How to pick the best ads objective for your non profit campaign

The ads world can be quite a mirky, jargon-heavy world. And to make matters worse, the landscape is always changing, so what you had your head wrapped around 6 months ago might now be completely different, leaving you back to square one. If Ads Manager and everything to do with it makes your brain ache, I hear you.

I've had a few instances this week where I've seen confusion in non profits over ads objectives in particular, where there's clear goal behind the campaign but it isn't reflected by the objectives chosen during campaign build. So I thought this week's newsletter might be a good opportunity to clarify some objectives that you may want to use for your campaigns. Here are the most useful objectives for charity campaigns and why you should consider using them.

Post engagement. Choosing this objective tells Meta to find people from within your target audience who often like/comment on or share posts and show them your ads. Engaging in this way is a small ask of people, but it is still an ask - it's a bigger step than just passively consuming content. Engagement campaigns draw out those people who are likely to be interested enough in your ad to take a small action - it doesn't mean that they are going to immediate donate, but they will engage enough to start the process of getting to know you, which brings them one step closer to taking the action you ultimately want.

If you're thinking - but surely I should focus on awareness, I want as many eyes on my ads as possible, hold your horses and ask yourself this. Do I want 100,000 pairs of eyes on my ads who may or may not take in any of my content, or do I want 10,000 pairs of eyes on my ads who will take the time to read it and let me know how they feel about it, or even share it with their network? How much more impactful could retargeting those people be?

Video Views. Especially at the moment where the algorithms are prioritising video content, video can be a great asset for non profits to showcase their activities and the impact they have. Similar to the engagement objective, watching a short video is a really easy ask; less active than engagement but more active than any campaign where eyes on ads is the only goal. A campaign based around video views is useful for two reasons. 1) Video is a really great way to communicate a message and start someone on the journey of getting to know you by showing your charity's personality. 2) Meta gives you the option to retarget your video viewers by the percentage of the video they watched, so you can focus on those who were the most engaged and bring them further down into your funnel.

Traffic. For those charities with a high-converting website, getting people to that website is the number one goal, and if that's you, then traffic campaigns are your new best friend. These campaigns seek out people who tend to not just click on ads but to spend time engaging with the page behind the ad, which is what you want if your website is a high-converting asset.

Conversion. This sounds like the most complicated (and does take a bit more work to set up) but choosing this objective is actually a really good way of telling Meta what you want people to do so that it's really clear who it needs to find. This is for you if you want people to take a specific action on your website, like signing up for your newsletter or donating. This is the objective with the biggest ask so it will likely be one you use once you have an audience that is really familiar with you and warmed up to the idea of supporting you.

If you found this useful, I've built an infographic (much like a Cosmo quiz from the 90s) to help identify which objective you should use based on your goal. If you'd like a copy, just let me know at alex@socialclimer.london and I'll send it over to you.