What is a marketing campaign objective, and why is it important?
When creating campaigns across nearly any modern digital media platform, including social media, search, and programmatic media, the concept of a campaign objective is central to the overall strategy and downstream success (or failure) thereof for a campaign. Whether on Facebook or LinkedIn, Google Ads, YouTube, or beyond, conversion tracking can and will make or break the success of a campaign.
So what is a campaign objective anyway?
In simple terms, the campaign objective is the primary goal that you want to achieve for a given marketing campaign. In the background, the objective tells the advertising platform what the desired outcome should be — so that the campaign is optimised accordingly by the media buying algorithms that power each platform.
What are some common types of campaign objectives?
Some types of campaign objectives include, but are not limited to:
- Awareness, where the primary objective is to serve as many ad impressions as possible to a target audience (impressions as the primary goal).
- Reach, where the primary objective is to reach as many unique people with ad impressions as possible. The difference between Awareness and Reach is that while both focus on impressions as the outcome, Reach is concerned with reaching individual, unique users. In contrast, Awareness doesn’t generally consider the frequency or the uniqueness of user reach.
- Link clicks, where the primary objective is to get people to your website or mobile app to take some further action.
- Conversion, where the primary objective is to get people to take some direct action on your website or within your mobile app.
Link clicks and conversions seem similar, eh?
From a macro-level view, Link click and Conversion campaigns might seem like they are looking to achieve the same thing: Brining users to your website or app for some downstream action. However, the difference between the two is quite profound.
For a link-click optimised campaign, all that is required is a destination URL. The platform algorithms will focus on driving the most possible link clicks from the target audience, with a CPC, or cost per click, as the KPI success measurement.
For conversion-optimised campaigns, however, there’s more to the story. Rather than driving the lowest possible cost per click and the highest possible traffic volume, conversion-optimised campaigns focus on driving the lowest possible cost per conversion, whatever the defined conversion may be, such as online registration, email capture, app download, or purchase. To measure this post-click detail, though, conversion-optimised campaigns require using platform-specific conversion tracking pixels, which must be installed on your website and/or in your mobile app to capture conversion events properly.
In general, conversion pixel implementation is a fairly simple process that can be facilitated in multiple ways, such as by manually installing code on your website or in your app, leveraging conversion tracking plug-ins for common CMS and eCommerce platforms like WordPress or Shopify, or via a tag management system such as Google Tag Manager or Adobe Launch.
By providing this depth of tracking and integration, the ad platforms’ algorithms can focus on driving clicks from the users most likely to convert, focusing on the lowest possible cost per conversion. Often, there’s an inverse relationship between CPA and CPC, insofar as the users with the highest conversion rates are usually not the same as those users who drive the lowest costs per click.
Confused? Think of the combination of the platforms’ algorithms for media optimisation, coupled with the conversion data, as a machine learning robot that is working in real-time to determine which of the myriad users on each platform in our target audience should see the ads based on the conversion data captured to date and things we cannot see with our own eyes (ex: data points not exposed through any reporting) and to ensure that each time an ad is served and a conversion is recorded, the campaign learns and continues to modify the under-the-hood settings to achieve the lowest possible cost per conversions.
Privacy Policy and Regulatory Compliance
One final note about conversion tracking: The implementation of tracking pixels and conversion APIs has implications for privacy policies and global consumer privacy regulation compliance, including but not limited to GDPR (EU), GDPR-UK (UK), CCPA (California), VCDPA (Virginia), CPA (Colorado), PIPEDA (Canada), APP (Austalia), et al.
For more information, consult your company’s legal counsel, and consider leveraging a third-party tool such as Cookiebot, OneTrust, or Quantcast Choice for consent management and regulatory compliance.
