How Switching A Meta Campaign’s Objective Cut Our CPM By 80%
When building a Meta campaign, it is crucial to ensure that the campaign objective aligns with your business goals and complements the desired user action.
Meta currently offers six different objective types: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, Sales, and App.
Each campaign objective serves its unique purpose, and without carefully selecting the correct one, you might overspend or fail to achieve the desired results.
Background
When initially setting up our Meta campaign, our goal was to encourage users to click on the ad and visit our website, leading us to choose the Traffic objective.
After running the campaign for several months and consistently seeking opportunities for testing, we decided to shift our business objective. Instead of heavily emphasizing website traffic, we aimed to enhance brand recognition and frequency.
Hypothesis
Our hypothesis was that this adjustment would allow our campaign to maintain its reach while exposing our ads to the audience more frequently. Although this shift involved sacrificing some website traffic, our overarching focus shifted to frequency, brand recognition, and lowering our CPM.
With the change in our business objective, we needed to adjust our Meta Campaign objective accordingly.
This is where my skepticism and past biases almost took over
Generally, I’ve steered clear of running awareness objective campaigns. In essence, the objective of such campaigns is to expose your ad to as many users as inexpensively as possible. While Meta claims that these users are “most likely to remember your ad,” I’ve found that if audience targeting isn’t precise, there’s a risk of having highly unqualified users view your ads simply because they were the cheapest audience to reach.
However, that’s when I was reminded that the audience this specific campaign was targeting is highly qualified and very specific. Our campaign was a retargeting campaign solely focused on past website visitors and page post engagers.
Given the high qualifications and niche nature of this audience, I became confident in transitioning our campaign’s objective to awareness.
Results:
| Traffic Objective Campaigns | CPM | CTR |
|---|---|---|
| $14.82 | 0.17% | |
| $25.67 | 2.80% | |
| Average | $20.25 | 1.49% |
| Awareness Objective Campaigns | CPM | CTR |
|---|---|---|
| $5.67 | 0.06% | |
| $2.52 | 0.13% | |
| Average | $4.10 | 0.10% |
- CPM: Switching objectives resulted in an 80% reduction in our CPM! This demonstrates that if our primary goal is to enhance brand recognition while keeping costs down, choosing an awareness objective is the most logical decision.
- CTR: As anticipated, we did observe a decline in the CTR when using the awareness objective. Nevertheless, given the shift in our business objective toward brand recognition rather than clicks, we accepted this decrease. It allowed us to allocate more budget to reach a broader audience more frequently.
- Business Results: With a lower CTR one could assume that we received less website traffic and therefore worse business performance. However the opposite is true for this client. We ended up stretching the budget further and boosting brand awareness with the same budget, and driving highly qualified clicks and subsequent conversions for this Lead Gen client through Meta ads.
Key Takeaways
At the end of the day, it is important to ensure the campaign objective you select matches your business goal. I’ll give credit where credit is due, and Meta’s algorithm is excellent at finding users who are most likely to take your desired action.
I also can’t stress enough the importance of continuous testing and avoiding complacency with a single approach just because it has been your routine. Embrace change, experiment with new strategies, and consider running additional campaigns. In the realm of marketing, true insights emerge only through ongoing testing and exploration.
Side Note: This is a HUGE reason why I strongly advise against boosting posts on Facebook. While it may seem like a convenient way to run ads, it often leads to inefficiency. Take a look at this screenshot; you’ll notice there isn’t even an option to run a boosted post with an awareness objective.
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