I contend that the most underrated action you take when creating a Meta ads campaign is selecting your performance goal. Too many advertisers take it for granted or simply don’t realize the impact it has on ad delivery.

In this day of audience expansion and broad targeting, the performance goal is more important than ever before. Before, your optimization event helped find people within your selected audience who are most likely to perform your desired action. But now, it’s what helps find people beyond your targeting inputs, too.

The performance goal is one of a handful of factors (along with targeting inputs and ad copy and creative) that have direct impact on who will see your ads. Do not gloss over this.

But, there is some understandable confusion around performance goals, too. There are 71 different possible ways, based on different objectives and conversion locations, to select 21 unique performance goals.

Does how you get there matter? What does each performance goal actually do? When should you use them?

Consider this your guide…

The Role of Campaign Objectives

It’s common for advertisers to misunderstand the role of campaign objectives. It’s understandable since this requires you to literally define what you’re trying to accomplish.

While the campaign objective helps streamline the campaign creation process by limiting the options available in the ad set and ad based on this selection, its importance stops there. The objective itself doesn’t determine how your ads are delivered.

Your performance goal does.

Several Paths to the Same Goal

One of the easiest examples of how the performance goal is more critical than the campaign objective is Impressions. There are nine different combinations of campaign objective, conversion location, and engagement type that will lead to this performance goal.

But in each case, it’s the same.

No matter how you get there, the Impressions performance goal means that Meta will try to show your ads to people as many times as possible. That’s it. Nothing else.

It doesn’t matter if you get to this performance goal from the Sales objective. Meta won’t have a secondary goal of conversions or purchases. In fact, there’s even a warning message when you select Impressions when the objective is Sales so that you know this.

The selection of a performance goal should be one of your top priorities when creating a campaign. Don’t get cute. In most cases, pick the performance goal that most accurately reflects the action that you want.

How you get there via objective, conversion location, and ad type doesn’t matter much. It could impact some ad settings that are available, but otherwise the performance goal — regardless of objective — defines success and determines how your ads are delivered.

There are 71 different ways to select one of 21 different performance goals. Focus on the goal that you want first.

Here is a collection of those 21 performance goals (subject to change, but as of February, 2024), Meta’s definitions, the various combinations that allow you to access them, and when you might use them…

1. 2-Second Continuous Video Views

Definition: We’ll try to show your video ads to people who are likely to watch 2 continuous seconds or more. Most 2-second continuous video views will have at least 50% of the video pixels on screen.

Objectives (2 combinations):

• Awareness
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Video Views)

When to use it: Only when the volume of video views is more important to you than the quality of those views.

2. Ad Recall Lift

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to people who are likely to remember seeing them.

Objectives:

When to use it: Typically when spending larger budgets and you want your ads to improve overall awareness.

3. Daily Unique Reach

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to people up to once per day.

Objectives (11 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: App)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Event Responses)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Post Engagement)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: Website)
• Leads (Conversion Location: App)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales (Conversion Location: App)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: App)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You don’t have a specific goal and you want to cap the amount of impressions shown to one per day.

4. Engagement With a Post

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to like, share or comment on your post.

Objectives (2 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Event Responses)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Post Engagement)

When to use it: The volume of engagement with your ads is more important to you than the specific actions people take, possibly for social proof.

5. App Events

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to take a specific action in your app at least once.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• App Promotion
• Engagement (Conversion Location: App)
• Leads (Conversion Location: App)
• Sales (Conversion Location: App)

When to use it: There is a specific action that you want people to take within your app.

6. App Installs

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to install your app.

Objectives:

When to use it: Increase the number of installs of your app, regardless of what they do next.

7. Calls

Definition: We’ll try to deliver your ads to try to get you the most possible calls and report the number of times the call button in the call confirmation dialogue is clicked.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: Calls)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Calls)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Calls)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Calls)

When to use it: Increase the number of calls into a call center that can handle those requests.

8. Conversations

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to people most likely to have a conversation with you through messaging.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You want to increase the number of conversations within messaging apps, but you don’t have a specific action that you want them to take. Also, make sure that you have personnel to manage these conversations.

9. Conversion Leads

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to convert after sharing their contact information with you.

