Quick answer: Meta campaign objectives tell Facebook what result to find. For service businesses, Leads or Sales almost always beat Traffic and Engagement.
When you create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager, the first thing you choose is the objective. It sounds like a formality, but it decides who Meta shows your ads to. Choose the wrong one and you’ll get exactly what you asked for, just not what you wanted.
The six objectives
Meta groups campaigns into six objectives:
- Awareness: shows your ads to as many people as possible, or as often as possible, within your budget. Good for brand recognition, not for enquiries.
- Traffic: sends people to your website or app. Meta looks for people likely to click, not people likely to enquire.
- Engagement: gets likes, comments, shares, video views or messages.
- Leads: collects enquiries through instant forms, Messenger, calls or your website form.
- App promotion: gets people to install or use an app.
- Sales: finds people likely to buy or complete a valuable action on your website, such as a purchase.
Why the objective matters so much
Meta’s delivery system is built to find people who are most likely to take the action you choose. Pick Traffic, and it finds people who click a lot. Pick Leads with a website conversion goal, and it looks for people who actually fill in forms.
That’s why a Traffic campaign can deliver lots of cheap clicks and almost no enquiries. It’s working exactly as designed. See why your Facebook ads get clicks but no enquiries.
Which objective should a small business use?
- Service businesses wanting enquiries: Leads. Choose website conversions if you have a good landing page with tracking, or instant forms if you don’t. Read lead ads vs landing pages.
- Online stores: Sales, optimising for purchases, with the Pixel and Conversions API set up.
- Businesses that take bookings or messages: Leads, optimising for messages or calls, if that’s how customers prefer to contact you.
- New businesses with no tracking yet: set tracking up first. Without it, the Leads and Sales objectives can’t optimise properly.
When Traffic or Engagement make sense
They’re useful for building an audience to retarget later, promoting content such as a guide or video, or when you have no conversion tracking at all and just need people to see a page. They’re rarely the right choice when the goal is enquiries.
The tracking catch
The Leads and Sales objectives only work well when Meta can see results. If you use website conversions, make sure your Lead or Purchase events fire correctly and show in Events Manager. Read Meta Pixel vs Conversions API and 7 signs your ad tracking is broken.
Sources and further reading
Written by Gregory
20 years building websites and running lead generation, mostly with my own money on the line. Based in Sydney, working with clients worldwide. How I work →