Choose a campaign objective based on the action you want people to take.
Farah sells workwear through an online store and recently paid for ads for the first time. Farah picked the traffic objective because the name seemed to describe the goal.
The campaign ran for a fortnight, and the dashboard numbers were encouraging. Thousands of people had clicked through to the shop, and each click had cost very little. Then Farah looked at the orders placed over the same fortnight and found three. The platform had found the people it was told to find, people who click. A shop that needs sales needed different people. Picking the wrong objective is the costliest error in paid advertising, and you make it before you have written a single ad.
The objective is the instruction you give the platform about which action to optimise for. That choice also decides which people it goes looking for, and the platform carries out the instruction to the letter. Lesson 1.1, "The highest bid does not always win", introduced the estimated action rate: Meta's auction predicts how likely each person is to take the action you selected. Google's automated bidding and TikTok's delivery rely on similar predictions. Your objective is where you select that action.
Choose traffic and the system searches for people who tend to click links. Choose sales or conversions and it searches for people who tend to buy. Those two groups are often not the same people. Some people tap on nearly every ad and seldom buy anything. Others ignore most ads but buy when the product suits them. You can keep the budget, creative and audience settings identical, change only the objective, and get very different results. Audience settings set the boundary, and within that boundary the objective picks who is shown the ad.
Each platform uses its own labels for objectives and changes them from time to time. Underneath the labels, objectives fall into three broad groups.
Awareness objectives try to put your ad in front of as many relevant people as possible, or in front of them as often as you set. They suit a business that mainly needs people to know it exists, such as a cafe that has just opened in a neighbourhood.
Consideration or traffic objectives look for people likely to engage with you: visit your website, watch a video, message you or react to a post. Use them when a visit or a view really is the result you want, or when you have no way yet to measure anything further along.
Conversion objectives look for people likely to complete an action on your website or app, such as a purchase or a lead form. These depend on tracking. The platform can only find more buyers if it can see who has already bought. Module three teaches how to set that tracking up.
At the time of writing, Meta's objectives include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads and Sales. Google asks you to pick a campaign goal, for example Sales, Leads or Website traffic. TikTok sorts its objectives into awareness, consideration and conversion. These names change, so look them up in each platform's help centre before you set up a campaign.
It is easy to think of traffic as the stage that comes just before a sale. The platform does not send a random cross-section of people to your site, though. It sends the people most likely to click, and it has become very good at finding them. Farah's thousands of visitors came from that group.
Traffic is still the right choice in some cases. It works when you want people to read a long article. It also works when you want to collect site visitors into a retargeting audience for a later campaign. Lesson 4.3, "Custom audiences, lookalikes and retargeting", explains how that visitor list is used. Traffic will not reliably find buyers, because you never asked the platform for buyers.
Engagement has the same problem. Likes and comments are cheap and make a report look healthy. If you need orders, engagement is aimed at a different target.
Pick the deepest measurable action. This is the step furthest along your customer's journey that you can track reliably and that happens often enough for the platform to learn from.
Farah's site records every order along with its value. A purchase is the deepest action Farah can measure reliably, so a sales objective fits.
Priya owns a maths centre in Tampines. Students enrol in person after a trial class, so Priya has no way to record enrolments online. Priya can record trial class bookings made through the form on the website. That makes a lead the deepest reliable action. The right choice is a leads objective, with the booking form counted as the conversion.
Mei Ling (an invented example) makes custom cakes in Punggol and takes almost every order over WhatsApp. No sale goes through a website, so there is no sale to track there. The deepest action Mei Ling can measure is a conversation being started. Meta and some other platforms have objectives and ad types built around messaging. Mei Ling would find whichever current objective optimises for messages, then count the orders that come out of those chats by hand.
How often the action happens matters as well. When the deepest action is rare, the platform may struggle to learn. A business that sells a few expensive items a month may need to optimise for an earlier step close to the sale, such as add to cart or submitting an enquiry. Module eight comes back to how much data each platform needs to learn.
Start with your goal, written as one sentence. Next, lay out the steps a customer takes and find the deepest one you can measure reliably. Check that it happens often enough for the platform to learn from. If it is rare, move back to the step just before the sale. If you plan to use a conversion objective, make sure your tracking is in place first. Look up the current objective names in each platform's help centre, then on each platform choose the objective that matches your chosen action.
Write down the goal for your own business in one sentence before you pick anything. In the activity below you will match it to an objective on Meta and on Google and explain the choice.
Write down your business goal. Pick the campaign objective on Meta and on Google that fits it best, and say why.
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