How To Choose The Best Facebook Ad Objective

It can be overwhelming to choose from the eleven different objectives available in Facebook Ad Manager. We have listed out the best uses for each. You will notice that in some cases, there are a few options that could work for your campaign - in which case we suggest testing them and comparing results.

1. Brand Awareness: Best for top of funnel campaigns to ‘cold audiences’ - people who haven’t yet interacted with you. Works for campaigns for educational or branding ads that stand alone (no destination URL) or a link to blog post, where your goals is eyeballs on the ad, and you don’t want people to take a trackable action.

2. Reach: Best for ‘top of funnel’ campaigns OR when trying to reach audience size greater than 5,000, usually with a ‘bottom of funnel’ retargeting ad after someone has visited your site.

   Optimisation goal that works with this objective - ‘Reach’

3. App Installs: Best when promoting an app install on Google play, iTunes, Windows store, Facebook Canvas or Amazon App Store.

   Optimisation goal that works best - ‘App Installs’

4. Traffic: Best for sending top of funnel traffic to blog posts/advertorial articles or when you want to run a conversion campaign but have less than 50 conversions per week. You can also use this goal for click-to-messenger.
   Optimisation goal that works best - ‘Landing Page Views’ or ‘Link Clicks’

5. Engagement: Best used for building social proof (likes, comments and shares) on a post ID or for comment to message.

   Optimisation goal that works best - ‘Post Engagement’

6. Video Views: Best when running top of funnel ads via video or when you want to run conversion campaign but have less than 50 conversions/week and want to use video as creative.
   Optimisation goal that works best - ‘10 second video view’

7. Lead Generation: Perfect when you want to generate a standalone lead and don’t need to send people to a thank you/ offer page immediately after opt-in. Can work for local/service but should be used with caution, sparingly.

8. Messages: Best used for sending sponsored messages. Another option for click-to-messenger and after traffic objective.

9. Conversions: Best for when you want a person to take a certain action on your site. For example: Opt-in or purchase. Must have more than 50 conversions a week per ad-set. Check your budget to make sure that’s ‘possible’ given your CPA. Optimise for purchase or custom conversions. (Target audience size > 5,000)
   Optimisation goal that works best - ‘Conversions’

   Conversion window - 1 day for lead
   - 2 days for purchase

10. Catalogue Sales: this option allows you to re-target site visitors with product when they’ve viewed or added to basket but not yet purchased, up-sell product to people who have viewed your product set, and cross-sell products to people who purchased. Uses product catalogue created in Business Manager. Test this objective vs. conversion objective.
    Optimisation goal that works best - ‘Landing Page Views’

    Conversion window
    - 7 days after clicking

11. Store Visits: Great if you have a physical ‘bricks and mortar’ store with multiple locations. You can target people physically near your store. There is the option to include map/directions when clicked.

Facebook Ads Manager Screenshot