Last Updated on November 27, 2024 by Elevate Digital

Choosing the right campaign objective can be essential to the success of an advertising campaign.

Now to be clear that doesn’t mean there is ONE particular campaign objective you will want to use that’s going to get you results every time.

Instead what we´ve found is that the most successful, top performing campaigns often use a variety of different campaign objectives in a very strategic sequence in order to get the best possible results.

Due to the huge difference in CPM by campaign objective (as highlighted in this chart from Metricool below) you can actually leverage low-cost campaign objectives to build an engaged top-of-funnel audience.

Stats showing average CPM by campaign objective by Metricool

CBA to read?🥱 Check out our video guide on campaign objectives below: 

You can then re-target ONLY the most engaged segment of your top of funnel – often resulting in lower overall CPM’s and CPC’s throughout the rest of the funnel, as the subsequent ads are only now showing to a ‘pre-warmed’ audience.

For example, video views campaigns will have a much cheaper cost per impression, meaning you can get in front of a wider audience who you can then show your content to and build trust, before you eventually then try to get clicks from them.

Elevate Digital blog post image showing video views low CPC

What are the different ad campaign objectives

Every advertising platform will have a range of it’s own objectives to choose from but in a nutshell they fall into 3 main categories:

Awareness

Awareness campaigns will often provide the lowest CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) as the platform is priortising total reach. However you may find in order to achieve this goal, your ads show in less favourable placements (like social media sidebars or third-party publisher networks) 

Traffic

Traffic campaigns are where you will generally be able to CPC (cost-per-clicks) generally allowing you to get the most visits for your total spend, however, this can sometimes end up attracting a lot of bot traffic or traffic with a high-bounce rate when additional filters aren’t applied here.

Conversions

As the name suggest, conversions campaigns are optimising for the best possible cost per conversion. However, if you’re fairly new to running ads on a particular platform or don’t have much historic conversion data in the ad account, this often isn’t the best objective to start with as the platform doesn’t yet know what a successful conversion looks like for your business.

There are also nuances and platform-specific objectives, for example, LinkedIn offers some recruitment specific objectives like job applicant ads or talent lead ads as you’ll see below

LinkedIn Ad Campaign Objectives

Meta also has some great features for app promotions as well as additional layers of being able to set specific conversion optimisation goals under each campaign objectives

Meta Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives
Meta Campaign Objectives

The importance of building trust first in ad campaigns

So what that means is by building that trust and credibility at the front end, when it then comes to driving traffic to your website, you’ll generally see a higher click-through rate and lower cost per click because the audience already have some affinity towards you or your brand. 

An example of this is when you see sponsored content in your social media feed. Brands or individuals will show you engaging, value driven content with the hope that you will engage enough to follow them and consume more of their content. And then further down the line, once the trust has been established, they will suggest visiting their website or opting in to an offer they are making.

Unfortunately though, most businesses start out trying to drive traffic and conversions out the gate, paying extremely high costs per click and finding it very difficult to compete or get any reasonable cost per acquisition on any advertising platforms.  

Expensive cost per click when trying to drive conversions image

Why you need to understand the mindset of your customer?

So the first thing is to understand how the algorithms work and how they process this information.  The algorithms behind platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok Etc are incredibly complex machines.

They’re processing and analyzing billions of different data points on individuals to understand what kind of mentality is this person in right now. What kind of mindset is this person in and what kind of behaviours are they exhibiting whilst using our services on their phone.

That allows these platforms to specifically find the people who they know are most likely to take a particular action.  For example let’s say I’m bored and I’m sitting on public transport.  I’ve got a long journey ahead and Facebook notices that I’m watching a lot of videos. In that case they may want to show an advertiser´s video views campaign to me because they know it’s more likely that I’m going to watch it.

However, if I’m at work and I’m just scrolling through looking for an update from one of my friends and I’m actually not engaging with any videos, Facebook would know not to show that video views campaign to me because the chances are I’m not going to engage with it.

They can also look for certain behaviours. So if they notice I’m buying a lot of items or that I’ve bought something recently. Or that I’m making searches that would indicate that I have a high level of buying intent, they would show me ads that have the conversion objective, because they know that I’m more in that “buying mindset”.

How to stand out from your competitors with your ads?

Now at this stage you might just be thinking, well of course I want to sell my product, why wouldn’t I just run conversions campaigns every time?

