Setting up your campaign objective can be a no brainer for objectives like conversions, traffic and post engagement.
However, there are two objectives that usually confuse advertisers – Reach and Brand Awareness. Let's figure out what is the difference between the Reach and Brand Awareness objectives and which one suits you best.
A marketing rule of thumb is that what starts with awareness can evolve into sales.
People need to feel connected with your brand before purchasing from you. Think about your last visit to the grocery store, what brands did you gravitate to? A reason that you resonate with a brand over the other is that you remember it. In other words, you have awareness of that particular brand.
As an advertiser, you’ll want to cultivate that brand awareness so that more people have your brand in mind when they are ready to purchase a product or a service.
However, the challenge we often face as advertisers, is measuring the brand impact. It is difficult to track the change in how people view a brand across time and campaigns. Therefore, using aBrand Awareness Objective is the solution for creating a memorable campaign.
Brand Awareness Objective: It is for advertisers who want to show ads to people who are more likely to recall them. (Facebook)
Facebook’s system will maximize the number of people who recall seeing your ad as a result of seeing your campaign.This is referred to as the "Ad Recall Lift" delivery optimization.
Which makes sense, the more people who“recall” seeing your ad, the more awareness you are raising.
This is the metric that Facebook provides you with in order to track your campaign outcome in real-time.
You can also use the Estimated AdRecall Lift metric to compare the effectiveness of different creative executions or target audiences.
For example, if the cost of Ad #1“Estimated Ad Recall” is less than Ad #2 then you may want to consider shifting the budget to the creative that is costing you less.
Suppose you're a retailer that wants to hold an online flash sale over the upcoming holiday weekend. Your goal is for the largest number of people to be aware of this flash sale.
Driving audiences to your online store at a large scale will have a positive impact on your sales. The Reach objective will show your ad to the largest audience possible allowed by your budget.
Reach Objective: The reach objective maximizes the number of people who see your ads and how often they see them. (Facebook)
After selecting your Reach objective, you will have the option to optimize for reach or impressions. This table illustrated by Facebook shows the exact differences between the two options:
As shown in the above table, if you choose the recommended Reach optimization you get to also choose the frequency cap.
The frequency cap allows you to control how many times within a specified number of days someone can see your ad.
If you are asking yourself “What is the optimal number of days?” Facebook conducted a research to better understand the optimal frequency caps.
They found out that up to 2 impressions a week can drive a positive impact on brand recall and purchase intent. The below graph demonstrates the results of their research.
The y-axis represents Cumulative brand lift and the x-axis represents the Weekly frequency cap. The green line represents Ad recall and the blue line represents Purchase intent. (Source: Facebook)
What the research concluded is that ad recall lift and purchase intent increased with the frequency of exposure.
Reach objective + Reach and frequency buying = 100% Optimized towards the most efficient reach available.
If you want more people to remember your brand, I recommend you choose the Brand Awareness objective. While if you want to reach the largest number of people, choose the Reach objective.
