There are three Facebook campaign types that are actively killing your return on ad spend. The worst part? Facebook pushes you to run them. They might be running in your account right now.
At The Moonlighters, we manage over 100 brands. And when brands come to us for an audit asking why their ads aren’t working, nine out of ten times, one of these campaign types is the culprit.
The Three Campaign Types to Kill
When you go to create a new campaign in Facebook Ads, six options come up. Most brands should be running sales or leads almost exclusively. But a lot of brands make the mistake of running these three:
Awareness campaigns. You’re telling Facebook to build upper-funnel awareness. Sounds logical. But it’s not actually building a funnel that will convert later. It’s just burning budget.
Traffic campaigns. These are designed to get the cheapest traffic to your website. And that’s the problem. Cheap traffic is unqualified traffic.
Engagement campaigns. On Facebook, an engagement can mean a like, a comment, a share, or someone watching a video for more than five seconds. Unless you’re making the best content in the world, that is not going to convert.
All three of these optimize for Facebook’s objective. Not yours. Your objective is purchases.
What These Campaigns Do to Your Pixel
Here’s the part that most people miss. Running these campaigns doesn’t just waste money today. It poisons your pixel long-term.
Your pixel stores data indefinitely, but the most relevant data is the last 28 days. And it doesn’t discriminate between good and bad signals.
Think of it this way. Every purchase signal is a green. That’s what you want. Your pixel finds greens, then goes out and finds more people just like them. High lifetime value, high conversion rate.
But when you run campaigns outside the purchase objective, you start feeding your pixel yellows. People who are less valuable. Run a traffic or awareness campaign and you’re flooding it with reds. Over time, your pixel only knows how to find reds. The greens disappear. Your whole account turns red and yellow.
You want the exact opposite of that.
“But I Need to Build Brand Awareness First”
No, you don’t. You do not need to run a top-of-funnel campaign to drive sales.
Here’s the thing. Every purchase conversion event is also an awareness campaign. By telling Facebook exactly the event you want, you increase your likelihood of getting it. You’re just driving higher quality traffic instead of cheap, unqualified clicks.
Some people argue that traffic campaigns are better for retargeting because the clicks are cheaper for warm audiences. That logic made sense once. But since iOS 14.5 in 2021, Facebook values every person based on their likelihood to buy based on previous interactions. Running a traffic objective cuts you off from the full pool of potential buyers. Your competitors using the purchase objective are sweeping in and taking those customers.
And if your account is brand new? That is the worst possible time to run these campaign types. You will flood your pixel with terrible signals right from the start and kill your long-term performance before it even begins.
What to Run Instead
It’s simple. Run conversion-based campaigns and optimize strictly for purchases.
Not add to carts. Not initiate checkouts. Purchases.
Facebook is an algorithm. A computer system. If you tell it to get add to carts, it gets add to carts. If you tell it to drive purchases, it drives purchases. That’s the whole game.
Avoid the temptation of building a “magical” top-of-funnel with traffic, engagement, and awareness campaigns. Your pixel, and your account performance, will thank you for it.
