Is Your Campaign Objective Irrelevant?

So look, this is partially a language problem. In most cases, people are using the wrong terminology to describe something, which is nothing new. But in others, it's a complete failure to understand how something works. The campaign objective isn't nearly as powerful as most advertisers think. So let's fix this now.

First, let's discuss the campaign objective at a fundamental level. What is it?

Now, this seems ultra basic. I get that. But basics are required here.

When you create a campaign, you can choose from six different objectives: Sales, Leads, Traffic, Engagement, Awareness, or App Promotion.

When you do this, it loosely defines the purpose of your campaign. Loosely. But to be clear, it's mostly decoration.

Let me explain what I mean by that. You can choose the Sales objective, for example. That’s going to impact some of the options that are available to you within the ad set and ad. But that doesn’t mean you’ve defined for Meta what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s not going to impact the delivery algorithm in any way to show your ads to people likely to buy.

That is determined by the performance goal.

Now, certain performance goals are only available based on the campaign objective. True. But there are also many different performance goals that are available across multiple objectives.

If your performance goal is to maximize landing page views, the algorithm doesn’t care whether your campaign objective was Traffic or Sales or Leads or something else. It’s only focused on getting you more landing page views. Just because you picked the Sales objective, the algorithm isn’t going to focus on landing page views that may somehow lead to sales.

Now, like I said, this is at least partially a language problem. People will often say that they’re running a sales campaign, or a traffic campaign, or an engagement campaign. We may make assumptions about what they mean.

I certainly assume that if you’re running a traffic campaign, your performance goal is link clicks or landing page views. I hope that if you’re running a sales campaign, your performance goal is to maximize the number of conversions with a focus on the purchase event.

And if you’re running an engagement campaign or you tell people you are, it usually means that you’re focused on post engagement, through play views, messages, or something else that is engagement-related.

But in all of these situations, it’s not necessarily the case.

You can create a sales campaign that optimizes for link clicks, landing page views, impressions, or daily unique reach. That’s no different than your typical traffic campaign.

You can also create a sales campaign that may maximize the number of conversions, but for an event other than a purchase. So it could be for add to cart, or initiate checkout, or something else. I often see advertisers optimize for a custom conversion in this case, but it's not mapped to the purchase standard event.

The point here is that you aren’t required to optimize for the purchase. The algorithm isn’t magically focused on sales because you selected the sales objective.

In fact, I often use sales campaigns to promote my lead magnets and to utilize the complete registration event. I don’t do this because I want some magic beans to get people who are likely interested in buying from me eventually. That’s not the point. I do this to take advantage of audience segments for reporting, which are only available for sales campaigns.

Now, also understand that engagement campaigns, when we talk about the objective, are not always about fluff engagement.

You have the option to use the website conversion location and optimize for conversion events.

I’ve used this as an alternative to link clicks and landing page views when promoting blog posts. I want to get quality traffic to my site, and link clicks and landing page views often fail at that. So I’ll optimize for custom events like time spent, scroll depth, or something else that’s important to me.

So what’s the bottom of the glass? What do I hope you’ll do with this information?

I want us to change our language and be more specific about what we’re doing. I know that’s asking a lot.

The fact that you’re using the sales objective means very little.

Let’s stop saying sales campaign, leads campaign, or engagement campaign.

Instead, let’s say:

• I’m optimizing for the purchase

• I’m optimizing for leads

• I’m optimizing for ThruPlay views

• I’m optimizing for link clicks or landing page views

Let’s be more specific.

When we do that, it does a couple of things.

First, it clarifies what you’re doing. It helps avoid confusion when talking to clients or other advertisers. You said you’re running a sales campaign, but you are actually optimizing for something else.

Second, it reinforces the performance goal, which helps you focus on what’s important.

And I guess a bonus reason to change your language here is that it reinforces for others what is most important. It’s kind of a teaching moment, because new advertisers can be led to believe the objective is important based on our language.

If we emphasize the performance goal and the optimization, not the campaign objective, you’ll be doing the entire industry a service.