25 Sep Understanding Facebook Advertising Objectives – The Fundamental

We’ve been doing Facebook advertising for the past 9 years, helping brands spent millions on the social network. There’s one thing I realise among SMEs that worries me, when they look to the social network as their marketing channel, is that most of them, are spending blindly.

Most of them jumped in without having understanding the mechanics of Facebook advertising, some of them spent thousands monthly but couldn’t reap the optimise benefit out of the dollars spent, hence some started to complaint that Facebook advertising is useless.

Facebook advertising is fun. But you have to start from the fundamental, which is from understanding Facebook advertising objectives, 11 of them.

Now who have not seen the above screen before?

What about this?

And clicked on the blue “Boost” button

These are Facebook advertising objectives lined up in your ads manager. How many of you use more than 3? 5?

Now take a good look at this screen, Please point me one thing that you think is the most important thing.

Yes, it asks you a question. What’s your marketing objective?

This version of ads manager start screen is the result of years of hardwork trying to make this easy to navigate and user friendly to especially new advertisers. Trust me this is the best yet, worse I’ve seen.

Fantastic question. But I’m an economy graduate, I like to question the status quo.

So I asked a question: how did Facebook come out with all these?

Because of us. Of course! No I mean, literally we did. How many years you’ve been on Facebook? I’m 10. The best 10 years of my life I’ve had Facebook recording them for me, all my interactions, all those rants, lunch photos, news we read… most importantly, Facebook has our 9 years of data of how we interact with the internet.

Facebook knows us better than ourselves.

So these 10 objectives are actions most likely to be taken by most people when they come across a piece of news.

This is how it works. Give a target audience of 1000 people for example, based on historical data, Facebook categorises each of us into groups that are more likely to take certain actions – actions defined by Facebook that matters to businesses.

So out of these 1000 people there will be people who are more likely to…

Face it, 2 billion people use Facebook differently.

Now let’s put 2 objectives into comparison. What do you get when you choose this? You get website clicks. But why are there still so many of us choosing this?! In case you’re not sure, this is the same as the “boost post” button you see in your page and happily spend hundreds Facebook suggested you to. What do you get doing so? Likes, comments and share, which categorises as engagements.

My question is, is engagement useful in growing your business? Yes it does, but not for most cases, we just click because it is convenient, we spend blindly.

I’m not gonna go into each of the objectives here because it will take another half day. But I urge you to start doing one thing differently today, take a step back and think: what’s your marketing objective?

Which to me, that actually asks: which action matters to you.

To learn more about Facebook advertising objectives, join this class.