Facebook Ads Campaign Objectives in 2023

Facebook has a number of different campaign objectives designed to help you achieve your marketing goals on the platform. Now if you haven’t been in Facebook for very long, you’re probably used to this list of six campaign objectives that are in Facebook currently. But if you’ve been running campaigns for as long as I have, or quite frankly, even over about a year and a half, you’re probably more familiar with the list of twelve to 13 objectives that used to be in the platform.

So what I want to do today is go through the different campaign objectives on Facebook, give an overview of how each of them works, and then for those of you that have been doing this for a while, I want to help you understand which campaign objective you’ll use now that would have corresponded to the previous campaign objectives.

The easiest way for me to cover all of the Facebook campaign objectives and their potential goals is going to be to walk through a sample campaign creation and show you the key points of each kind. So to do that, I’m in a client account and I apologize. We’ll have to blur a number of things out. But to get started, the first thing we’re going to do is come over here to create.

Whenever you set up a campaign in Facebook, the first thing you do is choose your objective. This is going to set the tone for the remainder of the campaign. So it’s really important, and that’s why we’re putting together this video of the campaign objectives for you to learn about today.

Now, as I mentioned in the intro, the campaign objective outlines have changed over the course of the last year or so in 2022. So if you’re brand new to Facebook advertising, you can skip ahead to the next section. But if you’ve been running Facebook ads for a while and the biggest thing you want is just to understand how the new campaign objectives match up to your old ones. This section is for you.

There are two ways that you can find what your previous objective was and how it maps into the new one that I’m going to talk about exclusively. There is a third which is going through each of the setup, but we’ll just cover that when we get to the full portion of the demo. Both of the ways that you can find your previous objective are going to be in this new little box up here at the top that is purple currently.

The first is going to be to click on the link for update to the campaign objectives, and that’s going to take you to a page that has this table in it. Here you can see in the left-hand column the previous meta objective name and the new Meta Ads objective name. I apologize, this is a little bit small, but I had to zoom out because the way that Facebook has this formatted, you would not be able to see all of these campaign objectives in one screen if I were zoomed further in.

But here you can find Brand Awareness, Reach, Traffic, Engagement, Video Views, Messages, Conversions, all of the previous campaign objective names and where those will be mapped to with the new objective piece. So the ones that I think are probably the most focused that people usually ended up using would be Brand Awareness, and reach are now consolidated into Awareness.

Video Views are now part of either an Awareness or an Engagement. Campaign messages will live in Engagement or Leads. They’ll also live in Traffic, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. And conversions, probably the biggest one, is going to be a subset of either Engagement, Leads, or Sales.

There is one other way that you can find your previous campaign objective and mapping into the new one, and that’s going to be just down below this link in the Find Your Objective button. If you click on that, it opens up this drop-down, and you can find whatever previous objective you used to use.

Let’s say that we used to use Conversions, and it will now tell me that you can choose Sales if you want to use a conversion event such as a Purchase, add to Cart, or a checkout. If I click next, it’ll say Choose Leads if your goal is to generate leads. Or you can choose Engagement if you want to use a conversion event such as View, Content, Subscribe or Search.

So depending on what your previous campaign objective was, you can choose from the drop-down, and it will walk you through in this little tutorial which type of campaign objective you should probably use and give you some of the benefits of each.

Now, with that out of the way, we’re bringing back the folks who skipped the first section. And even though Sales is currently selected from the previous section, I’m going to choose Awareness, and we’re going to start going through all of the different campaign objectives on Facebook.

Each time you choose a different campaign objective, this little paragraph down here off to the side will change. As you can see here, Awareness is intended to show your ads to people who are most likely to remember them. They’re good for generating reach, brand awareness, video views, and store location awareness.

So to keep walking through this, let’s go ahead and click Continue. And now, we’re going to be in the more expanded view of the campaign builder, which is where we’ll be for the remainder of this video. So on the Campaigns tab, you can see that we have everything set up here.

I’m not going to change any of this. The only other things that I want to call out for each campaign objective are going to be on the Ad Set tab and then maybe a couple of things on the Ads tab if something seems relevant, so now that we have an awareness campaign set up.

Let’s go to the ad set, and for awareness, everything is pretty simple. The only adjustments that we can really make to the objective itself is going to be in this optimization and delivery section. So here, if we hover over, you can see the defaults to Reach. But if we click Edit, we can choose from the drop-down if we want to have Reach Impressions, Ad Recall Lift through Play or a two-second continuous video view.

So if you’ll remember at the top, when we were setting up the campaign originally, the drop-down said that it was going to be good for Reach Brand Awareness, Video Views, Ad Recall, all of that stuff, and this is where you would change the objective that you want it to reach for as you’re using an awareness campaign.

