Facebook Ads campaigns with a Traffic goal – when to add to your strategy

Campaigns with a Traffic target are used to direct users to a specific destination, which in the case of this target doesn’t always mean the website itself, but also redirects to an app, to a conversation in Messenger or to promote a phone number to contact about an offer.

Because of European legal restrictions, ads directing to Messenger with the intention of starting a conversation are only available under this campaign objective. For this reason, such a campaign is also optimized for clicks on the button redirecting to Messenger, rather than the actual initiation of a conversation.

When to select a campaign under traffic generation?

When choosing atarget for a Facebook Ads campaign, it’s worth asking yourself first and foremost what you want from your ad audience. If we want to get as many impressions as possible, the right choice will be recognition goal, if we expect conversions on the page, then we should choose Contacts goal or Sales, depending on the nature of the conversion.

If, however, we are concerned with generating as many leads to our destination as possible, with no expectation of engagement – then Traffic is the right choice. The most obvious example is targeting sites where reading or listening is an end in itself. Reading specific content on a blog, listening to a new episode of a podcast.

Movement will also be helpful if, for some reason, we don’t have a pixel implemented on the site, but still care about redirection beyond Facebook – link clicks are an action that Facebook is able to measure regardless of the current implementation.

Invariably, the choice of Facebook’s campaign goal has a direct impact on our ability to optimize the campaign – it is the achievement of the selected result that the algorithms will strive to achieve, and on this the target audience people who are paid to show the ad.

Targeting not only allows us to simultaneously inform the audience about the offer or content, but also contributes to building a remarketing list. This will be especially important for those businesses where the decision-making process of a potential customer is one of the longer ones.

Targeting will also help to build a list of customers.

It will also make it easier to collect enough data to optimize for conversions if we are just starting advertising communication and the pixel implementation is very fresh.

Role of traffic in sales funnel

When we try to position traffic-generating activities in the overall marketing strategy, it is definitely a focus development activity.

When done properly, it can also support image building – for example, as an expert in your industry or by enhancing the visibility of your non-sales activities.

It can also be part of a complex advertising campaign, for example, by increasing the volume of people on the site, and in the next stage retargeting people who abandoned the shopping cart, visited the contact page, or clicked on the phone number, this time already with a different optimization goal and message.

We can also reach the remarketing list acquired through the campaign on Traffic with a special offer, intended only for those who have already been to the site.

We should also not forget that it is the Ruch target we will choose when we want to get recipients to interact with the profile – by redirecting them to Messenger – which in this particular case can act as a substitute for a campaign under contacts.

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Configure campaign with target Traffic

When setting up a campaign and choosing a Traffic goal, Facebook tells us at the very beginning what are the recommended uses for this type of campaign, namely the already mentioned redirects to a page, to an app, to a phone number or to a conversation on Messenger and WhatsApp. The nature of the destination itself is already chosen at the ad set level. The chosen destination category will affect, among other things, the available call-to-action buttons in Facebook Ads itself and their appearance. Those directing to an instant messenger will have a special icon to let users know already from the ad level where the ad will redirect them. Similarly for phone calls.

It is at the ad set level that we also define where we want our ad to appear and what our Facebook audience is. We can choose from people who have already interacted with the company in some way, the location we want to reach with the message, and other demographics. We can further narrow down these criteria with specific interests that are related to the industry, our customers or simply the topic of the content in question.

When the pixel is properly implemented, we can also select Display landing page as an optimization goal in addition to clicking the link, which will mean that our recipient has waited for the page and the measurement codes on it to load. Due to its nature, this option is only available if we are targeting a website with the campaign.

Importantly, when we have a post on a company profile that contains a link, and it is reading the redirect content that is our main goal – then instead of activity towards the post, it is worth selecting Traffic as the goal. During further configuration at the advertising level, instead of creating new content, we can select from the profile list the post we want.

Before we launch activities, it’s also a good idea to lean right into Facebook Ads remarketing groups Options related to them can be found both directly when creating a campaign – in the Custom Audience Groups section of the targeting settings we have the option to create a new group. The second option is to go in the Facebook Ad Manager tools (3 horizontal dashes at the top of the bar on the left) to the Recipients tool.

Then the procedure for creating such a group looks similar – we select the source of information, the time of data collection and optionally additional conditions to be met. Thanks to the configuration even before the launch of the campaign collecting traffic, we will not lose data about users.

Evaluate campaign results with target Traffic

When the campaigns have been broadcast for some time and we have the first statistics, we can look at the effects.

My by far favorite column view in Facebook Ad Manager is the Effectiveness and Clicks set, and here too I would suggest choosing it for evaluating activities. It shows all the most important statistics, and in the case of Traffic it will show us not only clicks to the link, but clicks to the ad in general. We will also see statistics such as CTR or cost per click, which will allow us to assess which elements of the campaign are most effective in terms of our marketing goal.

If, however, we have implemented a pixel, and the Facebook account measures conversions – we can still see if any engagement was gained from our campaign under Traffic. To do this, we should go to edit columns (Customize columns option in the drop-down menu) and select those events we care about. The most common is the Standard Events section, where for all available conversions we can select such columns as Total (i.e. the total number of a given conversion), Unique Conversions, Conversion Value, Cost and Cost of Unique Activity.

Unfortunately, we ourselves have to remember which conversions are measured within our implementation, or it can still be checked in the pixel data. Enabling all options will unnecessarily complicate the evaluation of actions – we will have a large number of columns with fields with a value of 0. For us, the total number of a given conversion, its average cost and possibly the mentioned value, if any, is enough. After selecting the columns, our set will be renamed Custom Setting. If we are satisfied with the set of columns, just select the Save option to the right of the set name, so that we can quickly return to it on subsequent visits to the advertising account.

If we don’t have standard conversions, there’s also an intermediate solution – with just a pixel implementation, we can still set up custom conversions, for example, based on the page view of a specific page, like Thank You Page. We will define this type of engagement in the Events Manager section, while being able to indicate which standard category the action belongs to.

Summary of Facebook Ads Traffic campaign

Campaigns with a Traffic goal may have a specific place in digital marketing strategy No less, if our marketing goal is to generate sales or engagement, this should only be part of the activity. It will also matter, for example, whether the advertised business also deals with distribution and/or customer acquisition, or whether it is just the campaign by default that should be informative, which will later, under the right circumstances, make the audience choose this product and not another.