All Facebook Ad Objectives Explained [2023 ODAX UPDATED]

The first step in creating your ad campaign is setting your Facebook ad objective. On Facebook, there are 6 campaign objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales.

It's no secret that Facebook has become a goldmine for businesses seeking to connect with their target audience thanks to its unparalleled reach and granular targeting capabilities.

But here's the catch: to truly harness its potential, you need more than just a compelling ad and a fingers-crossed approach.

This is where the magic of Facebook Ads Objectives enters the stage, promising not just visibility, but real, tangible results.

Picture this:

Your marketing efforts are tailored with laser-like precision, each campaign aligned with a specific purpose.

Whether your aim is to skyrocket website traffic, foster brand awareness, generate leads, or boost sales – Facebook Ads Objectives offer a roadmap to success.

Ready to transform your advertising game from hit-or-miss to hit-the-bullseye?

Let's dive in!

How to choose the right Facebook campaign objective?

When choosing a Facebook ads objective, make sure it aligns with your business goals.

Objectives in Facebook rely on algorithmic learning, meaning that the Facebook algorithm looks for patterns in people’s past behaviors to predict future actions.

If you choose an objective such as "traffic" when what you’re actually looking for is "store purchases," the algorithm will look for users most likely to click, not users most likely to buy.

So, before deciding on a campaign objective, it’s important that you consider your business goals.

Before delving into the specifics of each Facebook campaign objective, it's important to understand the latest Facebook ODAX updates and how this change impacts advertisers.

What is ODAX (Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences)?

ODAX stands for Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences. It represents a fresh campaign objective framework introduced by Facebook in 2022. The goal of ODAX is to streamline the process for advertisers to define their campaign objectives.

ODAX also simplifies the creation of cross-channel campaigns that seamlessly target audiences across Facebook and Instagram.

Advertisers now have the option to choose the same campaign objective for both platforms, allowing Facebook's algorithms to automatically fine-tune the ads for optimal outreach on each platform.

In summary, ODAX is a remarkable advancement over the previous campaign objective structure. Its implementation empowers advertisers to set precise campaign goals, thereby facilitating the creation of more potent and impactful ad experiences.

Facebook ad objectives - ODAX Updates

Facebook has recently employed an Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences (ODAX) approach, where advertisers set up their campaigns based on their business goals.

With this approach, they have streamlined the ad creation experience, combining the 11 previous Facebook ad objectives into 6 new ones.

With these changes, Facebook aims to achieve three main goals:

1. Simplify objectives, aligning them more closely with marketing goals.
2. Allow cross-channel campaigns (e.g., website + app, website + shop, or website + messaging).
3. Provide better guidance on the platform throughout the campaign creation process.

The 6 Facebook ad objectives

Awareness

Campaigns with Facebook ad objectives in the awareness stage likely won’t lead to sales directly.

The purpose for awareness campaigns is to attract people who are likely to go deeper into your sales funnel and gather enough data to create custom audiences.

Depending on the price tag and complexity of your products or services, you can choose to tell your whole brand story in one ad or use the ad to pique interest and re-direct viewers to blog posts, guides, or videos.

At the ad set level, you can set the optimization for the ads for:

• Impressions
• Reach
• Ad Recall Lift.

Traffic

When combined with content marketing, the traffic campaign objective can be a great way to get more people to visit your website and even your product pages.

The traffic objective can also lay the groundwork for conversion campaigns.
When your pixel is brand new, setting up a conversion campaign straight away isn’t likely to work well and you will not get any conversions because you don’t have enough data to work with.

It can help you attract people interested in your products and assist you in compiling a custom audience that you can later re-target with conversion ads.

For this objective, at the ad set level you can set the following optimizations:

• Landing Page Views
• Link Clicks Impressions
• Daily Unique Reach.
  

Engagement

The engagement campaign objective can help you get more shares, likes, and comments on your ads and posts, as well as get more video views and messages.

It can also help you reach people who are more likely to participate in your events and claim your offers.

Basically, every form of interaction with your page can be set on this campaign objective.

The engagement objective has different optimizations depending on the conversion location you set at the ad set level. The available conversion locations are:

• Your Ad
• Messaging Apps
• Website
• App
• Facebook Page

The available optimizations are: Direct Messages on Messenger, Instagram Direct, and WhatsApp, video views, post engagement, and event responses, conversions, landing page views, link clicks, impressions, and daily unique reach.

Leads

This objective is strategically designed to cater to individuals who possess prior familiarity with your brand, have demonstrated keen interest in your offerings, and are actively contemplating a potential purchase.

If your goal is to encourage potential customers to showcase substantial interest in your products or services, this refined objective proves to be instrumental.