So whether you’re trying to optimize for Reach Brand Awareness, video views, or your store location visits, you can choose the optimization for ad delivery here. The only one that doesn’t quite match up logically for this objective is Store Location Awareness. So your optimization for ad delivery here should be around either Reach or Impressions or Ad Recall Lift, depending on what you’re looking for here.

But then the way that you make this a store location, awareness is going to be at the ad level, and I’m going to ignore the rest of the ad setup, aside from the tiny box down here at the bottom that says Add a Destination. So if you check this box here, that’s how you’ll be able to drive users to your store location and have awareness for that piece.

Now, all the way back up at the top, we’re going to change our campaign objective, we’re going to edit that, and this time, we’re going to be in traffic. And rather than go back to the previous builder where we have to blur out a lot, I wanted to show you that if you hover over each of the different campaign objectives at this stage, it will still show you that same tiny paragraph that you would have seen off to the right in the previous builder.

So here we’re trying to send users to a destination like your website app or Facebook event. And traffic campaigns are good for link clicks, landing page views, Messenger and WhatsApp and calls. So let’s click on this one. Yes, I want to change it. And then, similar to the awareness campaign, the only other thing that we need to set up is going to be at the Ad set level and change the names of the different components.

So hopefully, it’s a little bit easier to follow which objective I’m on because it wasn’t going to change it from an awareness campaign. But since we’re doing a traffic setup, I wanted to make sure that this is pretty clear. So at the Ad set level for a traffic campaign, you can utilize these different conversion locations.

Now, I don’t love the fact that they use conversion as this naming convention here because that can get kind of confusing. But effectively, all you’re doing here is choosing where you want to drive traffic, and you can add more details about the destination later on. But you can choose from a website, an app, Messenger, WhatsApp, or Calls, where you can have people actually call your business.

If you’re interested in learning more about a call only campaign on Facebook, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. But the only other thing that I really want to call out is just showing the different types of optimization for ad delivery that you can use with each of these different conversion location goals for a traffic campaign.

So for Website, you can utilize link clicks or the preferred option, which is going to be landing Page Views, which means that somebody actually landed on your page and the pixel fired, registering a Page View event as opposed to just a link click, which is only tracked in Facebook and does not mean that your page and the Facebook pixel loaded.

It just means they clicked on the ad in their feed. But you can also use Daily Unique Reach and Impressions for a traffic website campaign if you want to send traffic to your app. You can see here that we don’t currently have an app, so that’s unfortunate, but we’ll get rid of that error.

The optimization for ad delivery changes a little bit here. We can use link Clicks or Daily Unique Reach, and that’s pretty much it. There’s not a landing page view to fire, so that’s not an option for this setup.

Next is going to be for Messenger if you want to send users to Messenger. So again, you can optimize for link clicks, Daily Unique, Reach, or Impressions. The same list is going to be true for WhatsApp in this account. We don’t have WhatsApp connected, so that’s why we’re getting the extra error. But you have the exact same ad optimization deliveries for WhatsApp as you do for Messenger and then for calls. We only have link clicks and calls as the optimization event.

So in this instance, I would almost view this link clicks action more as a traffic objective, trying to get as many people to click on your call link as possible. But if you optimize your ad delivery for calls, it’s pretty close to a conversion campaign because you’re trying to generate as many calls as possible from Facebook, depending on what your conversion location objective is. The ad variance and the ad copy fields are going to change on the Ads tab.

I’m not going to go through each one of those. Likely you can tell the difference between these. For the Website, you’re going to be driving people to your site app. You’re going to have the different app triggers that you can use Messenger and WhatsApp same sort of thing you’re going to be able to set up ads that either start a conversation on Messenger or start a conversation on WhatsApp in the phone calls.

You’re going to be utilizing ads that have a phone number included in them, and you’re driving people to click on that phone number to call your business. Jumping all the way back to the beginning, we’re now going to shift to an engagement campaign which is trying to get messages, video views, post engagement, page likes, or event responses. And it’s good for Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Video views, post engagement, and conversions.

One thing to call out here is that Engagement is the only campaign objective that mentions driving more page likes or event responses. So if you’re trying to optimize for those two types of objectives, which we see happen pretty often on Facebook, this is going to be the campaign objective for you. So let’s switch to Engagement! And now, let’s hop to the ad set level and see the different settings there!

Now this conversion section is going to feel somewhat similar but have a number of different options from what the awareness and traffic setup did. The first is going to be to use messaging apps where you try to get people to engage with your brand on Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram.

