When you are building an ad campaign using the Meta Ads Manager, one of the first questions the manager will ask is to choose one of six ad campaign objectives. Campaigns can have many different objectives and often have more than one.
However, Meta will help you focus on one overall group of objectives when automating your ad exposure across the Meta platforms.
When choosing your Facebook ad objectives, it’s important to consider your overall goals and exactly what kind of help you want the Meta Ads Manager to provide as you move forward. We can help with a tour of the six essential ad objectives, including how to choose and refine the settings to achieve your goals once you pick an objective.
Know Your Business Goals
The first step is to define your business goals regarding each campaign clearly. Are you trying to drive traffic, boost sales, build engagement, or collect new leads? Are you promoting a product, app, or the brand itself?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you refine your settings for the best results in your Meta ad campaign.
The 6 Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- App Promotion
- Sales
The six Facebook ad campaign objectives are awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, and sales. Understanding their differences will help you create more powerful campaigns, reach your audience more effectively, and drive toward your goals with every ad placement.
We’ll explore each of the six objectives in greater detail to help you understand each.
1) Awareness
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Video views
- Store traffic
Awareness focuses on reaching the largest number of people likely to remember and appreciate your ads. New businesses that have recently rebranded or those looking to expand to a larger target audience benefit from the awareness objective. You might choose awareness if your primary goals are reach, views, or traffic without other specific goals like engagement or conversion.
You can refine Awareness campaigns by setting performance goals, such as recall lift, reach, impressions, or video view length.
2) Traffic
- Website Traffic
- Facebook page visits
- Instagram shopping
- App users
Traffic campaigns rely on sending ad viewers to a specific online destination. Connect your website, landing page, event page, or any specific traffic target through the Conversion Location setting. Meta will help you drive visitors to your target locations. You can also choose your social media profile pages, Messenger, or WhatsApp for social traffic.
3) Engagement
- Messages
- Business conversions
- Video views
- Online tool usage
- Desired actions
Engagement seeks to inspire a specific interaction or direct contact with your business. This might include direct communication, use of your online tools, conversions, and video viewership, or you may want audiences to take specific action after seeing your ads. Choose a conversion location or engagement type based on your goa. Engagement types might be video views or communication, with the conversion location targeting a video or messaging app.
4) Leads
- Lead generation
- Messages
- Business conversions
Lead generation involves inspiring people to sign up for your business or service or book a future meeting. You might set a conversion location like Messenger, your website’s calendar page, or your lead intake form landing page to help ad viewers sign up.
5) App Promotion
- App installs
- Return users
- In-app purchases
- Feature usage
If your goal is app installs or engagement with your app features, link your app after choosing app promotion as your key objective. Connect your app download page to the ad campaign, and Meta will help you increase app downloads and active users. The Meta Ads Manager team suggests no other refinement settings.
6) Sales
- Product promotion
- Business conversions
- Catalog sales
- Instagram shopping
If your goal is to boost sales of your products or services, then select a Sales campaign as your Facebook ad objective. Start by setting your conversion location to your website product page, sales page, or app where purchases are completed. You can also target Messenger or WhatsApp, depending on your selling process.
If your goal is Meta catalog sales, select Manual Campaign Setup and choose your catalog in the Campaign Details section.
Honing Your Meta Ad Objective Strategy
Choosing the right objective is not just essential for setting up campaigns in your Meta Ads Manager. The objective settings you select will help to enhance the automated campaign strategies to best meet your business’s advertising goals. If you’re ready to boost your results by working with a pro Facebook advertising team for greater results in future campaigns, contact Brillity Digital to ensure your Facebook advertising performance is optimized for 2025.
