With almost 1.6 billion daily active users around the world and more than 2.1 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, Facebook is the category king of social media today. And as a result, its ad services are a simple and hyper-effective marketing option for businesses looking to drive traffic to their websites. In this blog, we step through the different types of ad objectives and ad types on offer from Facebook’s Ads Manager, and how to use these to create winning Facebook Ads.
Facebook offers three ad objectives: awareness, consideration and conversion. We like to think of these three objectives as aligning to the typical marketing funnel; awareness at the top of funnel, consideration and interest with warm prospects in the middle of the funnel, and finally, sales conversions for leads at the bottom of the funnel.
The Awareness objective is all about, as the name suggests, maximizing the number of individuals within your target audience that are aware of the existence and opportunity provided by your brand. This ad objective is good for new businesses seeking to increase their brand exposure or to spread the word of their launch. Large brands using the Brand Awareness objective would be trying to put their brand in front of mind with consumers, whilst not necessarily wanting people to engage with their content or generate leads or sales. This option may not meet the objectives for smaller businesses with limited advertising budgets.
The Consideration objective is great for when you want your audience to take a specific action. The Traffic objective is great for driving traffic away from Facebook, to visit your landing page or read a blog post on your website.
The Lead Generation ad type, found under the Consideration ad objective, is a simple ad type that can be used to effectively get prospects into a brand’s marketing funnel. This ad objective is extremely effective for capturing name and email address information, without requiring the prospect to leave the Facebook app. When a prospect clicks the CTA button on the ad, it opens a lead form within the Facebook app itself where a prospect can provide their name and contact information.
The simplest way to get in contact with prospects on Facebook is to send out ads with the ad objective of getting a message. This process works by selecting the Messages objective in the Consideration category. Messenger Ads allow brands to retarget and send reminder messages containing bonuses, trials and other offers to individuals who have previously expressed interest in their business. It’s just as good as having their contact information. These messages could prompt prospects to provide their phone number in exchange for a free trial or other type of reward.
The Conversions objective is suitable when your goal is to get people to convert for a specified action, whether it be to purchase, sign-up or opt-in. In order to optimize for Conversions, Facebook requires sufficient conversion data to be able to learn about the people that convert and make assumptions around those people who are most likely to convert within your target audience. The Conversions objective requires around 25-50 conversions per week for Facebook to effectively optimize the delivery of the ads to meet this objective.
Catalog Sales work brilliantly for re-targeting customers who have visited ecommerce sites and have abandoned their shopping carts.
The key takeaway: Aligning your campaign goals with the right Facebook ad objective is an essential part of creating winning Facebook Ads. With hundreds of Facebook Ads under our belt and several successful client stories (head over to our website to learn more), we’re proud to share our tricks of the trade.
Do you want to get more from your Facebook Ads, but aren’t sure which levers to pull? Request a Strategy Session with us today, we’d love to help.
