Facebook Ads: Which Marketing Objective to choose?

When you create your ads, Facebook will ask what you want of your campaign.  Given that Facebook knows a lot about its users, it will try to find the people that meets your goal.  So if you ask for video views, they will show your ads to people who like to watch videos.  If you ask for clicks to your website, they will show your ads to people who like to click ads.  Its simple, advertisers will be willing to spend more if Facebook is able to fulfil their business objectives.

For most small businesses, the biggest reason to advertise online is to get more leads for their business.  Not brand awareness, engagement, app installs or video views.

If you are looking to generate leads for your business, most of the time you need to bring them to your website to see the products and services your business offers before they will have the confidence to send you an enquiry or phone call. 

When people click on ads created via the “Messages” objective, they will immediately start Facebook messenger where they can directly chat with your business.  Hence use this only if you are able to allocate manpower to do customer support.

Catalog sales is for ecommerce websites to automatically show items from your catalog based on your target audience.  Store visits encourage visitors to visit physical stores.

The “Lead generation” objective is useful, however the leads obtained are generally less warm and will cause you to spend more time qualifying them.  It is good for building an email list though.

That leaves us with 2 objectives, “Traffic” and “Conversions” objective.

The “Conversions” objective is powerful in that facebook will try to show your ads to people who are more likely to send you enquiries.  However Facebook recommends that you should be receiving around 50  enquiries/checkouts/purchases weekly for this to work well.  Most small businesses will not receive this number of key results weekly.

So my recommended objective for most business is the Traffic objective.  Facebook will try to show your ads to people who like to click ads so that you can have more visitors to your website.  If you target audience is correct, this should result in more enquiries or purchases online.

So remember to choose the right objective!