Objectives:

• Leads (Conversion Location: Instant Forms)

When to use it: The lead itself isn’t as important to you as the eventual sale or other action that happens later. Additional setup is required, and this approach is most suitable when generating a higher volume of leads. The typical scenario is when sales people follow up with and close leads.

10. Conversions

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to take a specific action on your website.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: Website)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website and App)

When to use it: There is a specific action that you want people to take on your website, defined by a standard (purchase, lead, complete registration) or custom event.

11. Event Responses

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to respond to your event.

Objectives:

• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Event Responses)

When to use it: You want to generate more responses to your virtual or physical event.

12. Impressions

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to people as many times as possible.

Objectives (9 combinations):

• Awareness
• Engagement (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps, Ad Type: Sponsored Message)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Event Responses)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Post Engagement)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: Website)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You want to flood people with your ads, but the number of people you reach is less important than the number of total impressions.

13. Instagram Profile Visits

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to visit Instagram profile linked in your ad. (unofficial, but assumed definition)

Objectives:

• Traffic (Conversion Location: Instagram Profile)

When to use it: You want to drive people to your Instagram profile to hopefully generate more follows or actions there (though these actions aren’t considered by the performance goal).

14. Landing Page Views

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to view the website or Instant Experience linked in your ad.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• Engagement (Conversion Location: Website)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales Conversion Location: Website)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You want to drive traffic to your website, but there isn’t a specific action that you want people to take — or you don’t have the budget to properly optimize for another event. Know that this will often result in low-quality traffic.

15. Leads

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to share their contact information with you.

Objectives (4 combinations):

• Leads (Conversion Location: Instagram)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Instant Forms)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Instant Forms and Messenger)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Messenger)

When to use it: You want to build a list of contacts who could become potential paying customers, without sending people to your website. Ideally, you use a third-party tool to sync these contacts to your CRM.

16. Link Clicks

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to click on them.

Objectives (11 combinations):

• App Promotion
• Engagement (Conversion Location: App)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Group Joins)
• Engagement (Conversion Location: Website)
• Leads (Conversion Location: App)
• Leads (Conversion Location: Website)
• Sales (Conversion Location: App)
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: App)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Messaging Apps)
• Traffic (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You are driving people to a website that you do not control or does not have your pixel installed. Could also be for promoting instant experiences. Significant risk of low-quality clicks that you will need to address.

17. Page Likes

Definition: We’ll try to deliver your ads to the right people to help you get more Page likes at the lowest cost.

Objectives:

• Engagement (Conversion Location: Facebook Page)

When to use it: It’s 2013 and you still get amazing organic reach. Or you’re one of the lucky ones and it’s worth the cost to build your following through ads because your organic audience remains reachable and a profit driver.

18. Reach

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to as many people as possible.

Objectives:

When to use it: Two opposite scenarios. One is for awareness, typically spending larger budgets and you just want to reach as many people as possible with your ad. The other is to reach as many people within a very small audience as possible with hopes that the mere quality of that group will lead to desired actions. This performance goals also allows you to set a frequency cap.

19. Reminders Set

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to people more likely to set reminders for your upcoming event.

Objectives:

• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Reminders Set)

When to use it: You are active on Instagram and you have an event or launch that you want to promote.

20. ThruPlay Views

Definition: We’ll try to show your video ads to people who will watch the entire video when it’s shorter than 15 seconds. For longer videos, we’ll try to show it to people who are likely to watch at least 15 seconds.

Objectives (2 combinations):

• Awareness
• Engagement (Conversion Location: On Your Ad, Engagement Type: Video Views)

When to use it: You want to show your ads to people most likely to watch at least 15 seconds of your video, but you are less concerned about any additional actions they will take. Watch for placements that force ThruPlays, thereby inflating results.

21. Value of Conversions

Definition: We’ll try to show your ads to the people most likely to make higher value purchases.

Objectives (2 combinations):

• App Promotion
• Sales (Conversion Location: Website)

When to use it: You care more about generating higher purchase value and Return on Ad Spend than a high volume of purchases. Best when you have a wide range of purchase prices and you can generate the volume to suffer fewer purchases and remain effective.

Your Turn

How do you approach performance goals?

Let me know in the comments below!