When to use Facebook Ads conversion objectives
If you’re running a conversion campaign on Facebook Ads, you’ll have big things you want to achieve.
But don’t jump the gun. Before setting up your campaign, select one campaign objective you want Facebook to optimise for.
Your chosen Facebook objective needs to align with your campaign’s overall goals. Otherwise, you might experience some unexpected results.
Facebook has eleven standard objectives to choose from. Here’s how to pick the right one for your conversion campaign.
Why it matters
Facebook Ads are based on machine learning. Depending on your chosen objective, Facebook’s algorithm optimises your campaign differently. Different goals mean your ad is visible to different people and positioned in different places on-screen.
Facebook’s standard campaign objectives match the classic marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Again, Facebook’s campaign objectives are as follows:
- Reach
- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messaging
- Conversions
- Catalogue sales
- Store traffic
In the last blog of our matching campaign goals to facebook objectives series, we’ll talk about Facebook’s conversion objectives – everyone’s favourites.
Check out our other blogs for insights into awareness objectives or consideration objectives.
What are Facebook conversion objectives?
Conversions are your bottom-of-funnel actions – like signing up for something, making a donation, or completing a purchase.
To successfully run conversion campaigns, you’ll need conversion or purchase pixels installed on key web pages to tell Facebook what kind of transaction is happening, where, and what it’s worth.
It’s really important to get this right. Facebook uses this information to find more people and optimise your campaign. It also reports live transactions to understand in real-time how your campaign is going, giving you the option to course-correct if you need to.
Not having your pixel implemented correctly or insufficient data history on your pixel are top challenges charities face.
Facebook has three kinds of conversion objectives:
1. Conversions – direct people to take a specific action on your site
Reporting metrics: cost per conversion / return on ad spend (ROAS) / conversion value
Use this objective when you have a specific conversion on your website that you want people to complete.
Types of conversions that you might have include cash or regular donations, shop purchases, resource downloads, form completions, or challenge registrations.
These corresponding pages will each need a specific pixel code that tells Facebook about the action that’s happening.
Here’s an example of a conversion campaign we ran for Islamic Relief UK that got a return on ad spend of almost 9.
2. Catalogue sales – show products to generate sales
Reporting metrics: cost per conversion / ROAS / conversion value
Use this to promote your e-shop catalogue, target products at new or returning prospects, or up-sell other products to purchasers.
3. Store traffic – promote your business locations to people nearby
Reporting metrics: clicks on call to action buttons like call-to-action buttons like Get Directions
If you’re a charity with brick-and-mortar charity shops that you want to promote, this one’s for you! This objective allows you to target people close to one of your stores.
Pop your store’s location into Facebook and set up the campaign. It’ll start advertising to a target audience within range and able to visit.
Nifty, right?
Our Team’s Pick
At Platypus, we love charity conversion campaigns. Below is a photo of our team’s favourite right now.
The Trussell Trust have smashed it out of the park with the below ad.
It’s a strong image. The copy makes it relevant to what the reader sees on the news and experiences in their own life, right now. It’s a call to action to donate off the back of that. It’s great!
How to pick the right objective for your campaign
Every campaign is different, with different measures of success.
At the planning stage, always consider your charity’s goals and the actions you want people to take after seeing your ad. This helps clarify which objective is best for the job.
You’ll probably have multiple metrics. Your next job is narrowing it down to one Facebook objective.
Which is the most important metric? Prioritise one over all the others, or the algorithm will land you with some unpredictable results.
Conversion objectives are the right choice for your campaign if you’re trying to:
- acquire petition or email sign-ups on your website
- showcase your products to generate sales / donations, or
- promote your business locations to encourage visits
Sound like what you’re trying to achieve?
No? Check out our other blogs in the series on awareness campaigns and consideration campaigns.
Yes? Great stuff. Now set up your campaign and select your campaign objective.
One last piece of advice. Always run a test conversion on your page to ensure the data is pulling through correctly in the Events Manager section of your Ads Manager account.
You might need a developer to do this – we’d be happy to help if you need it.
Need some support?
Drop us a line. We’ll happily audit your current pixel set-up and work with you to create a campaign that matches your charitable objective.
