It’s all about Objective-Based Advertising

When you create a new campaign on any of the major digital ad platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Google, you will be taken through a guided series of screens, the first of which is to select the objective of your campaign.

The most common objective types I see are:

• Awareness – you want brand new eyes on your products
• Traffic – increase site visitors
• Engagement – get users engaging with your content (social engagement)
• Conversions – bottom of the marketing funnel users who want to purchase

The current Google Ads screen is shown below:

You can see the Facebook ads screen is quite similar:

When this type of “objective-based” guided approach started appearing a few years ago, I didn’t like being forced to go through these steps, telling myself: “How dare Facebook and Google put these road blocks up! I know what I am doing!”  But over time, I have grown to like the discipline these tools force on you. I am even using that type of approach when reporting and planning digital media ad campaigns.

Objectives and the Marketing Funnel

I’ve been putting on this “objectives-based” hat more often now when budgeting client media spend across the marketing funnel. This helps me figure out the right ratio of spending across those objectives based on where we are in the shopping season. For example, you may want to ‘heavy up’ (increase spend) the budget at the bottom of the funnel (‘conversion’ objective) during the Christmas season to maximize revenue when people are ready to buy. However, if we didn’t allocate budget to the top of the funnel early on in the year, we wouldn’t have enough users in that ‘conversion’ bucket to even target.

By segmenting an annual media budget by objective type, you can quickly see if your spend is too much on the conversion end or awareness end of the funnel.  I typically try to maintain a 65% prospecting/35% conversion budget ratio most of the year and then heavy up on the conversion objective spend at that high season mark.

Here’s an example of a Facebook account analysis of the ad budget by objective, you can see the conversions objectives has about 35% of the spend while the rest is distributed across middle and top of the funnel campaign objectives.

So, what are you doing with your digital advertising spend across your company’s marketing funnel? Are you always spending some money on prospecting or are you focused mainly on the bottom of the funnel converters?  Let us know!