Overview of Facebook Objectives & Ad Formats

What’s the difference between a Facebook objective and a Facebook ad format? Let’s review how to choose one, and also how they cross and overlap.!

Alright, so again, we are talking about Facebook objectives, campaign objectives, and then Facebook ad formats. Now what’s really important to realize is that these two things are mutually exclusive from each other. So what that means is that a campaign objective can have multiple ad formats, and those exact same ad formats can be in a different objective. But there are some times when one objective may not have a certain ad format. So if I’ve already lost you, that’s exactly why I’m creating this video. And I’m gonna show you examples of the two and just how to navigate around them within the ads interface.

Alright, this is a demo account that I have that doesn’t really do anything, but I wanted to show you the objectives and the ad formats. You wanna hit create here in the objectives, here are all of the different objectives that are available to you. And you’ll notice that Facebook has categorized them in three sections, so awareness, which means getting your business out there, consideration, which is the next step where people might take the first call to action, so driving traffic, or watching a video, or filling out a lead gen form, or conversion, which is really converting on a landing page, buying something, or visiting a store, okay?

So when you’re creating a new campaign, you might be sitting here thinking, which objective do I choose? And I’m gonna cover that full conversation in another video, in the next video, which I will link to in the description below, but here I just want you to know that when you choose an objective, the objective is your campaign and you cannot change it. So if, for example, I chose a brand awareness campaign, which basically says, I wanna get my brand out to people and I want them to remember my brand using a metric called ad recall lift, that I would select the brand awareness campaign, and my campaign name is called brand awareness. And I cannot change that objective in the campaign in the future at any point in time. Now when I go back, I’m gonna close out of this, and I’m gonna show you that the results here, this says lead, and this one says lead form, so this one has a conversion objective, and that’s why it’s tracking leads, and this one has a lead form objective, which is why it’s tracking lead forms. And when I hit edit on the campaign, I can see the objective is conversions, and then when I hit edit on this campaign, the objective is lead generation, and I can’t change that.

So this is just hard coded, so once you select your objective, it’s hard coded as the campaign, and all of the optimization within that campaign is associated with that objective. So for example, I would not wanna choose a lead generation campaign with the intent of generating more brand awareness, because Facebook is gonna optimize the campaign on lead generation, not on brand awareness. So even if I’m using the same ad, if I want multiple objectives running, I’m creating separate campaigns so that Facebook optimizes on those different objectives. So if I have one ad, and I wanna say, hey I wanna run this ad on a reach campaign, and I wanna run this ad on a conversions campaign, I don’t create one campaign and then two ad sets and run the ad separately, I create two campaigns, conversions and reach, and then I duplicate the ad set, just do the exact same ad set in both, and put the exact same ad in both, and then they’re running parallel, but they’re in separate campaigns. Alright, so when you are working with objectives, we’re in the campaign section here, I’m creating a new campaign, I will see the objective here, I will select the objective, and then that will be the objective for that campaign forever, you can’t change it.

Now one thing to pay attention to is this little link here that says help choosing an objective. I’m not really a big help center sort of guy, however, this is incredibly helpful when it comes to selecting your objective. And what you’re gonna see, about advertising objectives, and now we have all the different objectives broken down over here on the right hand side, and if I click brand awareness, for example, it tells me what platforms support brand awareness, so Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, and then it says, what ad formats can I choose in the brand awareness objective? So I can do a single image ad, a single video ad, a carousel ad, or a slideshow ad.

So these are the four types of images I can choose, these are the platforms, and this is the objective. So if I select an objective, and I wanna do a collections ad, for example, and I choose brand awareness, I will not even have the option to select a collections ad because it’s not showing here. Now if I do traffic, this does allow me to create a collection ad, right? And it also allows me to advertise in the audience network, whereas the brand awareness ad does not allow me to advertise in the audience network, because brand awareness is really Facebook saying how many people are going to remember your ad within two days using the ad recall lift objective, right? If you’re wondering why can’t I place this ad in a certain placement, or why do I not have the option to create this type of ad, it’s because the objective probably doesn’t support it. So you can spin through all of these, app installs, you can spin through all these different ones, so messages, and it’ll just show you exactly where the ads might show, and what you might need to consider. So there are exclusions for certain types of placement, like for example, this catalog sales, this only works for single image and carousel ads, you can’t do video ads, but that’s obvious, because you’re running a catalog through Facebook, why would you be able to do a video, right? So it does make sense when you think about it as you start working the platform more. Alright, so I highly recommend that as you’re choosing your objective, you hit the help with choosing your objective, and then the very first one is about advertising objective, and then you can also use this guide and get a little bit more information, just using this help area. Alright, so when you select the objective, you’re gonna have a campaign with that objective.

Now once you have selected the objective and you’ve created the campaign, now you have a campaign with that objective. So I’m gonna click in here, this is just a very basic ad set, and what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna create a new ad, right? So boom, boom, boom, and now we have the ad that we’re creating, and we have a number of different ad formats. So we have carousel, single image, single video, slideshow, and then collection. So these are basically the five that we were seeing earlier when we were looking in that help article about the different ad formats. So I could select any one of these, and then I will add the video, write the add, blah, blah, blah. Now if I had a lead form, a lead generation objective, then I will select the lead form down here at the bottom, and the other part that’s important to think about, but when you have an objective, it affects the ad set and what things you can optimize for. So for example, if I have this, I’m doing this random yoga one, these are the placements here, so this’ll show me where I can place an ad.

So when we were looking at the help center, this is the placement section. So Facebook, Instagram, audience network, or Messenger, and this one is the lead format, I believe, if I remember correctly. Let me see here, oh yeah, lead generation right here, so this is lead generation, so that’s why we can’t do the audience network, that’s why we can’t do Messenger, you can do Instagram, that’s also why we don’t have right column and suggested videos in Marketplace, because the lead generation objective you cannot place there. And then there are different types of optimizations that you can choose. So this one right here says it’s optimizing for leads, and we’re gonna optimize for the lowest cost. If you’re doing brand awareness, you can optimize for something else. You can even cap impression share with brand awareness, which you cannot do here. Right, so there are different types of optimization and delivery options within different objectives, and you can only select those options within the ad set itself, and you can change them in the ad set if you want. So objectives affect ad set optimization, and then they also affect what ads you can run and what placements. So, as I was saying about the ad itself, this ad, and these types of ads can be used in a ton of different objectives, however, objectives only allow certain types of ads.

Alright, so that’s it, I wanted to give you an overview of the difference, really I guess that conversation revolved a lot more around objectives than it did ads, but when you are building a campaign, make sure you organize your campaigns by objective, and just know why you may or may not be able to put certain ads in a campaign, it probably has to do with the objective, and then also know why you may or may not be able to optimize based on certain criteria, because in the objective itself, it might not support that. So thank you for watching, my name is Adam, the owner of ParaCore, we’re a pay per click lead generation company. If you have any questions, please comment, like the video, subscribe, and we will see you in the next video, thanks a lot.

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