Facebook Engagement Campaigns

With all the recent changes to online advertising and privacy laws, it’s more important than ever to take advantage of the on-platform performance and engagement you can get from your customers because we don’t lose that when somebody comes to our website. On Facebook, you can utilize engagement campaigns to drive individual post engagement or page engagement.

So today, I want to run through how to set up an engagement campaign and give you some ideas of how to leverage those audiences later down the funnel.

As is standard, with most of these videos where we walk you through something, I am in our Paid Media Pros staging account, so everything here will be ugly. But to get started creating an engagement campaign, we just need to come up and click create, and then when we’re prompted to choose our campaign objective, we’re going to choose, you guessed it, engagement.

Unlike most of the other campaign objectives on Facebook, engagement campaigns are then going to ask you what type of engagement you want to optimize for in your campaign. There are going to be three main types; the default is post engagement, so trying to get people to engage with that post specifically. The second is page likes, getting them to like your Facebook page or Instagram profile. Then the third is going to be event responses, and event responses have quite a bit more going on outside of just creating this engagement campaign.

Luckily, Joe has already put together a video on Facebook event campaigns, so if you want a full rundown of that specific setup, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. But for this video, I’m going to focus only on the post engagement and page-like options.

Overall, the setup for both post engagement and page-like campaigns are going to be really similar. We’re going to go through; you just choose the engagement type, you set up your audience, and you create your ads. But then Facebook on the back end is going to optimize for the different actions. So let’s go ahead and run through a post-engagement option first.

Once I click continue, I then come to the new campaign screen of a little bit more of a full walk-through as opposed to what we already have, so you can see here that we can still choose any sort of special categories. We can do any sort of a-b test, and we can use campaign budget optimization. Nothing else on here is any different from other campaigns, there is this little show more options thing here, but it’s just a campaign spending limit, so no big deal on that, and we don’t need to change anything, so I’m going to go ahead and click next.

You can then set up all of your different targeting options that you want to use for this post engagement campaign within the ad set. So you can set your different budget, you can set the schedule, you can choose your different audiences, whoever you want to target. You can then adjust the placements, and we have videos for each of these different sections of the builder within Facebook. So rather than calling out a specific video, you can actually just check out the Facebook playlist at the top of the screen right now and find more insights on each of these.

The last thing that you can customize here is going to be the optimization for ad delivery. So it’s going to be set for post-engagement. But if you wanted to, you could change this to be daily unique reach or impressions, to try and get as many people seeing your ad once a day, or to try and get as many impressions in front of people as Facebook possibly can. Odds are, since we’re trying to get some engagement, that’s going to be counterproductive, so I’m going to leave it as post engagement.

You then have the option to put a cost control in here to try and make sure that you are not paying more than you would like to for the different post engagements. But as with almost every campaign that I use on Facebook, I’m just going to leave that blank; we’re going to hit next.

The last thing we get to do in a post-engagement campaign is to set up our ad creative, so you’ll still choose the identity that you want it to come from. But then, one thing to note is that by default, for a post-engagement campaign, Facebook is going to choose that you’re going to use an existing post for your campaign rather than creating a new one. Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t create a new post. If you want to, you can just come from the drop-down and create ad. But I think that Facebook is assuming that you have a post that’s already doing well on organic, and you want to get more engagement through it or vice versa.

You have a post that you want to get more eyes on, but it’s not getting the traction you want to organically, so you can promote it through your campaign. I think that’s a more common use case for this. So you can find that ad creative in a number of different ways, have everything set up and be good to go.

One thing that is slightly different if you do decide to create a new ad for this, it’s that the fields are going to be limited compared to what you would see in a normal ad. So you normally get to add in the media, which you can add in either an image or a video, just like normal. But then all you have down here is going to be your primary text and a call-to-action button. That’s so that everybody will engage exclusively on the Facebook platform and try and have some sort of reaction or share or comment on your post.

But if you do want to add a destination, you can check that box, and now you can see that we have the headline, and you can then use the destination, which is going to effectively be an instant experience, rather than sending somebody to the website. So it keeps them on Facebook. This is a campaign designed for engagement, so sending people off-platform isn’t really in your best interest.

When you’re going in and setting up your post engagement campaigns, just know that you’re going to want to set up either something that is designed only for engagement with no destination or that you’re using an instant experience for the engagement on the platform. If you want a rundown of how to set up instant experiences, we’ve got a link at the top of the video right now that can walk you through that and how to think about creating that experience for your target customer.

Once you’re finished with all that, you just come over and click publish. But since I didn’t actually create anything and I’m not targeting anybody, I’m not going to do that. Instead, let’s go back to the very beginning and show what a page likes campaign looks like.

I’ve gone ahead and gone back to the beginning, clicked the engagement campaign objective, and now I’m going to choose page likes, and then we’ll go from there. All of the campaign settings for a page likes campaign are going to be the exact same as a post-engagement campaign, so we’ll just click next.