Here you’ll need to make sure that you have your Facebook Page, Instagram account, and WhatsApp account linked to Business Manager so that you can send people to the right profiles and engage with them on all the platforms. And then, you can choose down here what the ad type is. From this drop-down, you can either do Click to Message or a Sponsored Message.

You can see at the top here that ads that Click to Message will start a new conversation, and Sponsored Messages reengage existing connections. So depending on if you’re trying to reach new users or reach existing connections, you need to choose the ad type that makes the most sense for you.

The next type of engagement was the default, and it’s probably the one that people want to use the most often. And it’s going to be on your ad where you’re trying to get people to watch a video interact with your post or event. So just like we have with the messaging apps, we need to choose the engagement type that we want to come out of this. So here you can optimize for Video Views.

This will be the equivalent of a legacy Video Views campaign. You can try to optimize for Post Engagement where you’re trying to get likes, clicks, shares, all that sort of thing on your individual post. Or you can optimize for event responses.

So again, if you’re trying to optimize for a specific event, this is where you’d end up setting that up. We do have a video that shows you the other aspects of an event campaign set up on Facebook, and if you’re interested in checking that out, you can watch it at the top of the screen right now. For each of these different engagement types, you will also have a different list of optimization for ad delivery.

So since I’m on video views, we can optimize for a through play which is going to be a full play of your video if it’s 15 seconds or shorter, or a play of at least 15 seconds on a video that is longer than 15 seconds. Or you can optimize for a two-second continuous video view if you decide that you want to optimize for Post engagement. You can now see down here the optimization for ad delivery will have Post Engagement, which will basically just repeat what it was, but it clarifies the different actions that you’re optimizing for.

This is where you’re delivering to the people who would get the most likes, shares, or comments on your post at the lowest costs. You can also optimize for Daily Unique Reach or impressions if you like. And then the last option was for Event Responses.

You can optimize for Event Response, which probably makes the most sense deliver to your ad to get the most event-related interest at the lowest cost. Or you can optimize for Post Engagement on an event, or again you can utilize daily unique reach or impressions as well. The next is going to be the website Engagement Objective, and here you get to choose an actual event on your ads.

As we’re getting into some of the other campaign objectives, this list will continue to pop up, but you’ll also notice that certain events are not eligible to be used. Since we’re in an engagement campaign, I can only use the two events that are categorized here, but I cannot use Lead and Purchase. Down below, you’ll see that these are only available with certain campaign objectives, and that’s because of the category of conversion that they are in the conversion setup process.

I’ve jumped to a custom conversion creation setup because the setting that controls which conversion actions can be used with which campaign objectives live in this setup. So once you’ve chosen the event, you have all the different rules set up. The last thing you need to do is choose a standard event for optimization, and you’re utilizing this Facebook category.

So right now, Facebook is choosing a category for you, but if you choose this little link here, select your own category, there’ll now be a drop-down to where you can choose all of the different types of conversion action that this will be. And here, you can see that Lead is one of them, and Purchase is another. Depending on which of these categories your conversions are filtered into, you will only be able to use them for certain campaign objectives.

So as a really quick cheat sheet, since we’re talking about it now in a traffic campaign, I cannot use the Lead and Purchase events that were created here. But when we get to the Leads campaign objective, I will be able to use the lead conversion action but not the purchase action. And then, when we get into the conversions campaign, I will be able to use the purchase action as well.

So if you’re ever curious why you can or can’t use certain events in a campaign objective, it’s likely because of this Facebook conversion category scrolling down just a little bit. I’m going to go ahead and choose an event that I’m allowed to use, and then the optimization for ad delivery is going to be down here where you can optimize for conversions, landing page views, or other options where you’ll see link clicks, daily, unique reach and impressions are also eligible there as well.

So in some ways, engagement campaigns can also be set up pretty similar to conversion campaigns, depending on how you have all of your settings. And if that seems really confusing, I agree. Considering the fact that they went and tried to consolidate and make everything more logical, this seems illogical to me, but they didn’t ask me. I didn’t have any input on this setup process.

Next is going to be the app engagement campaign. Obviously, we don’t have any apps here, but we can optimize for certain app events or other options around link clicks, daily, unique reach. If you do have an app, it is going to be something similar to the website action where depending on certain events that you have, you’ll be able to optimize for those different events in this campaign.

And then the last is going to be Facebook Page. The first thing you’ll need to do is choose your Facebook page, and then you’ll see that the optimization for ad delivery is just page likes. This is what you’re optimizing for. This is what you’re trying to get.

So if you want a page-like campaign, you can just set up an engagement campaign, optimize the conversion location for a Facebook page, and you’ll be all setup and ready to go. The next campaign objective we’re going to look at is going to be led where we’re trying to collect leads for the business through Instant Forms, Messenger. It’s also good for conversions somehow and calls.

