For this week’s best practice, we’re diving into choosing the right objective when setting up a social media ad campaign. The objective is how your campaign will be optimized and what you want people to do when they see your ads. Deciding on the right objective is crucial to the success and measurement of your ad campaign. Read on for our third installment in our Best Practices series which was created to provide our best tricks of the trade when it comes to creating a strong presence on social media for ourselves and our clients. If you missed Best Practice #2: Define Your Audience, click here.
Choose the right objective
There are a wide variety of campaign objectives available when setting up ads in the Facebook Ads Manager, and each represents a slightly different way that the platform will attempt to optimize your budget and will greatly influence results like audience reach and engagement. Over time, the nuances within the statistics of how your budgets were spent will become more meaningful and you’ll want to measure effectiveness of ads by metrics like ‘Cost per Objective’ instead of the flashier numbers like ‘Reach’ and ‘Impressions.’ That shift in mindset allows an organization to value meaningful connections with the right audience, even if they don’t measure in the millions.
In general, it’s best to go ahead and choose the objective that seems most appropriate for your specific ad campaign. Often, that will be ‘Traffic’ for website traffic OR ‘Engagement’ to drive likes, comments and shares. However, it’s worth considering if your business has an overriding objective for Facebook ads – in that case, you may want to remain consistent about which objective you set in order to create consistency in the results data.
One more tip: Make sure to set whether you want to be charged by ‘Impression,’ ‘Link Click,’ etc., when given that option in the Ad Set settings of certain campaign objectives. This will directly reflect in your ‘Cost per Objective’ results.