Now the setup process at the ad set level is going to feel mostly the same, but there are a couple of nuances for a page likes ad set. So we’ve got the Facebook page specifically, you’ll see that you need to choose this; you can choose from the drop-down because this is the page you’re trying to generate the likes for. So this is an important thing to make sure that you have right since we’re trying to get page likes. All of the budget, scheduling, and audience setup are going to be the same until we get down here to connections.

As with other targeting campaigns, you can choose the different connections that you want to target. One that might be very helpful for this type of campaign is to exclude people who currently like or follow your page because they have already done the action that you’re trying to optimize for. So that’s something to keep in mind.

But this alert down here is also telling us that we need to change the type of connections that we have before we publish. This is something brand new, but I wanted to call it out in case you’re seeing it in your account.

So basically, due to updates with the way that Facebook creates connections and connected audiences, these will need to be converted into a custom audience based on the type of connection. So rather than people who like your page, you’ll need to create a custom audience that is based on the Facebook page and targets people who have liked your page.

It’s a little bit of a nuance, all you need to do is walk through the steps here of convert connections, and you should be all set. But for now, I’m going to skip that; we’ll come down to the bottom, and then for the page likes campaign, you’ll see that you cannot adjust the optimization action. It is only going to optimize for page likes; you can’t do daily unique reach or impressions here. So let’s go ahead and click next and get to the ad creative.

Again, this is going to look different than a standard ad on Facebook. The Facebook page itself was set at the ad set level; you’ll see here that it’s grayed out. We do have the right one chosen for Paid Media Pros, but you cannot change it because we’re trying to generate likes for this page. When it comes to the creative itself, there’s very little that you get to do. There is some media; you can edit that and change it to some different image. You can edit the media just a little bit, or you can turn it into a video; that’s pretty much it. You’ve just got the one option, and then all you have is a primary text available.

Make sure that whatever you’re using here is going to be impactful, and if you’ll notice in the example off to the right, the primary text that you use is going to be used in both the intro section above the media. But it will also be used below the page name, which is going to operate as the headline of the ad. So make sure that whatever you type in there makes sense if it shows up in both places because that’s how it’s going to show up.

So overall, the setup for either a post-engagement or a page likes engagement campaign is pretty similar to a regular conversion or traffic campaign. The only main differences are going to come down to the ad creative and what that user experience is going to look like.

Once we’ve launched our campaigns, there are ways that you can see the engagement metrics in Facebook. So I’m going to hop into a different account that actually has performance, so you can see what those look like.

To find all the different engagement metrics, we need to come up here to our column selector, and then one of the preset options for columns is actually going to be engagement. Here, you’ll be able to see across campaigns, ad sets, ad creative, what the different engagements were. So you can do post reactions, comment saves, shares, link clicks, and page likes.

The campaigns that we have set up here are optimizing for website conversions; they’re really not trying to get these different things. But you can see that even conversion campaigns will drive all of these different engagement actions.

You can also utilize any of these different metrics to come up with custom metrics within the Facebook interface, so if there’s a number that you want to see that is not in here, all you have to do is create that custom metric by going up to the columns, going down to customize columns, and then up at the top here you can create a custom metric.

If you want a more full run-through, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. But you’ll see that one of those that I’ve created is actually engagement rate, and it’s post-engagement divided by impressions. So if I click that, I’m going to scoot it up a little bit and click apply; now I have my custom engagement rate metrics to see how each of these different campaigns, in this instance, is generating engagement.

The last thing I want to show you is how to create audiences based off of the engagements that people are taking on Facebook. Because again, since we’re losing some of the third-party tracking capabilities with cookies, utilizing the engagement can be maybe not quite as good, but pretty close to having website visitors. So let’s hop back into the Paid Media Pros account and show you how to set some of those up.

To create those audiences, I’m going to head over into the main menu and then go to audience manager. We can then create a new audience, we’re going to say custom audience, and then nearly all of the engagement actions are going to be based on Facebook sources. So they’re going to be in the second set down here below.

For anything that has to do with a post engagement, so the reactions, comments, shares, or a page like, we’re going to use either the Instagram account or the Facebook page source to come up with those audiences. I’m not going to go through both, but pretty quickly, let’s just do Facebook page and click next. Just like with any of the other audience builders or with a website audience builder, we then get to choose the event that somebody took.

So this can be anything of people who currently like or follow your page, everyone who engaged with your page, anyone who has visited your page. People who engaged with any post or ad. They clicked a call-to-action button, sent a message, saved your page or any post, so there are lots of different ways that people can engage with your Facebook page, and then you can create that into an audience to retarget or exclude later from your campaigns.

Overall, the engagement that you receive on Facebook or Instagram or any of the other social media platforms can be just as beneficial as those people who visit your website; you just have to remember to create the audiences out of those users and use them for retargeting or exclusionary purposes.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, some of the third-party cookie tracking capabilities for those retargeting audiences or for those conversion tracking pieces are going away or at least starting to have a few more gaps in them. So it’s important to know who is engaging with your page, with your posts, with your ad campaigns, and making sure you’re speaking to them in a way that reflects where they are in the customer journey.

I know I went through a few of these sections relatively quickly, usually because we already have other videos that speak about it. But if I didn’t talk about anything that you have a specific question for with these engagement campaigns, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Written by Michelle Morgan