So let’s go ahead and switch this over and hop into the ad set. You’re probably getting used to this, but the conversion location is where you’re going to set up the remainder of the options for this type of campaign. And the default option is going to be sending users to your website to generate leads.

So here, this is going to be yet again another type of conversion campaign where if we scroll down, we can utilize the conversion event. And here again, you will see that we can use the lead action, but again not the purchase conversion action that we have set up because that has a different category.

We can still use the previous conversion actions that we could use in the engagement campaign, but we’re just not quite to the point where we can use that purchase action yet. All of the optimizations for ad delivery are going to be the same optimized for conversions, landing page views, or other actions.

It’s going to be link clicks, daily, unique reach, and impressions. So again, very similar to the engagement campaign, but just in a leads campaign setup instead, and that will determine which conversion actions you can use. So make sure that you’re paying attention to those.

You’ll also be able to set up your regular Instant Forms, which is going to be the same as a Facebook lead generation campaign. So if you’re looking for that, this is where it’s going to be. You can then choose the ad optimization piece as Leads or Conversion leads, which again should still focus on leads because you’re trying to get people to fill out that form on the Facebook platform.

I’m not going to go through all of these because otherwise, we’ll be here forever. But you can also utilize the Messenger platform. You can utilize Instant Forms Plus Messenger. You can also generate leads directly through Instagram, you can generate phone calls with a lead generation campaign, and you can optimize for certain app events in the same way that you can optimize for certain website events utilizing the app conversion location for the leads campaign.

The biggest takeaway for me with a leads campaign objective is that this is where you’re going to utilize the Instant Forms options on Facebook, and this is where it’s going to make the most sense to leverage those pieces. The next campaign objective is going to be app promotion, and this is going to be good for app installs and app events. This will likely feel pretty similar to the leads conversion action, but let’s go ahead to the ad set.

And as I’ve mentioned before, we do not have an app set up here, so it’s not going to be a great run-through. But once you’ve selected which app store you want and you’ve tied the app together with the account, you can then utilize the optimization for ad delivery to focus on specific events that you want to use.

If you are passing through value with your app, you can utilize the value bidding option, but otherwise, the two main pieces are going to be app events where you’re trying to get people to take a specific action within your event.

Think of an account registration, an in-app purchase, certain gameplay, those types of specific events within the app. Or you can optimize for app installs, which is going to be a much higher funnel conversion action. You can also optimize for link clicks, but I wouldn’t suggest that if you’re trying to get certain actions within your app.

The last campaign objective is going to be sales. This is where we’re trying to get people to purchase a product or service. It can be good for conversions like some of the other campaigns as well as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp messages and calls. But then the last piece that’s a little bit different than some of the others is this is where we can also set up catalog sales, which is going to directly coincide with one of the previous campaign objectives.

Once you’ve chosen sales, if you do want to utilize the catalog, you’ll need to set that up here. At the campaign level, you just toggle this on. I don’t currently have one, so I’m not going to be able to do that. But then you’ll also be able to choose any of these specific feeds and that sort of thing that you want to use for your catalog.

At the ad set level, we’ll then be able to utilize all of the different conversion locations that should track pretty closely with what you’ve been seeing in the previous campaign types. So we have a website, app, website and app, messaging apps, and calls.

The only piece that I want to call out here is that, as we talked about in previous campaign objectives, different conversion events are eligible for different campaign objectives. So if I come down to the conversion event down here, I’ll just need to scroll a little bit so you can see it.

I now don’t have access to the lead event that I did in the leads campaign objective, but I do have access to the purchase event that I didn’t have access to in the previous one. So again, whenever you’re setting up your campaigns, make sure that you’re choosing the objective that will allow you to optimize for the right conversion event that you’re trying to focus on.

Overall, the campaign objectives might make sense to users who are just now coming to the platform. As somebody who’s been running Facebook ads for quite a while, some of these mappings don’t quite make sense to me. But I do at least appreciate that they’re trying to narrow the number of objectives as opposed to having twelve or 13, whatever it was before. But again, there are a lot of different ways to reach the same type of objective.

If you’re trying to optimize for, let’s say, phone calls or conversion events, there were a handful of different campaign objectives that will allow you to do that. So hopefully, this overview of these objectives has given you a little bit better insight into how each of them work. You have some ideas of what you can optimize for in certain areas and not optimize for in others, and now you’ll be able to set up your campaigns to make sure that you’re meeting the goals that you have set out for your account.

If you have any additional questions on Facebook campaign objectives or anything else relating to Facebook ads, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan