Your optimization goal (or bidding goal) tells your target ad platform what you want to achieve when participating in the auction for impressions. Choosing the right bidding goal for your situation will improve your campaign performance. The available optimization goals depend on your campaign objective. Below is a list of the possible goals with brief descriptions, and some guidelines about where they may be most appropriate.
Awareness
- Ad Recall Lift: focus on targeting users so they are more likely to remember seeing your ads
- Impressions: focus on achieving as many impressions as possible
- Social Impressions: focus on maximizing social impressions
- Reach: focus on reaching as many users as possible up to once per day
- Video views: focus on targeting users who are likely to watch the ad's video
These goals are appropriate in situations where you are not trying to drive specific conversions and/or you want to maximize your ads' reach within certain parameters. For example, if you are trying to drive website conversions, a small target audience can result in poor delivery, but an awareness-based bidding goal can help you to reach everyone in your audience.
Consideration
- Link clicks: focus on targeting users who are likely to click the link in your ad
- Landing page views: focus on targeting users who are likely to click the link in your ad and wait for the landing page to load
- Page engagement: focus on targeting users who are likely to engage with your page by, for example, liking, commenting, or sharing content
- Post engagement: focus on targeting users who are likely to engage with your ad by, for example, liking, commenting, or sharing content
Link clicks, Page engagement and Post engagement can be thought of as indicators of brand consideration. If you are trying to drive specific conversions, Landing page views optimization is recommended over Link clicks optimization as the resulting website traffic should be of a higher quality. A consideration-based bidding goal can be useful in A/B testing as the results are typically quite stable.
Conversion
- App installs: focus on targeting users who are likely to install your app
- Event responses: focus on targeting users who are likely to be interested in your event
- Lead generation: focus on targeting users who are likely to complete your lead form
- Offsite conversions: focus on targeting users who are likely to complete a specific action on your website
- App events: similar to Offsite Conversions; focus on targeting users who are likely to complete a specified action in your mobile app
- Value: focus on targeting users who are likely to generate revenue as reported by your Pixel/app events — see Value Optimization
- Offline conversions: maximize conversions that happen offline, as reported through the Offline Conversions feature
When choosing a conversion-based bidding goal, it is important to select a conversion event in your funnel where you are generating enough conversions to provide the ad platform with the data it needs. For example, if your goal is Offsite conversions, and your chosen conversion point is Purchases, each ad set needs a minimum of roughly 10 purchases per week (or 30 in the lifetime) to be effective. More conversions means better optimization. Otherwise, you need to select a different conversion point from your upper funnel (e.g. Add To Cart, View Content), but if neither is possible you can also use Landing page views.
Conversion-based bidding goals are selective, so they can help you to get the most value out of your budget. However, for this, you need large audiences and a good click-to-conversion rate (CVR): 0.5% or more (with 1-day post-click attribution).