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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 directed to Messenger to start 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 initiating a conversation.
When should you select a campaign under traffic generation?
When choosing a target 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 or listening to a new episode of a podcast.
The 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 can 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—the algorithms strive to achieve the selected result, and for this, the target audience is people who are paid to show the ad.
Targeting allows us to simultaneously inform the audience about the offer or content and contributes to building a remarketing list. This will be especially important for businesses where a potential customer’s decision-making process is one of the longer ones.
Targeting will also help to build a list of customers.
It will also make collecting enough data to optimize for conversions easier if we are starting advertising communication and the pixel implementation is very fresh.
Role of traffic in the sales funnel
When we try to position traffic-generating activities in the overall marketing strategy, they are definitely focused on development activities.
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 we will choose the Ruch target when we want recipients to interact with the profile by redirecting them to Messenger, which, in this particular case, can 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 and their appearance. Those directing to an instant messenger will have a special icon to let users know from the ad level where the ad will redirect them. Similarly, for phone calls.
At the ad set level, we also define where we want our ad to appear and our Facebook audience. We can choose from people who have 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 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 the Display landing page as an optimization goal and click the link, which means that our recipient has waited for the page and its measurement codes to load. Due to its nature, this option is only available if we target 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 the post we want from the profile list.
Before we launch activities, it’s also a good idea to look into Facebook Ads remarketing groups. Options related to them can be found directly when creating a campaign—we can create a new group in the Custom Audience Groups section of the targeting settings. The second option is to go to the Recipients tool in the Facebook Ad Manager tools (three horizontal dashes at the top of the bar on the left).
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 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, allowing us to assess which campaign elements are most effective regarding our marketing goal.
If 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 columns such 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 many 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, 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.
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Certified specialist with many years of experience, with Up&More since 2016. Her campaigns have been awarded many times . She has experience with clients from the development, automotive and mobile application industries.