You know how the saying goes: With every Good, comes a Bad.

For better or worse, this saying can be used 100% of the time to describe Facebook advertising.

The Goods of Facebook ads are things like powerful targeting capabilities, the magic brought to you by the Facebook pixel, and the affordability in running paid campaigns.

The Bads of Facebook ads are things like the learning curve to fully understand what is possible through Facebook advertising, limitations of the 20% text rule, and how frustrating dealing with Support can be, especially after receiving nonsensical disapprovals.

Choosing the Best Facebook Ad Objective for your Ad Goal

When we look a bit deeper into the Facebook Ads learning curve, a lot of things come to mind. There are lots of ways to “mess up” your ad campaign when you are just getting started with Facebook ads. One of the biggest factors in your Facebook ad campaign’s success is selecting the correct Marketing Objective, which is the first step after clicking on the green Create button once inside your Ads Manager account.

Facebook categorizes its 11 marketing objectives into 3: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Facebook describes each category like this:

• Awareness – Objectives that generate interest in your product or service.
• Consideration – Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it.
• Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.

Underneath each category header, you find the specific types of Facebook ad campaigns you can run. When you hover your mouse over any of them, you’ll see a grey circle with an “i” that appears on the right side. That’s how you can find out more about what each ad type means or is good for.

For the small business owners I work with, I would say that the most popular types of Facebook ads run would be Traffic (sending people to a website page off Facebook), Engagement (great for Facebook contests or when you have large number of photos you want people to ‘thumb through’), Video views (people who tend to watch videos), Conversions (people who click a link that takes them off Facebook and then complete another action on your site like opting in to your email list or purchasing a product you sell), and Reach (awareness of your in-store sale).

Understanding Facebook Ad Marketing Objectives

Facebook knows a lot about its users and their behavior on the platform. That means it knows things like the users who tend to watch videos, the users who tend to engage with a like, comment, or share, the users who tend to click links that take them off Facebook, and the users who will click links that take them off Facebook and be likely to complete the desired action on that website page.

Each Facebook ad objective you see in the chart above pairs with a user behavior. This is why it’s critical to match up the desired action you want a Facebook user to take, with the correct marketing objective.

Facebook looks for people within your targeted audience who are likely to take the action that aligns with the chosen marketing objective.

Said another way, if you choose a marketing objective that doesn’t align with the action you want people to take, your ad isn’t going to go well for you.

Misaligned Facebook ad marketing objectives is also the most common reason why Facebook Page admins who click on the blue Boost button located on published Facebook Business Page posts don’t get the results they want. Boosts are engagement ads, and with engagement ads, Facebook looks for people within your targeted audience who tend to click like, leave a comment, or share the post. So if you boost a Facebook Business Page post that includes a link to send users to your website, your desired action (clicking a link) does not pair well with the marketing objective (engagement ad equals liking, commenting, or sharing).

Different Facebook ad campaigns will need different marketing objectives, so as you are getting used to running your own Facebook ads, make sure to hover over each marketing objective name and read the description within the Info circle before making your marketing objective selection.