Meta's Traffic Objective: Unnecessary and In Need of Fixes

The purpose of setting an advertising objective in a Facebook ad campaign is to define what you want your ad to achieve. The objective is your ultimate goal and will impact the options available to you, including optimization and delivery. Objectives can range from Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, to Sales, each with specific performance goals tied to them.

Examples of campaign objectives and their performance goals on Facebook include:

• Awareness: Ad Recall Lift and Reach
• Engagement: Engagement with a Post, Reminders Set, Event Responses, and Page Likes
• Leads: Leads and Conversion Leads
• App Promotion: App Installs
• Sales: Value-Based Conversions

The Traffic objective provides no unique value because its main metric, link clicks, is found within five other objectives. Similarly, Landing Page Views is found within four objectives. Additionally, you don't need to select the Traffic objective to access other performance goals like Impressions or Daily Unique Reach, which are also available through other objectives such as Engagement. Essentially, there is nothing exclusive about the Traffic objective that you can't get from other objectives.

Meta can address the lack of uniqueness in the Traffic objective by:

1. Introducing a unique performance goal: Meta could come up with a performance goal that is unique to the Traffic objective, such as a Quality Traffic metric that advertisers could optimize for.

2. Folding the Traffic objective into Engagement: Since Traffic is essentially another form of engagement, Meta could restructure campaign objectives by merging Traffic with Engagement, as suggested in a recent post.