The Best Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives in 2026

0:00if you want your Facebook ads to succeed you have to choose the right Facebook ad objective and it's essential that you choose the right objective for your specific business and the strategy you are using in this video I'm going to explain the options and which one you should use so to demonstrate this I'm in an example Facebook ad account I'm in ads manager I'm going to go ahead and click on this green plus create button um and then you can see that one of the very first things that we're being asked to decide when it comes to creating a new Facebook ad campaign is the camp

0:29campaign objective and the campaign objective is incredibly um important because it determines how meta is going to optimize your campaigns um and that has an enormous impact on your results and you'll see that as as we go through this process so you select your campaign objective that changes a load of the defaults and and preset settings as you go through the rest of the campaign creation process so if you get this wrong your campaigns are highly unlikely to succeed if you get this right you've got a much much greater chance of getting the results um that you really want okay so I'm going to start with

1:01traffic as the campaign objective I know it's not the top one on the list but I want to start with it because it's where a lot of um new advertisers in particular start because it's one of the quickest and easiest ones to use you want to send people through to your website go ahead and use traffic pop the link in you think I'll send as many people to website as possible they'll then go on to purchase they'll then go on to become a lead whatever it is the action that you you want them to take and you can see here that when I hover over it Met's information about traffic

1:30is it's good for link clicks landing page views is basically just a link click but someone actually made it to the point where your landing page loaded um Instagram profile visits um Etc there's some other options for for generating communication now even though that's where a lot of people start and they start because it's easy right you don't need to have the pixel installed to be able to track the actions people take on your website like whether they purchase become a lead and things like that you can just get the ad set up pop the link in boom send people there um done up and running it's not what I'd

1:59recommend most advertisers use in most circumstances so I'll give you some scenarios where we would use traffic um and you can see that these don't come up that often the majority of the time you're going to be want to using other um campaign objectives so use traffic if you want to send people to say a blog post and all you really want is for people to consume the content on that blog post you don't want to then take a subsequent action like purchase become a lead you just think if if I could just get people to read this content um that will confer some sort of benefit to me

2:29later down the line okay that's one scenario in which we use traffic the other one might be if we're sending people through to our Instagram profile either because we want more followers or you might be using something called the Instagram profile method which is where you sort of convert your Instagram profile into a bit of a uh a sales page a landing page people can see your pinned posts they can see your story highlights consume those and that makes it more likely people will convert that's something that we've done before I actually include a link in the description to another video on um the Instagram profile method in case you

2:56want to check out that strategy and how it works those are other scenarios in which we used traffic and then the other one and probably actually the most common would be if we're sending people through to a third party website that we don't have any control over is in we can't install the metapixelatron

3:29things along those lines right so those are really the only scenarios in which we use traffic and you can see that doesn't come up all that often when we are sending people through to a website to get sales or sending people through to a website to get leads or just try to generate leads on platform we're not going to be using traffic um hardly ever okay right next campaign objective I want to talk about is engagement okay we'll come back to awareness in a second now we can see that um again meta gives us some information around engagement and what it's good for so they've got

3:58messageer Instagram WhatsApp similar traffic basically being able to send people to those places to start a start a conversation uh video views is one of the engagement metrics that the campaign can optimize for and then there's going to be engagement like uh likes shares comments um and things along those lines this is another common one that people uh often start with when they get into Facebook advertising they think yeah I want lots of people to engage with my ad I want them to see the video I want them to click on it like it share it that's going to then lead to uh sales leads all

4:30the things my business actually want often it actually doesn't if you go with engagement met is really good getting people putting your ad in front of people who are likely to engage not necessarily take that next step it's a similar story um to traffic okay so when would we use engagement again there are some scenarios but these don't come up all that often we are usually not using the engagement objective so if you're building a Facebook following you can use your Facebook page as a destination to get followers similar to traffic with the Instagram profile uh setup if you're building a Facebook group again you can

4:58do the same thing not available in all ad accounts but some you can send people directly um through to um a Facebook group and that's just about it there are some very Fringe cases where you might be running a like a competition style ad to try and get people to really engage like that's really what you want you don't want to do anything else there's a big competition and you're just trying to create lots of noise and activity on uh that business's social accounts and engagement might be used in that scenario but most of the time when we're running ad campaigns and most of my recommendation is like be more direct go

