Reach vs. Brand Awareness. When setting up a new advertising campaign on Facebook (to know the difference between a boost and a campaign (check out this other article), the first thing you need to do is to choose the campaign’s objective.
This is highly significant as, depending on your choice, you will have a completely different set of options and settings available for your new campaign. More importantly, depending on what you choose, Facebook will automatically optimise your ads in different ways, and even show them to a different set of users within your chosen target audience. So, without a doubt, choosing the objective for your advertising campaign on Facebook is not a question that you can take lightly, ‘just click somewhere and move on’.
Of course, the most important and basic rule for selecting your campaign’s objective is to choose it in line with your current overall business goal. What do you want to achieve? Why are you investing your hard-earned money into these ads? Do you want direct sales? Do you want to promote your Facebook business page and grow its number of followers? Do you need to get more traffic to your recently updated website?
There are lots of business goals that you can have in mind when setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook, but today we want to talk about the one that, out of all of them, has the biggest probability of success for most businesses – the awareness goal. Do you need to get your brand, or your newest offer, in front of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible? Well, then Facebook Ads is one of the best tools that you can use in this case. But what Awareness campaign objective should you choose?
There are two goals that usually confuse advertisers – Reach and Brand Awareness. When you create a new advertising campaign on Facebook, both of them are listed under the ‘Awareness’ category. Let's try to understand what is the difference between them and which suits you best.
Both objectives are designed to ‘spread the word’ about your brand, product or service. And both of them are designed for campaigns targeting your ‘top of funnel’ audience. You would use these campaigns to target people who are not potential customers just yet, but might become once they discover your brand. So, it’s not likely that you will get sales from this kind of campaign. If that is your goal, we recommend that you consider other objectives that Facebook has available. But if you’re sure that it is awareness that you need, let's look in more detail to these two types of campaigns.
Basically, the difference between them will be in the end result that we want to achieve, as Facebook will optimise the ads for different things, and we will analyse different metrics on the campaign’s results.
The Brand Awareness objective is created to show your ads to people that are most likely to remember your brand afterwards. Using its smart algorithms, Facebook will determine the best users and the best moment for showing your ad. Also, as the goal is for users to remember your company, Facebook might show your ad to the same person several times. Once the campaign is over, the main metric that you will have to analyse will be ‘ad recall’.
The Reach objective is designed to show your ad to the largest number of people possible and, contrary to the previous one, Facebook will keep the frequency (the number of times the same user sees the same ad) low. While analysing the results of these campaigns, you will need to pay attention to the reach metric (the number of people that saw the ad at least once) and to its CPM (cost per 1000 impressions).
So, to sum it all up:
- If you need to quickly pass on some information to as many people as possible (for instance, create awareness about a new product you have just launched), you would choose the Reach objective.
- If you need to work on your brand within a long-term strategy (for example, create awareness about your brand in a new target market you are expanding into, or keep your brand as top of mind for your type of product), you would choose the Brand Awareness objective.
And of course, you can always use a combination of both of them in your branding activities. The key here, as in any digital marketing effort, is to make sure that you align your online and real-life business goals, and choose the best tools available.
If you would like to learn more about fine-tuning your advertising campaigns on Facebook, we recommend you also read about the 5 mistakes that are killing your Facebook Ads performance.
For more information, bespoke strategies and efficient digital marketing solutions, just contact the Clarity’s girls through info@yourdigitalclarity.com or visit our website at yourdigitalclarity.com.
