How to Pick the Right Objective for Your Facebook Ad
Updated: Jul 17, 2018
When Facebook originally launched well over a decade ago, few probably could have predicted that it would soon become one of the dominant advertising platforms for giant corporations and small businesses alike on the planet. Yet, flash forward just fifteen years, and here we are.
Facebook isn't just a powerful advertising platform - it's the type of opportunity that comes along once in a generation, if that. Consider just a few of the following statistics about the site's own audience:
According to Pew Research Center, 68% of adults in the United States use Facebook.
76% of ALL Facebook users visit at least once per day.
The average person spends about 50 minutes per day engaged with Facebook's various channels.
Out of ALL the time that is spent on mobile devices like smartphone and tablet, 19% of it is devoted to - you guessed it - Facebook.
But at the same time, launching a Facebook ad campaign isn't necessarily the "silver bullet" you've been looking for. It IS possible to do it wrong, cutting into your return on investment along the way. One of the most important steps to take when creating a Facebook ad is to pick the right objective for everything that comes afterwards. That, of course, requires you to keep a few key things in mind.
Facebook Ad Objectives: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
In a lot of ways, your Facebook ad objective is exactly what it sounds like: an outline of exactly what you want your ad (and the larger campaign that it's a part of) to accomplish.
Do you want more people to become aware of your business? Do you want to find higher volumes of new potential customers and generate leads? Do you want to drive sales for your products and services? Facebook ads are a great way to do all of these things, but not necessarily at the same time. This is why picking the right objective as critical.
In essence, don't start with the ad and hope the objective falls into place later. Start with the objective and work your way back to the best possible version of an ad that supports this.
In a lot of ways, this is going to require you to think about where your business is today and where you hope to be in, say, a year from now. Are you a brand new business with no pre-existing audience? Then using your Facebook ad to raise awareness is probably the most logical step to take. Are you an established organization that is now looking at a growth mindset? Finding new potential customers (and focusing on things like conversion and lead generation) would then be the most obvious goals.
Remember that an ad designed to raise brand awareness is naturally a little on the passive side, while one designed to increase sales must be engaging in a way that drives people to action. One won't necessarily work well for the other and vice versa, which is why sitting down and picking the right objective FIRST is of paramount importance. This is another one of those things that a digital inbound marketing agency can help with.
One of the key things to understand is that there isn't necessarily a "one size fits all" approach to this. This is one of those questions that only you and you alone can answer. Likewise, nobody is saying that you have to pick an objective and stick with it forever. As your needs change, your campaign can do the same and Facebook actually has a number of tools built right into the advertising platform that can make it easy to pivot from one objective to the other and back again as necessary.
But regardless of which objective you choose, you need to make sure that it is both A) clear, and B) measurable. Knowing what you're trying to do and using both Facebook and Google's own analytics tools to help track your performance over time are a great way to gauge the ultimate success of your campaign. If you launch a video campaign that most people tune out of after the first three seconds, it doesn't make any sense to proceed without making some concrete changes. You'll want to think WHY they're tapping out and address those issues moving forward. Then, continue to track the campaign to see how well your collateral (hopefully) improves.
If you're looking for a Pensacola advertising agency to help you create better and more compelling ads for Facebook or Instagram, or if you'd just like to uncover new opportunities to take your marketing in Pensacola as far as possible, feel free to contact me.