optimize for conversions because you do not have enough conversion events, or you are just testing a new funnel, or you just want to drive a lot of traffic to a page… the traffic campaign is often the right choice.

In this case, Facebook will optimize for exactly that… driving traffic to your chosen landing page.

We use this campaign objective when we don’t have enough conversions coming into an event but want to get people clicking on our ads.

Facebook will learn through the pixel who is landing on your landing page and optimize the campaign for people who are going to click through your ad and go to your marketing funnel.

Post Engagement Campaigns

Sometimes you don’t have a link on your post. 

Maybe you’re running a retargeting ad to your audience to engage them with content or get them to share something out for you.

Or maybe you just want to build social proof up on your ads.

In this case, we choose post engagement campaigns.

This is when you want Facebook to determine who are the people who are liking, commenting, and sharing your ads and get this ad in front of more people like this.

Often times we use post engagement ads for retargeting to get content and social posts in front of our warm audiences with retargeting campaigns.

Video View Campaigns

Video view campaigns tell Facebook to optimize for people who will consume a video on your ads.

When  you have video content that you want to get out there, you can set up a campaign to tell Facebook to watch for who is watching your content the most and optimize the campaign for more people like that.

We use these campaigns the most when we have new video content that we want to seed out to an audience.

Then we retarget users who watched more than 50% of the video to main product or offer.

These types of two-step campaigns have been working well with Facebook ads because it warms up the audience and get them to engage with your brand first before seeing a call to action to buy a product or sign up for something.

Lead Generation Campaigns

Lead Generation Campaigns are a special type of campaign objective that allows you to capture contact information inside of the Facebook platform so that the user never has to leave Facebook to fill out your form and become a lead for your business.

When you choose “Lead Generation” as the campaign objective, it creates a lead form on your ad. 

A lead form is basically like a mini “landing page” you can use to capture information and send that to your CRM or anywhere else you need.

The information also prepopulates with the users information that is already saved on their facebook profile so they just have to confirm and hit the submit button.

Facebook likes these types of ads because it keeps users on the platform and typically we find a lower cost per lead with these types of ads.

These ads can be great for lead generation, lead magnets, or registering people for webinars.

But make sure you use a tool like Zapier to send these leads where they need to go, otherwise their contact information will just sit inside your Facebook Page somewhere in the settings waiting to hear from you.

Testing Campaign Objectives

Just to show you how great at optimizing for particular events are, we’ve ran some different split tests to see how the algorithm works..

Below is one test that we ran to measure the conversions objective vs. the traffic objective. Both campaigns had the same audiences and ad creatives. The only difference was the campaign objective.

Campaign Objective	Click Through Rate	Cost Per Click	Cost Per Lead
Conversion	1.15%	$0.97	$2.72
Traffic	2.57%	$0.35	$7.09

As you can see, the traffic campaign objective did a great job at optimizing the campaign for people who clicked on the ad to go the landing page, giving us a higher click-through-rate and lower cost per click by 64%.

But the conversion campaign gave us a lower cost per lead by 62%.

For each objective, Facebook optimized for exactly what we asked it to do and was able to deliver a better cost per result based on the campaign objective.

Here is one more test that we ran to measure the traffic objective vs. the video view objective. Again, both campaigns had the same audiences and ad creatives. The only difference was the campaign objective.

Campaign Objective	Click Through Rate	Cost Per Click	Video Views at 25%
Traffic	2.22%	$0.47	581
Video Views	0.13%	$7.75	3,343

The traffic campaign objective did a great job at optimizing the campaign for people who clicked on the ad to go the landing page, giving us a higher click-through-rate and lower cost per click on these ads.

But the video views objective got over 5x the video views for the exact same budget. 

At this stage of the campaign our biggest goal was to have people consume our video content so we could retarget them with the next step of the funnel, so we chose to continue investing in the video views campaign.

Wrapping Up

From our experience and based on the numerous tests we’ve run we find Facebook does a great job at optimizing for the campaign objective you set when you feed it enough data to make the right decisions.

We use the 5 campaign objectives mentioned above the most because of the types of campaigns we run on a regular basis.

So plan out your strategy and choose your objectives wisely based on your goals at each stage of the process.

And when in doubt, don’t be afraid to test it out.