Before you create an ad campaign, you need to determine your goals for the campaign — why are you creating it, and who do you want to reach? If you are new to digital marketing, it can feel intimidating to choose the right ad objective. So instead of starting there, start with your business goals. Some examples are:
Each of these business goals can be matched to a broader category of ad objectives:
Let’s explore each category to discover which ad objectives are the right match for your business goals.
Brand awareness campaign goals help get your business’s name out there and build recognition in the market. These campaigns help you build trust with potential customers, while driving awareness about what your company does.
This ad objective is a bit of a numbers game — you want to reach a very large audience to maximize awareness. However, if your target audience is too broad, your message might get lost. To keep your audience large enough to be effective, but still targeted, narrow it some by applying high-level demographic parameters like income and age range.
An awareness objective is a good example of why you might want to run an evergreen — or ongoing — campaign that lasts months, rather than days or weeks. As a small business owner, awareness efforts will always be an important part of your marketing strategy.
One way to measure awareness is by how many times your ad has been viewed, and the metric that reflects how many views your ad has received is impressions. This metric includes multiple views from a single person. Some ad platforms, like Nextdoor, will also show you how many people you’ve reached, which is a helpful metric to track in addition to impressions.
A great way to reach new customers is to create an ad that introduces people to your business with creative that captures attention — this is your first impression, after all!
To reach 35,000 new customers, you’ll want to use a combination of visuals and text to make it clear what you do, where you do it, why that would be appealing to a potential customer, and an image that represents your business well. Advertising platforms serve ads that seem relevant to their audiences, so use these ads as a chance to showcase your value.
A plant nursery might want to share that they serve a certain area and can offer a wide variety of exotic plants — something competitors may not offer. They would use an image of these exotic plants to reflect their messaging and capture their audience’s attention.
Website traffic campaign goals center on increasing the number of visitors to your website. Driving your audience to your website is a great way to help customers learn more about your business. Your website is also likely the place people can get in touch with you directly, or even make purchases, so once a potential customer is on the site, conversion becomes much easier.
Because you’re targeting an audience that you hope to convert, you’ll want to tighten your target audience a little. Still include information like the city or designated market area (DMA) and income level, but also add in more precise parameters like interests that align to your business. You’ll still have a broad enough audience to reach a large number of people, while ensuring that the people visiting your website will actually be interested in your product or service.
Depending on why you want to drive traffic to your website, your campaign will be different lengths. If it’s for a specific promotion like a sale, it will be short-term — just a few days or weeks. But if it’s ongoing, it will be long-term — usually three to six months. You might even want to run a short-term and long-term campaign at once to maximize results. In this case, you would have different messaging and creative for your sale’s campaign than you would for your ongoing campaign.
You can measure the success of this campaign by looking at the CTR, which reflects how many people who have seen your ad have actually clicked on it. Many ad platforms, Nextdoor Ads Manager included, will also show you the raw number of clicks. These two figures will help you get an idea of how many website visitors are coming from your ad campaign.
One of the most important elements of your ads to support website traffic is your call to action (CTA). In addition to the strong creative mentioned above, the CTA tells your audience what action you want them to take — in this case, clicking on the ad to visit your website. This will help you get 4x more visitors to your website.
For example, if you’re a real estate company that shares your open listings on your website, create a campaign that prompts your audience to visit your homepage to access them with a clear CTA like “See listings”.
Lead generation campaign goals support efforts to build up your marketing and sales prospects. These campaigns help you gather contact information that you can use in continued marketing efforts like emailing or setting up calls.
You should be serving these ads to your ideal customers. Beyond location, income, and other demographic information, including interests again will help target the right people. This audience includes people who aren’t quite ready to purchase yet, but are likely in the research stage of buying.
An effective way to generate leads on a platform like Nextdoor is to offer a specific, limited promotion to create a sense of urgency — that would be a short campaign. You may also want to have an evergreen campaign running at the same time, as it’s important to keep building your pipeline.
This ad objective is tied to a specific metric: form fills, or number of forms that have been successfully completed. These ads will lead your audience to fill out a form that shares their name, email, and other contact information, along with any other information that will help you market your business to them. Just remember, the more fields a person has to fill out, the less likely they are to complete the form. Limit your forms to information you absolutely need.
Let’s say you’re an insurance agency offering multiple types of insurance. A lead generation campaign would include your value proposition. For example, you might want to promote that you have competitive rates for the products you offer. In that case, you could then use a CTA that prompts your audience to get a quote.
The CTA button would then lead them to a form that asks them to fill out important information you need to give them a quote, but it also is an indication that whoever fills out the form is looking for the service you provide. This opens the door to a sales conversation.
Sales campaign objectives are designed to increase sales. They use a pixel placed on your website to track your audience’s actions. This makes it possible to see if they followed through on a purchase or not after they have clicked on your ad.
This audience should include neighbors who check all of the boxes of your ideal customer. Your messaging should be a specific sales pitch to entice people who are ready to buy. The advertising platform will see this messaging and serve it to the right people.
These campaigns often center around specific promotions, like sales or seasonal deals, which might only last a few days or weeks. It’s most effective to run short-term campaigns that will drive immediate sales alongside long-term campaigns that support the other campaign goals we’ve explored.
Remember that pixel? This is the key to determining how effective your campaign was. The pixel you set up will measure ad conversions for you, so you can understand which purchases can be attributed to which campaign (if any).
Clothing stores often have flash sales or seasonal sales. Run a sales campaign to tell your ideal audience how much money they can save by shopping with you right now. Put the pixel on your sale landing page to track how many people actually complete a purchase.
No matter which ad objective you choose, it should always track back to the “why.” What business goals are you supporting with your ad campaign? If you are ever unsure of what direction to go in, think back to your specific business goals. And for an advertising experience that grants you access to best practices and resources, try a platform like Nextdoor.