5:32for what it is that you really want and engagement whilst it sounds good and whilst it's something that a lot of people who don't know that much about social media think is the objective it's often not going to be um the right way to go for most Facebook and Instagram advertisers now before we move on to the next campaign objective I wanted to let you know that HubSpot who I'm partnering with on this video have created a fantastic free resource that contains 50 examples of high performing Facebook ads that you can model from there is a link in the video description below where you can download these Facebook ad examples

6:02they've included ads from Nike Hulu VMO and so much more my favorite part is that it's sorted by industry to make it really easy to find exactly what you're looking for using this free resource to find High performing Facebook ads to model from is one of the absolute best ways to create Facebook ads that can deliver outstanding results you don't need to try and reinvent the wheel especially when you're first learning I'd strongly recommend you check it out and use it to level up your Facebook ad creative check it out using the link in the description below and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video now

6:28it's time to talk about the awareness campaign objective so if I har over this one we have a look at what meta uh mentions so they say awareness is good for reach brand awareness also video views and then you've got store locations um as well okay so awareness sounds like it would naturally be the first step in any sort of Facebook advertising strategy like okay first you advertise to get awareness and then you advertise to get something like sales related down line once you've built a lot of awareness and that's I understand the logic but it it just doesn't really apply um in practice awareness is

7:04typically better for larger businesses that have really big budgets that aren't looking to generate direct leads or direct sales they're not looking for anything close to a short-term return on their ad spend big Brands running big campaigns who just want to make sure that their thing is top of mind when you think of a certain category so when you think of a car a big car company might be doing brand awareness campaign so that they brand is top of mind when you think of a car where if you're thinking of a a soft drink you know it's Coca-Cola immediately comes into mind because they do tons tons of brand

7:38awareness awareness-based advertising to to help promote the brand that's typically what um awareness is good for so I recommend that most small businesses stay away from Brand awareness if you want anything close to a short-term medium-term return on your ad spend you want to generate direct sales you want to generate direct leads You' be better off with with with different options as opposed to going with uh with awareness now with that said we will use the awareness campaign objective um if we are using my omnipresent content strategy and that can work really well for businesses that sell higher ticket products and services so if you fall in that category

8:14definitely go ahead and check out my omnipresent content strategy um I'll include a link in the description below where you can go through and and give that a watch and run through that because I think that might be really valuable um for you as a business so we do use it in those circumstances because it has a specific feature around frequency capping other wise we're typically not going to use awareness unless like I said we're advertising for a really really big business that really they do want brand awareness in that scenario I'll quickly touch on app promotion um fairly self-explanatory with app promotion if you've got an app

8:42use it if you don't don't you can use this objective to get app installs you can also use it uh and not everyone is aware of this to help Drive uh app events so things like inapp purchases so you could advertise to existing um app users to try and get them over the line to become like a premium member or whatever it is your app so that's a potential good option now that leaves the two campaign objectives here where we've got leads and sales and I want to talk about these two together now these are the options that we are going to use more than any others by far because if

9:16you want sales or you want leads you want to go with sales or you want to go with leads now out of those two you might be thinking okay well as part of my sales for I generate a lead and then I generate a sale like which one should I go for my recomend Commendation is to track the action that is furthest along your sales funnel that you can accurately track so if you could accurately track sales go with sales if not go with leads and you have to factor in attribution Windows into this so let's say for example we're advertising our services as a Facebook ads agency we

9:51are far more likely to go with leads because we generate a lead someone say books are cool with us um it's often going to be a re amount of time between that person becoming a lead and then actually that turning into a client that turning into a sale there could be a few weeks in there sometimes happens almost immediately but often it's going to be a well they've got to wait for that call then they've got to have the call then they've probably got to you know what I mean there's steps involved and there's some time there so with meta's attribution window being a maximum of 7

10:18days after the click like is someone going to go from clicking on the ad booking the call having the call um agreeing whatever work it is we're going to do for them paying the do you know what I mean like that's a long time period so we're going to be outside the attribution window also there's difficulties in marrying up the click with the eventual um conversion because there's sort of offline intermediary steps there's a call with one of our sales team who's going to explain the processes they might be sending out via email then um like a proposal and you know examples of previous work and all

10:54this sort of stuff involved in that process right so it's difficult to track so we're going to optimize for leads but there are many scenarios if you're like an e-commerce business for example you absolutely go with sales you can track the sales even some service based businesses where people come through to your website and perhaps it's a really quick easy all done online in one go process generate the lead and then the sale um you can go with sale as well but if you can't do that lead is absolutely fine and with leads if I hover over it you can generate leads via your website you can also generate leads within

