Facebook Ads: Optimization for Ad Delivery – Which is Best?

The Optimization for Ad Delivery section is an important part of your Facebook ads campaign and something that you don’t want to skip over. Facebook doesn’t hide it, but it selects it’s “defaults” for you and a lot of people just skim over it.

That can be a mistake.

The best setting for Optimization for Ad Delivery depends on the type of campaign that you’re running and what you are trying to get Facebook to do for you.

This is an important thing to get right for the best chance at the highest level of conversions.

You can find Optimization for Ad Delivery in the Ad Set level of your campaign.

To access the Optimization for Ad Delivery section you will need to scroll down to the bottom of the ad set level and click on the edit button.

Conversion Campaigns

Conversion campaigns are the most common type of campaign that most businesses use. It’s also the most common type of campaign that I use in my agency.

A conversion campaign tells Facebook to go out and find buyers or subscribers for you, and it requires you to have a Facebook pixel installed on your site.

If you need to install a Facebook Pixel on your site, you can follow the step by step instructions at the post “How to Install The Facebook Pixel on a Website” (Including WordPress).

It’s probably stating the obvious that businesses like conversions. You can’t run a business without paying customers and that’s what conversions get you. So if you’re running a conversion campaign then you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the ad optimization that you’re using.

Conversion campaigns have several options for ad optimization, but the one that we use and recommend is the conversions objective.

I don’t want the people who are most likely to click links. I want the people who are most likely to buy or subscribe to our mailing list (depending on what the goal of the campaign is). The conversion objective will tell Facebook that I’m targeting buyers or subscribers.

Traffic Campaigns

Even though conversion campaigns almost always work better than traffic campaigns, there are some circumstances that conversion campaigns simply don’t work well.

You may not be able to track conversions or install the Facebook pixel on your landing pages. In that case, you may need to use traffic campaigns.

Traffic campaigns have a default setting of link clicks. I recommend that you change that to landing page views.

The reason that I recommend this change is that it’s EASY to accidently click on an ad in Facebook or Instagram. People do it all the time. They are scrolling on their phones and click on an ad and then click directly back to Facebook or Instagram.

You don’t want Facebook to optimize for accidental clicks.

Instead it’s a better idea to optimize for landing page views. When you optimize for landing page views you are telling Facebook to send people to you who actually VISIT your website – which is the desired outcome.

The cost may be a little higher, but the quality of the traffic will also be higher.

Optimizing for landing page views gets rid of a lot of the accidental clickers.

Reach Campaigns

I use reach campaigns in omnipresent campaigns that we run for ourselves and our clients. We use the reach objective in reach campaigns.

Currently some people aren’t seeing the option for reach campaigns. If that happens then you want to use impression campaigns instead. They do the same thing.

If you sell high ticket products and/or services in your business then an omnipresence campaign can be a good way to go and give you an incredible competitive advantage. You can read about how we set up these campaigns at my post “My #1 Long Term Facebook Ads Strategy.”

The difference between the reach objective and the impressions objective is that the reach objective puts your ad in front of as many people as possible, and the impressions objective gives you as many views as possible.

Your goal is to reach as much of your audience as possible, so the reach objective works for that.

Video Views

Most of the time when we are running video ads at my agency, we are still running conversion campaigns. But sometimes you may want to use a video view campaign instead.

When you are using video views as an objective, I recommend the ThruPlay optimization objective.

The other option is a 2-Second Continuous Video View Objective.

The problem with the 2 second objective that it’s super easy for people to accidentally watch a two second video clip and they can do it by accident simply by having Facebook or Instagram open on their phone while they turn away for a moment.

So to get higher quality traffic, ThruPlay is a better bet. When you use ThruPlay Facebook will optimize for people who actively watch your video.

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 now!

Video Tutorial on Using the Best Optimization for Ad Delivery for Your Facebook Ads

In this video I go over what Optimization for Ad Delivery you should use for the most common campaign types and why they typically work the best.

The Bottom Line on Facebook Optimization for Ad Delivery

Facebook has powerful machine learning, but to get the most out of it you need to understand which Optimization for Ad Delivery options will work the best for the type of campaign you are running.

In my agency, we generally use:

• Conversion Campaigns = Conversion Optimization
• Traffic Campaigns = Landing Page Views
• Reach Campaigns = Reach
• Video Views = ThruPlay

The overall strategy is to get higher quality interactions with our ads and not just get the people who click the most. We want people who engage with the business and could potentially become customers down the road. Choosing the right ad optimization objective can help get us to that goal.