The leads objective encompasses a broad scope of channels for the conversion location, which are:

• Your Website
• Instant Forms
• Messenger
• Calls
• Your App

App promotion

With the app promotion campaign objective, Facebook targets people within your target audience who are more likely to install your app.

The optimizations for app promotions are:

• App Installs
• App Events
• Value

Note that the Value option will deliver the ad to people in order to maximize the total purchase value in order to get the highest return on ad spend (ROAS).

Sales

Facebook ad objectives sales stage are best used on hot leads who know your business and have strong buying intent.

This objective works best with people at the bottom of your funnel who just need that last push or reminder to buy.

The sales objective includes catalog sales; This objective is the bread and butter of advertising for ecommerce businesses.

Ads catalog sales campaigns are generated from your ecommerce store's product feed, bringing a personalized shopping experience to your target audience directly in their social feeds.

For example, if you sell winter boots and someone clicked on a pair of your boots but failed to follow through with the purchase, you can use Facebook to remind them about the boots they previously looked at.

The sales objective can include the following conversion locations:

• Your Website
• Your App
• Your Website and App
• Messenger or WhatsApp (If you accept payments on these messaging apps already)

For each of them, you can set the optimization, just like the other objectives, but if you set value, you will need to have a value-based event configured on Facebook events manager.

ODAX Facebook ad objectives in Revealbot

At Revealbot you can already create your ads for Facebook with the new ODAX objectives in the bulk creation or post boosting features.

All the changes to the objectives and conversion locations can now be found in the Campaign tab.

Previously, you had to set them up in the Optimizations option within the Ad Set tab.

If you want to learn how to use the Bulk Creation feature or boost your posts automatically using Revealbot, you can check our Help Center articles:

Bulk Creation

Post Boosting

You can start creating your ads using the new objectives right away by trying Revealbot.

Facebook ad objectives before ODAX

Prior to the update, Facebook's ad objectives were divided into three categories with 11 objectives.

These were based on the conversion funnel stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion.

The issue with these objectives was that they weren't simple and sometimes overlapped.

For instance, if you had a store and wanted to increase brand awareness before driving purchases, you would set up a "Store Traffic" objective in the conversion category.

Now, you can simply choose the "Traffic" objective.

All these changes reduce confusion in campaign setup and help advertisers achieve their goals.

Facebook ad objectives before ODAX:

• Awareness - Primarily aimed at targeting people at the top of your funnel and attracting those likely to purchase your products at a later stage.
• Brand Awareness - This objective was mostly used to gauge ad recall performance. Ad recall lift is an estimated metric within Facebook Ads Manager based on polls in which Facebook users are asked whether they recall seeing your ad.
• Reach - The main aim of reach ads is to target as many people as possible to expand a small audience. It was mostly used to grow audience and follower counts.
• Traffic - With this objective, advertisers could reach the target audience and direct them to their website. It could also be used to initiate conversion campaigns by gathering data for custom audiences.
• Engagement - As the name suggests, it focused on generating shares, likes, and comments on your posts to build social proof for your page.
• App Installs - Aimed at attracting people more likely to install your app.
• Video Views - This type of campaign focused solely on video views, which could be set up for at least 2 or 15 second views.
• Lead Generation - This worked best for people familiar with your brand, interested in your products or services, and ready to make a purchase. The form was automatically created by the platform, eliminating the need for users to leave the page.
• Messages - For users who preferred messaging and frequently used Facebook Messenger, this objective served as a conversation starter to connect with your audience and present your product or service.
• Conversions - These were designed to prompt actions on your website, app, Messenger, or WhatsApp. Actions could include opting in, adding to cart, or making a purchase.
• Catalog Sales - Ads in catalog sales campaigns were generated from your ecommerce store's product feed, offering a personalized shopping experience to your audience directly in their social feeds.
• Store Traffic - For this ad type to be effective, you needed to add your physical store locations in the business manager, and users needed to have their location services activated. For example, a local market could advertise their organic products to someone living 5 minutes away from their location.

Conclusion

Setting the right Facebook ad objectives is a critical part of any successful marketing campaign.

By choosing the right objective, you can ensure that your ads are seen by the right people and that you are measuring the right metrics to track your success.

When choosing an objective, it is important to consider your business goals and the stage of the buying cycle your target audience is in.

For example, if you are just starting out, you may want to focus on awareness campaigns to build brand awareness.

Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can move on to traffic campaigns to drive people to your website or app.

And if you are ready to start generating leads or sales, you can use the leads objective.

It is also important to measure the right metrics to track your success.

You should always have clear goals and KPIs to measure the success of your campaigns and track them constantly.

By choosing the right Facebook ad objectives and tracking the right metrics, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns are effective and that you are getting a return on your investment.

FAQ