Welcome to our newest series of Blog Posts which will teach you the basics of Facebook Ads Manager and how to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign. This first blog specifically looks at the types of campaigns available to you with the Ads Manager platform. Future blogs will go in more detail about ad creation, Facebook Pixel and SDK codes, reporting, and more, so be sure to check back regularly for new guides.
Facebook and Instagram are two of the most powerful and useful platforms to advertise your business in 2022. Knowing how to leverage them is extremely important but can be very daunting if you have no experience with it.
So, first thing’s first, you should familiarise yourself with Facebook’s proper back end Ad Creation suite: Ads Manager. If you’re unaware, you can access this by being signed into Facebook on your browser, and following this link: https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager/manage/campaigns
This is Facebook’s real power-house Ad Creation platform which gives you far more features, options, and control over your ads.
Types of Campaigns
As mentioned, this blog will give an overview on the different types of goals you can achieve through Facebook Campaigns using Ads Manager. Facebook breaks these Campaign Objectives into 3 tiers, based on their positioning along the traditional sales funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
Awareness Campaigns
Brand Awareness
Brand Awareness Campaigns are a super high-level form of ads, typically best used as a very first campaign for a new business, new product/service, or new project you’re working on. The goal here is to have your name, logo, and details of your company shown to as many people as possible, who are likely to remember them, and you, for future campaigns. Your “return on investment” here should be how much Reach and Impressions (more on this below) you can achieve and how well received your ads are, as opposed to how much sales you can generate. Brand Awareness Campaigns tend to be quite cheap and you can reach a very large number of people for relatively small budgets.
Facebook will report these campaigns using “Estimated Ad Recall Uplift”. A very stupid term that basically means how likely Facebook estimates people who view your ad are to remember your business in future ads.
Reach
Reach Campaigns have a similar goal to Brand Awareness, in that you’re not looking, necessarily, for sales & leads, but for reach and impressions. The most amount of eyes on your ad as possible for as little budget as possible. These campaigns will likely reach a higher number of people than BA campaigns for similar budgets, due to Facebook removing the “requirement” for people to “remember” your ad.
Consideration Campaigns
Traffic
The goal in Consideration is to show off more of your products & services and begin to generate real interest among your potential audience. The primary way to do this with Facebook Campaigns is using Traffic ads. (No, this doesn’t mean running out in the streets at stop signs). Traffic Ads have the sole goal of driving traffic to your website. You can choose to send them to the main home-page, or a specific landing page populated with curated information.
A secondary benefit of Traffic campaigns is that they work very well in conjunction with the Facebook Pixel to monitor the activity of visitors to your website, and allow you to re-target these same visitors in later campaigns.
Engagement
Engagement Campaigns are, in simple terms, more advanced versions of “boosting a post”. The goal here is to either get more page likes, event responses, or comments & reactions on a specific post on your Facebook Page.
Post Engagements can be useful as a way to better engage your existing followers and ensure they’re not missing particularly interesting content from you.
Event Responses can be useful to encourage better attendance at an event you are hosting
Page Likes can be useful in the early-days of your business when you have first setup a Facebook Page, to generate an early following and engagement.
App Installs
If you have a mobile App you are trying to Promote, App Installs campaigns are extremely valuable. Alongside the Facebook SKU, this campaign type can help you to promote an app and encourage new people to install it for the first time, and also to encourage existing users to engage with new features & content within the App.
Video Views
Video Views Campaigns are a slight anomaly under the umbrella of Consideration Campaigns. The reason for this is that the goal of Video Views campaigns is typically to have a video shown to and seen by as many people as possible – goals usually associate with Awareness rather than Consideration.
That said, this depends entirely on the content of the video itself. Video content is far more engaging and likely to generate more results than static ads, so using this method to share further information about your business or your products/services can be a powerful way to further generate interest from consumers.
Lead Generation
Lead Generation Campaigns are used to generate interest in the form of email submissions, phone calls, or chats on Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger. While lead generation can also be achieved using Traffic campaigns to send people to specific landing pages on your website, the primary benefit of Lead Generation campaigns is that the lead can be created without the person ever leaving the Facebook Platform.
Particularly for mobile viewers, this means Lead Forms can pop-up within the app, and phone calls & messages will be started instantly at the touch of a button. People have such short attention spans nowadays, that these quick-completion options will reduce any bounce rates caused by slow-loading websites.
Messages
Messages campaigns are created with the primary goal of encouraging direct messages to you on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or Instagram Direct. The benefit of these campaigns is ease of connection from the consumer’s point of view, and ease and automation from your point of view, as conversations can be pre-filled and automated.
Conversion Campaigns
Conversions
The Conversions Campaigns umbrella is the final step in the sales funnel and focuses purely on final sales or actions on a website, known as “conversions”. Conversions Campaigns are the most powerful of these options and are created in close conjunction with the Facebook Pixel.
These goal of these campaigns is to encourage people to make a purchase of some sort on your website – be it a product, service, booking, or lead form. Using Ads Manager and the Facebook Pixel you can track the value of each purchase so you can create direct ROI reports.
Catalogue Sales
Catalogue Sales are specific to retail users. You can upload a catalogue of your products, and create automated ads on Facebook, in conjunction with the Facebook Pixel, and show your products, their details, and their prices within the ads, rather than having to send them to the website to see this information first.
The other powerful feature of Catalogue Sales is re-targeting website users. For example, if someone views a pair of shoes on your website shop but does not make a purchase, Catalogue Sales campaigns will retarget that person to show them the shoes they viewed, and encourage them to return to compete the purchase.
Store Traffic
Store Traffic Ads allow you to promote your actual brick and mortar store and encourage people to visit in-store. Your ads will be shown to people most likely to actually visit your store.
A powerful feature in these campaigns is the ability to add in a “map card” which shows the exact location of your store. Mobile users can tap this card and have their phone’s GPS Map service give them exact directions to your store.