Well again, the thing you have to remember here is, because most other advertisers go straight in with conversions campaigns, what you end up with is a load of businesses all trying to flog their product to people who have never heard of them.

So it becomes very difficult for me as a consumer to choose your product above anyone else. You’re basically just casting your rod out into the ocean and praying that you’re going to get a bite.

But what you’ll notice with the best performing marketing campaigns out there, is that they break their marketing down into different stages of the funnel, each one utilizing different campaign objectives to their advantage. Again, reach campaigns or video views campaigns will generally be optimized to get the highest amount of views on your content for the lowest cost.

That means you can use those views strategically in order to plant a seed in people’s minds and build trust before we then try and get that conversion, meaning when I’m now seeing your ad amongst all of your other competitors, yours is naturally going to stand out more to me because I’ve already seen your brand and there is a level of trust there that is going to make me more likely to buy from you. Here´s a first hand example of this in action, but with a blogpost, instead of a video ad.

After searching for information about Kefir and Kombucha, for their probiotic health benefits, I read a blog on the website of Kefiralia.

Elevate Digital Blog image of the Kefiralia blog

 The next day I was searching for information on how to get fit and lose weight and read another blog on the Healthline website. Guess who´s ads are all over the page? You guessed it, Kefiralia!

Elevate Digital blog image Healthline blog with Kefiralia advertising

The omni-channel approach in advertising

You can also use multiple platforms to achieve the same result here. For example, one of our clients who sells payroll software had an extremely high cost per click on Google when targeting those high intent keywords that show somebody is actively looking for payroll software. In fact these were sometimes upwards of 20 to 30 pounds just for a single click.

So instead, what we did was create a Blog on the website called “How to switch payroll providers or switching payroll providers checklist”. We then ran search campaigns to this blog content and the benefit of that, because it was an informational search, versus going after the high intent search, the cost per click was significantly cheaper, meaning we were able to drive a lot of visitors to the website, deliver them valuable content, which actually helped answer the question they had. Therefore, not only building trust, but also, at that stage, introducing them to the brand for the first time so they now have a level of brand affinity there.

Elevate Digital Blogpost image - PayCaptain ranked blog and website screen capture with book a demo CTA

We were then able to re-target people who visited that page on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, to then drive them into a conversion action, like booking a demo. A lot of the time this means you’re going to be able to get in front of your target customers before they have even started searching for whatever it is you sell and being bombarded with ads by your competitors who have likely got bigger budgets and more aggressive marketing strategies than you.

In essence, when it comes to choosing a campaign objective for your overall marketing, you never want to just think about one, because chances are you’re probably missing out on huge opportunities to convert more customers at a lower cost.

How many touch points are needed in successful marketing?

In terms of how many touch points you’re going to need, this is naturally going to vary, depending on the selling price of your product or service and the typical buying cycle.

For example, if you’re selling Enterprise level SAS software which has a contract value of half a million pounds plus, you’re probably going to want to have an omni-channel approach, where you’re including informational search content, re-targeting with educational videos and webinars, running through to leadership posts on platforms like LinkedIn with video views campaigns. All before eventually driving traffic to your website.

However, if you’re an Ecom store selling a relatively low value item to consumers, you’re probably not going to have as many layers. Even so, most Industries these days are incredibly saturated, so this means that you can´t just get away with running a conversions objective campaign out the gate and expect to get a decent cost per acquisition.

You really want to think about the overall strategy you’re putting in place to build that brand trust, that brand equity with potential customers before you then try to drive conversions.

When to use Google ads, Meta ads, LinkedIn ads or TikTok ads?

What you really want to think about with all of this when you’re creating an advertising strategy, is how can we make it an absolute “No brainer” for this individual to buy from us, versus the competition.

And naturally when you think about how you find out about products, or how you buy things, there are probably multiple touch points involved before you actually make that purchasing decision. This is where that omni-channel marketing approach can be so important and where incorporating a combination of Google ads AND meta ads, LinkedIn ads or TikTok ads can be so effective.

So by really thinking carefully about the campaign objectives you’re going to use at each stage of the funnel, each stage of the buyer journey, this will help you to choose the correct ad platform. And over time it will also assist you massively in getting the best possible cost per acquisition.

Want Better Results From Your DTC Marketing Strategy?

Book your FREE digital review today and we’ll record you a personalised video going through your website, showing you how you can generate more website visitors and then turn those visitors into paying customers.

Tom Peyton
Follow Me