We Don’t Need a Traffic Objective
This has nothing to do with whether or not you should run “traffic campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More.” The objectiveWhen you create a campaign, one of the first things you’ll do is select an objective. The campaign objective is your ultimate goal. Your selection will impact options, including optimization and delivery. Options include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. More itself provides no value…
Examples of Objective Value
Every other campaign objective has a performance goal that is unique. The only way to use it is to pick its related objective.
Here are some examples…
Awareness: Ad Recall Lift and ReachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More
Engagement: Engagement with a Post, Reminders Set, Event ResponsesThe number of people who responded ‘Interested’ or ‘Going’ to your Facebook event and credited to your ads. More, and Page Likes
Leads: Leads and Conversion Leads
App Promotion: App Installs
Sales: Value-Based ConversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More
Traffic Provides No Unique Value
Traffic is known for link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More, which is found within five objectives. Landing Page ViewsLanding Page View is a Facebook ads metric that represents when people land on your destination URL after clicking a link in your ad. More is found within four.
You don’t use the Traffic objective because you want access to ImpressionsImpressions are the number of times your ads were displayed to your target audience. Impressions aren’t counted if it is detected they came from bots. More or Daily Unique ReachDaily Unique Reach Facebook ads optimization allows you to limit the number of times you reach your audience to no more than once per day. More. You don’t even need to select it to get access to Calls or Conversations performance goals (both are also found in Engagement).
There is nothing unique about the Traffic objective. So, what’s the point?
How Meta Can Fix This
There are two ways that Meta can fix this:
1. Come up with a performance goalThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More that is unique to the Traffic objective. An example could be a Quality Traffic metric that advertisers could optimize for.
2. Fold this objective into Engagement. That’s all traffic is otherwise. It’s another form of engagement. This is something I recommended in a recent post about how Meta could restructure campaign objectives.
If you aren’t going to make it unique, there’s no reason to keep it.
What do you think?