Use These 10 Facebook Ad Campaigns to Maximize Your ROI

October 20, 2020 5 min read

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The following excerpt is from Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, Fourth Edition by Perry Marshall, Bob Regnerus, and Thomas Meloche, with Mark Ingles. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Bookshop | Entrepreneur Press

When setting up your Facebook Advertising plan, increasing the awareness of your brand is a top priority. The best way to do that is to create targeted Facebook Ad campaigns that target prospects at their various levels of brand awareness. Here are 10 Facebook Ad campaigns that should be on your radar:

Brand Awareness Campaigns

Brand Awareness Campaigns are for advertisers who want people to remember their brand. There will be little need for most advertisers to use this objective because you always want to allocate your ad dollars for actionable events. However, if it is used, it is most often targeted to cold, unaware traffic.

Reach Campaigns

Reach Campaigns are for advertisers who want to maximize the number of people who see their ads and how often they see them. You can strategically use this campaign type for retargeting purposes to effectively to reach audiences where the total number of people seeing the ad is more important than Facebook being selective about who sees it. The Reach Objective is most often used for audiences that are warm and aware of your business versus cold, unaware traffic.

Related: How to Choose the Best of the 3 Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives

Traffic Campaigns

Traffic Campaigns show ads to users with the intent of moving them away from Facebook to your website, app in the App store, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Typically, you are attracting cold, unaware traffic when utilizing a Traffic Campaign. These campaigns are best suited for situations where you want to maximize the number of people visiting your website at the lowest cost-per-visit. Most often you do not require this traffic to take any other action on your web page.

Post Engagement Campaigns

The Post Engagement Campaign objective will show your ad to people most likely to like, comment and share your ad. The only time you will use this objective is to give an ad social proof.  You can run Post Engagement Campaigns to both cold and warm traffic.

Page Likes Campaigns

A Page Likes Campaign optimizes ads for people that are most likely to like your page. The only reason you might run this type of campaign is that you have a new page on Facebook and you want to grow the page likes quickly. We typically tell clients that you’ll want to get 100 page likes to signal to people that you’re a real business. You’ll most often run this campaign to cold, unaware traffic. However, we’ve also run this campaign to people that are aware of a business to get them started liking a new page.

Event Responses Campaigns

Event Responses Campaigns are to get people to respond (by saying they are going or interested) to events created on Facebook. In order to create this campaign, your event must be active and tickets must be sold online. You will only run this campaign typically to warm, aware traffic for events that happen in a local or regional area.

App Installs Campaigns

The App Installs Campaign will be used to advertise your Apple or Android app on mobile devices. Facebook gives you the ability to drive users right from your ad to the Google Play or App Store and optimize for Install actions or Purchase actions. The great thing for advertisers is that you can allow Facebook to track everything in your app so you can track many user events and actions. When you set up your ad, you can specify not just what platform to advertise on, but also what versions of iOS or Android as well as the type of device like iPads vs iPhones. App Install Campaigns are suitable for both cold and warm traffic depending on the marketing goals you have.

Video Views Campaigns

You can use Video Views Campaigns to sort and sift cold traffic and identify people who might be interested in what you’re selling without requiring them to leave Facebook. For instance, one of the most inexpensive ways to prospect is using a video ad and casting a wide net to a cold audience because video views are quite cheap in the Facebook universe. Facebook tracks the stats of every video played on its platform.

Lead Generation Campaigns

Lead Generation Campaigns are a unique way to collect leads for your business without having to build a form on a web page. In fact, this allows you to collect a great deal of information from a prospect without them ever having to leave the Facebook platform. This is a low-friction way to collect leads. You avoid disrupting the person’s user experience by keeping them on Facebook instead of switching to your website and back again. They usually don’t have to type their contact info because it’s prefilled. They also never have to check their email or spam folder for a confirmation. Especially on mobile devices, it’s a simple and elegant way to collect leads. You will typically use Lead Generation Campaigns for cold, unaware traffic.

Related: The 3-Step Formula for Successful Facebook Video Ads

Message Campaigns

Messages Campaigns allow you an opportunity to run an ad that will initiate a conversation with a Facebook user through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. You can also show ads called Sponsored Messages inside existing Messenger conversations that users already have with your page. There are a number of creative ways to use this type of campaign. We’ve personally used this objective to connect with our most ready prospects by asking them a question and inviting them to a conversation. Many prospects often just need to get a simple question answered before they buy, making this a great solution to do that.