BEST Facebook Ad Objectives for 2024

If you use the wrong Facebook ad objective your ad Campaign will almost certainly fail. It’s essential that you choose the right ad object for your specific business and the strategy that you’re using to make sales.

In this tutorial, I’m going to explain the various options and which one you should use. To demonstrate this I’m going to use an example Facebook Ad account.

How To Find the Ad Objectives

The first thing you will need to do is go ahead and click on the green create button in your ads manager.

Then you’ll get a popup that shows you the different campaign objectives.

I’m not going to through these in order, but I am going to go over the various options and what I see as the most common mistakes that people make with ad objectives and also what you SHOULD be using to get the best possible results.

Why Your Ad Objective Is Important

Your ad objective is important because it’s going to determine Meta (your Facebook and Instagram campaign) is optimized. 

I’ll get into this in more detail as I go over the different objectives and what they are used for, but for now it’s important to understand that what you choose for your objective determines HOW Facebook is going to run your campaigns.

For example, if you select sales then Facebook is going to try and get you as many sales as possible. But if you select traffic then they are going to try and get as many people to your website as possible.

These might sound like the same thing, but they aren’t.

And if you select the wrong one you are effectively saying to Meta to go out and get the wrong result for your business. 

You want to make sure you are selecting the RIGHT objective for your business so that you can get Meta’s AI and machine learning working in your favor.

What Do the Different Objectives Do?

In this section I’m going to go over the different objectives, let you know what they ACTUALLY do and when you should (and shouldn’t) use them.

Traffic Objective

This is the place where I see most new Facebook advertisers make mistakes. They think “I’ll get as much traffic as possible and I’ll send as many people from Facebook and Instagram to my website. That will make me have as many sales as possible.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

With the traffic objective you WILL get as much traffic as Facebook can send as possible. But that traffic is not likely to convert like it would if you used the sales objective.

I don’t recommend the traffic objective most of the time, but there are three scenarios where it’s very helpful.

Scenario #1. When the goal is to get people to click through and consume content like in a blog post or for a video then the traffic objective can be effective. We might retarget this audience later on with a sales or lead objective.

Scenario #2.  If we are looking to send people to an Instagram profile, you can use the traffic objective for that as well. This is a campaign where we are trying to get more Instagram followers. You can also do this if you are using your Instagram profile as somewhat of a sales page. 

Scenario #3. If you are sending traffic to a sales funnel where you can’t track sales or leads then the traffic funnel can work. This isn’t ideal and you should track if you can and use the sales or lead objectives instead.

Engagement Objective

The engagement objective is designed to get you social interactions of likes and other reactions on your posts. It could be comments on your ads or shares or any other interaction. 

I find that Facebook advertisers use this objective far too often. They think that if they get people to engage with their ads that they will then go through and purchase or become a lead. 

But it doesn’t work that way. Facebook is really good at identifying people that will engage but not necessarily purchase.

Now there are some circumstances where we will use the engagement objective.

Scenario #1. If we genuinely want engagement to deepen the relationship with our audience then we will use the engagement objective. In this case we might use the engagement ad campaign to specifically get them to view a video and engage with it.

Scenario #2. If we are looking to get Facebook likes and followers on our Facebook page then we will use the engagement objective. This is particularly helpful when we have clients who want to run Facebook ads, but don’t have a lot of page likes or followers on their Facebook page. We typically don’t run this type of campaign very long. Just long enough to get followers and likes. 

Scenario #3. Some people also have the option to send people to interact with a Facebook Group and that can also be useful in some circumstances.

Awareness Objective

The awareness objective is another objective that a reasonable amount of new Facebook advertisers will use. That’s because they think that I want to get my name out there and I want people to know about us.

This is an understandable thought process, but the reality is that unless you have a really large ad budget, the idea behind just getting yourself out there is somewhat flawed.

You just aren’t going to be able to spend enough to get enough impressions to reach the critical mass that you need to develop significant brand awareness.

Most businesses are in the situation that ad spend needs to generate leads and/or sales in order for the spend to make sense. If that’s the case for you then you don’t want to use the awareness objective.

Now, we DO use the awareness objective when we are using the Omnipresent Content Strategy and that works well for specific types of businesses. Usually these are businesses with higher ticket offers and we are putting ads in front of a warm audience again and again.

This can be very effective for the right type of business. But this is not a fast return. It usually takes several months to see an ROI on this strategy.

Leads and Sales Objectives

Most of the Facebook ad campaigns that we run are going to use the leads or the sales objectives. The way we choose between the two is by looking at how the sales process works.

For many service based businesses where the conversion is going to take place offline we use leads. For e commerce stores and other businesses with a direct checkout we use sales.

If you are using lead or sales objectives it is VERY important that you have the Meta pixel installed on your site so that Facebook can track the effectiveness of your campaign. The pixel is how they know who to target.

Somewhere between 80% and 90% of all the campaigns we run are sales or lead campaigns.

There are a number of options with lead campaigns. You can have people fill out a native form right in Facebook, send them to your landing page, or you can send people directly to messenger to chat with you.

Another Awesome Free Facebook Training Resource

There is nothing I like better than to see business owners increase their ROI with Facebook Ads. In order to help business owners succeed with Facebook ads I’ve created a FREE webinar training that you can register for here.

When you attend this webinar you’ll learn:

3 different Facebook ad strategies that we use every day. These strategies have generated millions of dollars in revenue and are tried and proven to work.

How to customize the Facebook ads strategy to your particular business. There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to Facebook ads.

How Facebook and Instagram have changed and how to adjust your ad strategy to what works in 2024

App Promotion

One is app promotion. App promotion is great for app installs or if you want to directly advertise to people that have already installed the app but get them to take specific actions like signing up for ad purchases. 

What You Need to Know About Ad Objectives

The most important thing for you to know about Facebook ad objectives is that if you are selling something and want to make sales then the best ad objectives are going to be lead or sales objectives.

These get the best results the vast majority of the time for our clients and are likely to get you great results as well.