You will be able to choose a campaign objective based on the action you want people to take.
Farah's first paid campaign for her workwear shop looked like a success on the dashboard. Thousands of people clicked through to her site, and each click cost very little. Then she checked her orders for the same fortnight and found three. She had chosen the traffic objective because the word sounded like what she wanted. The platform did exactly what she asked: it found people who click. It just was not what she needed.
That is the most expensive mistake in paid ads, and it happens before a single ad is written. The objective is an instruction, and the platform follows it literally.
Remember from lesson 1.1, The highest bid does not always win, that Meta's auction uses an estimated action rate: its prediction of how likely this person is to take the action you chose. Google's automated bidding and TikTok's delivery work on similar predictions. The objective is how you choose the action.
So when you pick an objective, you are telling the platform which people to look for. Pick traffic and it looks for people who tend to click links. Pick a sales or conversion objective and it looks for people who tend to buy. Those are often different people. Some people click on almost everything and rarely buy. Others scroll past most ads but buy when something fits.
This is why the same budget, the same creative and the same audience settings can give very different results under different objectives. The audience box you fill in sets the outer limits. The objective decides who inside those limits actually sees the ad.
Each platform names its objectives differently and renames them from time to time, but they fall into three broad groups.
Awareness objectives aim to show your ad to as many relevant people as possible, or as often as you choose. They suit a business that needs people to know it exists, such as a new cafe opening in a neighbourhood.
Consideration or traffic objectives aim at people likely to engage: click to your site, watch a video, message you or interact with a post. They are useful when the action you care about is genuinely a visit or a view, or when you cannot yet measure anything deeper.
Conversion objectives aim at people likely to complete an action on your site or app, such as a lead form or a purchase. They need tracking in place, because the platform can only find more buyers if it can see who bought. Module three covers that tracking.
At the time of writing, Meta's objectives include names such as Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads and Sales. Google asks you to pick a campaign goal such as Sales, Leads or Website traffic. TikTok groups its objectives into awareness, consideration and conversion. Check the current names in each platform's help centre before you build, because they change.
Farah's story is common because traffic sounds like the step before a sale. More visitors should mean more orders. But the platform is not sending you a random sample of people. It is sending the people most likely to click, which is a group it has become very good at finding.
Those clicks can still be useful. If you want people to read a long article, or you are building a retargeting audience of visitors for later, traffic may be the right instruction. Lesson 4.3, Custom audiences, lookalikes and retargeting, shows how a visitor list gets used. What traffic will not reliably do is find buyers, because buying is not what you asked for.
The same trap exists for engagement. Likes and comments are cheap, and they look good in a report. If your goal is orders, engagement is a different target.
Here is the rule to work from: choose the deepest action in your customer's journey that you can measure reliably and that happens often enough for the platform to learn from.
For Farah, that is a purchase on her online shop. Her site can record each order and its value, so she can use a sales objective.
Priya, who runs a maths centre in Tampines, cannot record an enrolment online. Enrolments happen after a trial class, in person. What she can measure is a trial class booking through the form on her website. So her deepest reliable action is a lead, and she would choose a leads objective with the booking form as the conversion.
Mei Ling, who bakes custom cakes in Punggol, takes almost all her orders over WhatsApp. She cannot track a sale on a website at all. Her deepest measurable action is a conversation started. Meta and some other platforms offer objectives and ad types built around messaging, so she would look for the current option that optimises for messages, then count orders from those chats herself.
If 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 a step just before the sale, such as adding to cart or submitting an enquiry. Module eight returns to how much data each platform needs.
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 your business goal, then pick the campaign objective on Meta and on Google that best matches it and explain why.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).