11:21Facebook and Instagram so you can see that leads has got here instant forms so that's where someone clicks on an ad and they're presented with that ad within Facebook within Instagram they can come and fill out their information there without having to come through to your website often you get cheaper leads by using instant form so just something to be aware of that with the leads objective you're not necessarily sending people off platform um you can choose okay so the next thing I want to talk about was performance goal so you can undo a lot of the good work that you did selecting the right campaign objective by selecting the

11:50wrong performance goal now if you go with the default performance goal most of the time you're going to be absolutely fine and I've just gone ahead and actually created the leads campaign um I've jumped to the adet level and you can see here we've got performance goal and the default here is maximize number of conversions absolutely fine that's what I want you to go with you may be able to go with maximize value of conversions depending on how you've got your tracking set up so let's say you're generating different types of leads some leads are worth more than others and you've got that information being fed

12:16back into your meta ad account using um the pixel then great you can select that option and meta will not only get you as many lead as possible they will get you the ones that are worth more to your business you can do the exact same thing with the sales campaign objective as well well you can maximize number of conversions or maximize value conversions as long as you've got everything set up to track that this is just an example ad account so we don't have that set up here um but I just want to let you know that is an option however there are other goals you could

12:42go ahead and select so you could instead of going with leads goal for example uh and getting as many maximize number of conversions you could go with one of these other goals and maximize number of landing page views maximize number of Link clicks well those are going to operate just like traffic campaigns yes you've selected the lead campaign objective but if you go and undo that would work by selecting one of these performance goals it's going to perform just like a traffic goal that's optimizing for either landing page views or link clicks maximize daily unique reach is going to operate or maximize number of Impressions that's going to

13:10operate like awareness campaigns that are set up to maximize daily unique reach or maximiz number of Impressions so very very rarely will we use I don't want to quite Say Never um because I'm sure there'll be some circumstance in which we might use one of these as opposed to going with maximize number conversions or maximize value of conversions for a lead camp campaign or sales campaigns but it is extremely rare so please don't go in and undo your good work in selecting the right campaign objective by messing up um the performance goal like I said most of the time when you go with the default uh

13:41once you've selected the right campaign objective you're going to be absolutely fine okay a few other things I wanted to mention about campaign objectives so um you can't change the campaign objective of an existing campaign so if you're like ah I don't not using the right one and want to change it no you'll have to recreate the campaign um with a different campaign objective so kind bit annoying but given it it governs how the campaign's optimized it kind of makes sense one thing I really want to emphasize here and really want to get this message across is please don't try and be extra clever and game the system

14:14and think okay meta is not going to give me what I really want if I go for sales I'm going to go for traffic and then get the link clicks and then they're going to convert or such and such such and such like it's a very old school way of thinking even years ago I was very skep of that approach but far more advertisers did it absolutely now when meta's platform is so much better at optimizing your ad campaigns at getting you the results you want like please don't go ahead and do that you are almost certainly not going to get better results and by doing that and remember

14:45meta is highly incentivized to get us the results that we want because they know that if an Advertiser runs ad campaigns and they get leads and they get sales they're going to keep spending money which is how meta generates the vast majority of its revenue and they might scale their campaigns they might spend more basically us getting leads us getting sales is meta as a business giving us as the customers we're the customers the advertisers not the users we're the customers it's giving us what we want which means we spend more with them which means meta makes more money so they are highly um incentivized to go

15:18ahead and do this and I also wanted to quickly show you this which is a poll that I did um on my YouTube channel asking people which Facebook ad campaign objective typically performs best for you right and you can see that my audience is very well trained with what's that 80 almost 85% of the time um people seeing that sales and leads produces the best results for their business with a smattering others like I said there are use cases for all the other ones depending on what people uh want to use but the majority of time it is um sales and leads okay so you now

15:48know when it comes to Facebook ad campaign objectives which one you should be using and when what's going to produce the best results for your business but to get the best results from your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns there are obviously a lot of other things that you need to get right as well and with that in mind I strongly recommend you check out this video in that video I walk you through the entire Facebook ad campaign creation process from scratch I go through how to set the campaign the ad set the ads everything you need to get the best possible results and to get all the settings

16:16right that you need to get right I know it could be very very confusing so now you know with the campaign objectives time to move on to the rest of the stuff and you'll find all that info right here