Facebook Ads Goals: How to Choose the Right Objective for Your Campaign

Updated 16 August 2025.

Did you know that there are many types of Facebook ads, and each type is specific to your business goals? You need the right strategy before you type in your credit card, or you could be throwing your money away!

If you’re new to Facebook ads or any other type of PPC advertising, you may be a little bit baffled when you first take a look. You may have decided that PPC ads are a good choice for your business, but you’ll need to firm up what you want to achieve before you hit the go button. We’re sharing the different goals you might have for your business and how to translate these into effective advertising campaigns. 

Why Your Facebook Ad Objective Matters

When you launch a Facebook (Meta) ad campaign, the very first and most important decision you make is selecting your campaign objective. Your objective tells Facebook’s algorithm what you want to achieve, whether that’s building brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales. Choosing the right objective is crucial because it determines who sees your ads, how your ads are optimized, and which results you’ll get.

The 6 Core Facebook Ad Objectives (ODAX Framework)

As of 2025, Facebook has streamlined its objectives under the Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences (ODAX) framework. There are now six main objectives, each designed to align with a specific business goal and stage of the customer journey.

1. Awareness

Goal: Get your brand, product, or service in front of as many relevant people as possible.
Best for: New businesses, product launches, or when you want to build recognition.
Optimizations: Impressions, reach, ad recall lift.
Example: Running a video ad to introduce your brand to a new audience.

2. Traffic

Goal: Drive visitors to a specific destination, such as your website, landing page, or app.
Best for: Content marketing, blog promotion, or when you want more people to visit your site.
Optimizations: Landing page views, link clicks, impressions.
Example: Promoting a blog post or special offer on your website.

3. Engagement

Goal: Encourage people to interact with your content—likes, comments, shares, event responses, or messages.
Best for: Building community, promoting events, or increasing social proof.
Optimizations: Post engagement, page likes, event responses, video views, messages.
Example: Boosting a post to get more comments and shares.

4. Leads

Goal: Collect information from potential customers, such as email addresses or phone numbers.
Best for: Growing your email list, booking consultations, or gathering inquiries.
Optimizations: Instant forms, website forms, calls, messages.
Example: Running a lead generation ad with a built-in form for newsletter signups.

5. App Promotion

Goal: Get more people to install or engage with your mobile app.
Best for: App launches, increasing app downloads, or boosting in-app activity.
Optimizations: App installs, app events, value-based optimization.
Example: Promoting a new app with a “Download Now” call-to-action.

6. Sales

Goal: Drive purchases or other valuable actions, such as adding items to a cart or completing a transaction.
Best for: E-commerce, retargeting, or any campaign focused on conversions.
Optimizations: Website purchases, catalogue sales, in-app purchases, Messenger/WhatsApp sales.
Example: Retargeting users who viewed a product but didn’t buy, with a special offer

The Goal: Get more sales

This is what most business owners imagine PPC ads are all about, but it’s just one of the many ways you can use Facebook ads for your business. We are jumping into this one first, as this is likely what you think your goal is, but don’t be surprised if you change your mind after you have read some of the alternatives. Sales isn’t a very specific goal and is most useful for those who need to increase revenue in any way possible.

If your goal is to get more sales, the first thing to consider is how your sales process works. Do you sell items at a fixed price? Do you need to give prospective buyers a quote first? Do you have limited availability for a service?

If you don’t need to talk to customers first, likely because you sell a fixed-price product, how are you selling your items? Are you online only, brick-and-mortar, or a hybrid of the two?

If you are selling offline only, your Facebook ads need to be focused on brand awareness. Set this up as your objective and send people to your website to familiarize themselves with your business. If you are selling online or hybrid selling, set up your campaign for traffic to maximize those visiting your e-commerce store.

The Goal: Get new customers

Sometimes, it’s not about sales specifically, but about bringing new customers into your business. Introducing new customers is different from retaining customers and creating repeat sales.

By and large, you can follow the steps for more sales, but if you need to speak to people before they purchase, the most effective way to introduce them to your business is to send them to a quote form, appointment booker, or something else that represents the next stage in your sales funnel.

Your PPC ads objective is leads. This may mean integrating with other systems, or it may be as simple as encouraging people to send a private message. The key is that they need to open up communication with your sales team.

The Goal: Get existing customers to buy more

It is usually much simpler to encourage existing customers to purchase from you than it is to introduce new customers to your business. Your existing customers (provided they had a good experience) have already decided you are worth their hard-earned money, so your marketing message can be slightly different.

If you don’t need to talk to your customers, you can send them where they need to be (traffic), but if you do, it’s worth considering a stripped-back protocol (leads). If you have existing information from them, such as their address and square footage, if you provide a home service, you can create a simplified process, reducing the sludge and increasing conversions.

The Goal: Connect with customers

Customer engagement has become a key metric for online small business owners, and it is a valid goal for your campaign! Whether this is to boost engagement on posts, encourage messages or get them to sign up for a newsletter, it may feel a little strange to be spending ad money on something that doesn’t directly bring in money to your business, but nurturing your existing customers is often a surprisingly fruitful way to boost your revenue.

Your objective will be engagement, and it can come in many forms, from competitions to text messages to promoted posts. Be creative and enjoy building a community for your business.

The Goal: Get the word out about your business

Whether you are a new business or looking to expand, you may well find yourself wanting to get your name out there. Sure, you could do this through a sales-push campaign, but you can ease people in gently with a different focus.

You can do this in two ways:

• Awareness, optimized for reach, will give you a simple cost-per-person formula to introduce people to your brand.
• Awareness, optimized for recall lift, is a metric that marketing professionals use to determine the number of people who remember the content of an ad vs those who saw it.

Often, spreading the word can be aligned with other goals, such as engagement. For example, you might run a PPC campaign for a lead magnet or a free webinar. The offer of something free grabs the attention of potential new customers, yet by reacting to it, they are engaging with you as a brand. If you have an effective sales funnel, this should then lead to not only increased awareness and engagement but also sales!

Pro Tips for Facebook Ad Success

• Use one objective per campaign for best results, but you can run multiple campaigns with different objectives.
• Test and optimize: Regularly review your campaign performance and adjust your objective or targeting as needed.
• Retargeting works best with Sales and Leads objectives: Use custom audiences to reach people who have already interacted with your brand.
• Creative matters: No matter your objective, compelling visuals and clear calls-to-action will improve your results

Ready to Launch Smarter Facebook Ads?

Choosing the right Facebook ad objective is the foundation of a successful campaign. Align your goals, leverage Facebook’s powerful targeting, and watch your results improve.

If you’re new to PPC ads and need a hand, click here to book a free virtual coffee and let’s chat strategy. Whether you are trying to sell tickets, up your newsletter subscribers, or just spread the word, we can make it happen.

Cyber PR Army Solutions Inc. Digital Marketing Made Easy.