A digital marketer's guide to choosing the right campaign objective
- PPC
Selecting the right campaign objective is the critical first step in any successful paid media campaign. It’s the instruction you give to a platform’s algorithm, telling it precisely what you want to achieve. Get this wrong, and you risk wasting your budget on metrics that don’t align with your business goals.
This guide will walk you through the core campaign objectives—awareness, consideration, and conversion—and help you align them with your marketing strategy and the most suitable advertising platforms.
Understanding the core campaign objectives
Every paid media campaign serves one of three fundamental purposes. Understanding which one you need is key to structuring your activity effectively.
1. Awareness
An awareness campaign is your brand’s introduction. It’s designed to cast a wide—but intelligent—net, reaching new audiences who are not yet familiar with your products or services. These campaigns are essential when you need to build brand recognition from the ground up.
They are particularly effective for:
Launching a new product or service
Entering a new market
Building foundational brand recognition
Establishing a strong market presence
To measure success, we focus on metrics that demonstrate reach and attention, such as impressions, audience reach, and ad recall lift.
2. Consideration
A consideration campaign bridges the gap between initial awareness and a final decision. This is the crucial middle-funnel stage where you engage an audience that knows who you are but needs more information before committing.
These campaigns require a thoughtful balance of information and engagement, providing clear value to keep your audience interested. They often rely on sophisticated retargeting and dynamic content to stay relevant.
These campaigns excel at:
Showcasing specific product features and their benefits
Driving traffic to high-value content like guides or webinars
Building meaningful engagement with your brand
Encouraging deeper website exploration
Here, key performance indicators include video view-through rates, content downloads, page views per session, and time spent on site.
3. Conversion
Conversion campaigns are designed to turn interest into measurable action. This is where your marketing efforts culminate, using compelling calls to action and precise targeting to secure a final commitment from your audience.
Modern conversion campaigns move beyond simple "buy now" messaging. They use advanced tracking and multi-touch attribution models to understand the entire customer journey and prove return on investment.
These campaigns are the optimal choice for:
Driving sales and direct purchases
Generating high-quality leads
Encouraging app downloads or software trials
Securing valuable newsletter subscriptions
Success is measured by the metrics that matter most to your bottom line: conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Which platform should you use for your paid media?
Choosing the right platform is just as important as selecting the right objective. Your decision should be guided by where your audience spends its time and which environment best suits your product or service.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a comprehensive marketing ecosystem, using powerful machine learning to reach audiences at every stage of the buying journey. It’s an essential platform for capturing user intent.
Search campaigns: Perfect for capturing high-intent audiences who are actively searching for a solution. Excellent for direct response and lead generation.
Display campaigns: Use rich visual formats to build awareness and run remarketing campaigns across millions of websites in the Google Display Network.
Performance Max campaigns: Harness automated, goal-based bidding across all of Google’s properties to maximise reach and conversions with minimal manual intervention.
Video campaigns: Reach audiences on YouTube with a range of formats ideal for brand storytelling, product demonstrations, and driving action.
For B2B marketing, LinkedIn is an indispensable platform. It offers unparalleled targeting based on professional attributes like job title, company, and industry—data you simply cannot get elsewhere. Its campaign objectives are structured to guide professionals from initial awareness right through to conversion.
Awareness
Brand awareness: Reach a wide audience of relevant professionals to increase visibility. Ideal for building brand recognition and positioning your business as a thought leader within your industry.
Consideration
Website visits: Drive high-quality traffic to your website, landing pages, or articles, putting your solutions in front of a professional audience actively seeking them.
Engagement: Encourage meaningful interactions with your content—likes, comments, and shares—to build brand affinity and an active community.
Video views: Amplify your message and demonstrate expertise using engaging video content designed to educate and inform your target audience.
Conversions
Lead generation: Capture lead information seamlessly using LinkedIn’s native Lead Gen Forms. By pre-filling forms with user profile data, they reduce friction and significantly improve conversion rates.
Website conversions: Drive specific, valuable actions on your site—such as guide downloads, webinar sign-ups, or demo requests—by targeting the professionals most likely to convert.
Job applicants: Streamline your recruitment by promoting open roles directly to qualified candidates within their professional network.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta’s strength lies in its vast data ecosystem and sophisticated targeting options. Its AI-driven algorithms allow you to reach highly specific audiences based on interests, behaviours, and detailed demographics at an impressive scale.
Awareness: The ideal starting point for building brand recognition. This objective is designed to maximise your reach, putting your brand in front of new, relevant audiences to build recall and establish top-of-mind presence.
Traffic: Use this objective to drive users to a specific destination, such as your website, app, or a Messenger conversation. It's highly effective for promoting high-value content, increasing footfall to key landing pages, and introducing your audience to the next step in their journey.
Engagement: Designed to build an active community around your brand. This objective encourages likes, comments, shares, and event responses, helping you build social proof, foster brand loyalty, and gather valuable audience feedback.
Leads: Focus on capturing high-quality leads directly within the platform. Use Meta's Instant Forms for a seamless, low-friction user experience, or drive direct enquiries through Messenger, Instagram Direct, and calls. This is the go-to objective for building your sales pipeline.
App Promotion: The essential objective for businesses with a mobile app. It allows you to drive not only new installs but also specific in-app events, ensuring you attract users who are more likely to engage and deliver long-term value.
Sales: The primary objective for driving direct commercial outcomes. Optimised to find users most likely to make a purchase, it integrates seamlessly with product catalogues and Meta Shops to convert interest into revenue. This is where you prove your return on ad spend.
How to make the right choice for your business
Choosing the right campaign objective and platform is a strategic decision. Success depends on creating a cohesive plan that leverages the unique strengths of each platform while maintaining a consistent brand message.
Before you invest your budget, consider these key factors:
Your business goals: What does success look like? Define clear, measurable objectives first, then align your campaign type with the relevant stage of your marketing funnel.
Your audience: Where does your target audience spend its time online? Go where they are, and tailor your message to the context of that platform.
Your product or service: Is your offering highly visual? Is it a considered B2B purchase? The nature of what you sell should heavily influence your platform choice.
Success in paid media requires a careful alignment between your objectives, your audience, and the platforms you choose. The digital landscape is always evolving, so an adaptable, test-and-learn approach is key to maintaining effective campaigns.
If you need expert guidance, our team is here to help you build a campaign strategy that delivers tangible results. Whether you're just getting started or looking to optimise an existing setup, we can ensure your investment works harder for you. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you achieve your goals.
