How to Choose the Right Ad Objective in Meta Ads Manager
Choosing the right ad objective in the Ads Manager in Facebook (now called the Meta Ads Manager) has always been a difficult subject to understand. That was because originally, Facebook offered 11 different ad objectives which were less inspired by traditional campaign objectives than by their own system features.? This is a classic legacy problem for software developers. It has been especially acute in any software platform designed to provide marketing and advertising solutions. This is true for both ad platforms, like Facebook and CRMs which evolved independently, beginning as simple customer contact lists before developing into sophisticated email platforms that eventually integrated with ad platforms themselves. ?For marketing software as a service (SaaS) the disconnect between system features, like a post or a lead form, naturally created a complex problem for expanding how the features work inside a campaign strategy.? There are two different conversations happening at the same time. There is the conversation about how different features work together, and another conversation about campaign requirements and objectives. These two different conversations often collide in a mass of confusion.
The biggest disconnect in all of this is between traditional marketing views of the Customer Journey and what were called “Loop Conversions” which are simply the key conversions that really matter, from an unknown prospect to a marketing qualified lead, then to a sales qualified lead, and finally to a customer.? You would think that these classic marketing conversions would map directly onto any set of campaign objectives created by any online ad platform.? But they don’t, unless you take into consideration the variation in business models between one type of business and another.?
As an instructional designer, I had to confront this confusion and try and sort it all out so that I could teach business owners and entrepreneurs how to use these tools simply and effectively. To make matters worse, Facebook, aware that their original ad objectives were about as clear as mud, decided to introduce a simplified set of ad objectives focused on objective driven outcomes or “Ad Experiences”. Facebook labeled this new set of objectives, Object Driven Ad Experiences, or ODAX. This approach makes sense, particularly because Facebook based their new set of objectives on a traditional three stage marketing funnel, divided into Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Their new version includes these five stages:
1.??? Awareness
2.??? Traffic
3.??? Engagement
4.??? Leads
5.??? Sales
Awareness is the same early stage in the Customer Journey, where individuals become aware of your brand or business, through ads or by referral. Traffic and Engagement roughly map onto mid-stages of the Customer Journey. Leads and sales roughly map to late-stages of the Customer Journey. But it is not quite this simple.? You cannot make blanket statements about marketing because they don’t necessarily apply universally to every type of business. We divide small businesses into two main categories, depending on whether or not they have a professional sales staff, and then we subdivide these into three sub-categories for each group. See our previous blog post, Managing the Customer Journey, for a detailed description of the key conversions in the Customer Journey. We have even drilled down into a deeper layer of business models, identifying 20 unique types of small typically found in virtually any community.? So, before you start trying to figure out what ad objective is right for your business, you need to analyze how the Customer Journey plays out for your business model.
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We can make a good approximation by simply looking at the two main business categories we define at the top of our hierarchy of business models, businesses without a professional sales process and businesses with a professional sales process. In the chart below, we list the simplified, Objective Driven Ad Experiences, or ODAX objectives in the first column, the business goal in the second column, and the original Facebook objective in the third column. If this looks familiar to you, it is structured just like a similar chart you can find in instructional content produced by Facebook (Search for the title of the chart). We made two main changes to our version of this chart. First, we added two columns on the right side, one for businesses with “no-professional sales processes, and for businesses with “professional sales processes”. Then we mapped the ODAX objectives to the Customer Journey stages in these two columns. You can see there are minor but important differences in both cases. Second, we detailed how you would use an ODAX objective to achieve one of Facebook’s original ad objectives.
Business with or without a Professional Sales Process
In business with no professional sales process, the Customer Journey is compressed, and a person can convert to a customer at any point, even skipping over stages that play an important role in businesses that do have a professional sales process. For retail and many other local, consumer facing businesses, engagement might be a like, comment, or share on your business page, that can suddenly convert to a new customer at any time. For big ticket consumer sales (like cars, boats, RVs, etc.) the Customer Journey is also relatively short, and it leads into a sales funnel that often converts into a closed sale during a single sales call. Yet, there are important differences between these two sub-categories of business models that will greatly impact your campaign strategies.? For B2B businesses doing continuous business with companies that produce high levels of revenue, the Customer Journey can be far more complex, and each stage in the Customer Journey requires special attention. Multiple campaigns must be designed to complete each other and move prospects consistently through the Customer Journey and into the sales funnel.?
Comparing ODAX Objectives to Achieve Facebook’s Original Ad Objectives
The second column, “Your Business Goal” describes examples of how you might use an ODAX objective to achieve an original Facebook ad objective.? We did this to illustrate the original thinking of Facebook on these issues, and in part, to defend the original logic. But as you can see, the original objectives themselves are all over the place. That is because they are focused on a system feature, like videos views, or conversions.? In this case, a conversion can be any objective that the feature enables. Thus, if someone watches a video, you have a conversion; if someone “likes” a post, you have a conversion; if someone clicks through to a landing page; you have a conversion. By this way of thinking, anything can be a conversion, and this was the Achilles heal of the original objectives.
?Facebook’s new “Objective Driven Ad Experiences” provide a much more practical view of ad objectives, but it still requires that you remain focused on the final objective and not be confused by tactical features used along the way to fulfill the campaign objective. Whether you want video views, an engagement action, or a message response in Facebook Messenger, choose your ad objective on the end result you seek, which should be at a key conversion in the Customer Journey.