Which Facebook Ad type is right for you?

Calling all novice social media advertisers.

If you’re looking to dabble in your first social media advertising campaign to help solve a pain point for your business, then this blog is for you.

Before you launch straight into the world of Facebook Advertising Manager, take a moment to educate yourself on the different types of paid campaigns available to you, to ensure you don’t waste precious advertising moolah on ads that don’t align with your end goal.

From top of the funnel advertising, all the way down to the bottom, social media advertising allows you to move customers from awareness to consideration to conversion, based on an objective of your choosing.

With two awareness objectives, six consideration objectives and three conversion objectives at your advertising fingertips within the Facebook advertising matrix, get to know the most common Facebook Ads and discover which one might be right for you.

1. Have you just launched your new brand or business and want more people to know about it?

Given the fact you’ve just launched your business (congrats, btw!), it’s likely the number of people who know about it is low. If you’re nodding, you need to start at the very top of the marketing funnel: Brand Awareness.

Facebook Ads Manager has two objectives to choose from for this top of the funnel activity: Brand Awareness – which measures your brand uplift – or Reach – which aims to reach as many people as possible.

Unless you’ve got a big chunk of advertising dollars to put behind a campaign, we recommend choosing Reach over Brand Awareness, which is most effective when used to study an uplift over time.

Think of a Reach campaign as casting the net wide. This campaign objective is optimised for impressions because at this stage of your business journey, you want your brand exposed to as many people as possible.

2. Are you trying to grow your Facebook following or get more people to engage with your ads?

While Facebook follower numbers are often referred to as a vanity metric, there’s method to a growth-first strategy.

The more followers you have, the more eyes you’ll have on your organic posts.

There are three types of engagement objectives you can choose within Facebook Ads Manager: Page Likes (optimise for people to like your page – Facebook only), Post Engagement (optimise for likes or comments on your ads – both platforms) or Event Responses (optimise for responses).

Choosing Event Responses will optimise for people to respond to an event which is helpful to gauge interest; however, this objective sits under ‘consideration’ in the marketing funnel aka is still only a way to garner engagement rather than convert people to buy tickets for an event. You’ll need to choose a conversion objective if you’re all about reporting ticket purchases.

If you’re thinking ‘great! I’ll put a social media paid campaign in market to build my Instagram following”, unfortunately, there isn’t an equivalent as Page Likes on Facebook for Instagram.

If you’re wanting to grow your Instagram, organic growth is key, along with partnering with digital influencers.

3. Do you want to grow your consumer database?

More people in your database = more people to send future communications to.

There are two ways to do this. Firstly, you can use Facebook Forms as the creative for your ad, where people can sign up directly through the form. However, this requires a bit of manual labour downloading the customer list and uploading it to your CRM.

The second option is to create a Traffic Campaign and direct people straight to the sign-up form on your website, which should already be integrated into your CRM (less manual input).

Lead generation activity like this also sits as a consideration marketing activity, as you are moving people through the funnel who want to learn more about your business or brand and are actively opting in to hear more.

4. Are you trying to drive people to a specific page on your website?

Just like a drag car driver puts their foot down on the accelerator to speed as fast as possible towards the black and white chequered flag, a Traffic campaign tries to achieve the same. Your audience is the driver and the finish line is your web page.

You can choose to optimise your campaign for Link Clicks (get as many people in the target audience to click the link) or Landing Page Views (if you want people to wait for the landing page to open).

As you’re moving people through the marketing funnel, you can consider refined targeting here using demographics and interests.

5. Are you trying to get people to ‘add to cart’?

“Show me the money,” said every e-commerce marketer ever.

If you want people to buy your product using social media advertising, you’ll need to ensure they are ready to purchase. Meaning, it’s not the first time they are learning about your business or brand.

As a conversion objective, social media ads are optimised for people who are ready to purchase.

This is when you’ll be targeting your most qualified audience, based on performance primed for conversion.

Remarketing is a great way to achieve this, by creating a custom audience such as your CRM database, recent website visitors or people who have engaged with your ads in the past 180 days.

There are a few additional steps required to create a Conversion campaign, such as installing a pixel and creating a custom event; however, you should have a pixel regardless of which campaign you’re running to ensure you can always track your paid performance.

Still unsure which Facebook advertising campaign is right for you?

Get in touch with our team and book a call with one of our social media paid specialists to learn how we can help.

If you prefer to DYO social media advertising (or would like to upskill in this field), book into our 1:1 training to learn the ins and outs of Facebook advertising for yourself.

You’ll learn how to set up a campaign, define your audience, community manage your ads, create retargeting audiences and monitor performance.

If this is something you’re interested in, shoot us an email and learn more.