When to use Facebook Ads Awareness Objectives
For many charities and not-for-profits, the world of Facebook Advertising is a minefield. The terminology is confusing when you first start out and doesn’t always ‘fit’ with your campaign’s charitable objectives.
We’re here to help.
Chances are, if you’re running a campaign, you’ll have goals – big things you want to achieve.
If you’re running it on Facebook Ads, you’ve got to choose a campaign objective. This is what you want Facebook to optimise for. Your campaign goals and your chosen Facebook objective must align, otherwise you might get some unexpected results.
In this blog series, we’re breaking down how to match your campaign goals with Facebook’s objectives.
Facebook has eleven standard objectives to choose from. Here’s how to pick the right one for your campaign.
Why choosing the right objective matters
Facebook’s standard objectives tell the machine learning algorithm what to optimise your campaigns for.
Put another way, depending on which objective you’ve chosen, ads in your campaign will be delivered to different people, on different placements, and across different channels.
This makes choosing the right one super important.
Facebook’s eleven standard campaign objectives are aligned with the classic marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion:
Awareness
- Reach
- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messaging
- Conversions
- Catalogue sales
- Store traffic
This blog will kick off with Facebook’s awareness objectives – brand awareness and reach.
What are awareness objectives?
Awareness objectives are for people within your target market who are at the top of your marketing funnel. They don’t know that much about you, or haven’t interacted with you in any way.
The purpose of these objectives are to increase the number of people who know about your charity, but don’t necessarily need to take further action at this stage in their donor journey.
There are two types of awareness objectives:
1. Reach – how visible your advertising is to your target audience
Main reporting metric: reach / cost per mille (cost per thousand impressions) / frequency
The reach objective optimises your campaign to reach the most individuals for your budget. This objective is great for brand campaigns, where you just want people to see your ads.
You’ll have seen these on Facebook – for example, charities promoting a new service they want people to know about, like a helpline.
2. Brand awareness – how aware your target audience is of you
Main reporting metric: estimated ad recall / estimated ad recall value
This objective optimises your campaign for people who are most likely to recall your brand within two days.
These campaigns are perfect for testing creative elements or products that result in people being more likely to recall your charity’s brand. Use this campaign for rebrands or messaging tests.
Our Team’s Pick
A picture speaks a thousand words. Here’s a bang-on example of how to use a Facebook awareness campaign as a charity.
Switchboard is an LGBT+ helpline. They’ve been active since 1974, offering a safe space for millions of people to talk about anything – including their sexuality, gender identity, sexual health and emotional wellbeing.
Switchboard runs ads to raise awareness of the helpline. There isn’t a direct call to action – people don’t need to click on the ads or take any action.
The goal is just to make sure people know they exist, and they’re here to help.
Let people know who they are, what they do and how to reach them.
That’s a great way to build awareness of your charity.
How to pick the right objective for your campaign
When creating your campaign, always consider your strategic goals, how you’ll measure success, and the actions you want people to take as a result of your ad.
You’ll probably have multiple answers – great! Now whittle them down to the most important metric. You need to prioritise one over all the others.
Awareness objectives are the right choice for your campaign if you’re trying to:
- ensure your brand video reaches as many people in the UK as possible
- test your messaging to see which is most memorable
- generate interest in your latest product or service
Sound like what you’re trying to do?
Yes? Perfect. You’re ready to set up your campaign and select your campaign objective.
No? Look out for our next blog in the series all about consideration campaigns.
Need some support?
Contact us for an audit of your current pixel set-up and see how we can help you create a campaign that matches your objective.
