Tips for Top Performing Brand Awareness Campaigns on Facebook Ads

One of the most underrated aspects of social media marketing is the ability of our channels to make an impact in any part of the funnel.

Overall, social media is a lot like a marketing multi-tool.

think about it. We may not be the sharpest switching “knives” in the drawer, especially compared to branded searches.

But what we may lack in performance advantages, we more than make up for in our versatility.

Regardless of the goal, we can provide a variety of tools to get the job done.

Now that I’ve spent most of my career as a social media performance marketer, I’ll admit that’s still my default way of operating.

But beyond leads and traditional “CPC,” there’s a whole world that can significantly impact the bottom funnel and bottom line.

I’m talking about funnel top.

“Brand Awareness” campaign, where impressions are high, but measurable attribution may be small.

In this world, performance marketers can be a little uncomfortable with the lack of tangible results.

But just because top funnel campaigns don’t always drive leads and sales effectively or directly, doesn’t mean they’re not an important part of any balanced digital marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll “up the funnel” and discuss how brand awareness campaigns work on Facebook, and how to set them up for best results.

The strategic role of brand awareness

Before we dive into campaign details, it’s crucial to understand the role of awareness in your overall marketing strategy.

For “omnichannel” marketers, this may take some commentary, but it’s critical to understand how to get the most out of these campaign types.

First, let’s settle on the nomenclature.

These activities have different names and terms, which I use interchangeably in this article.

Brand awareness, brand awareness, top of the funnel, top of the funnel, and tofu are just a few of the ways marketers refer to these activities.

In the simplest of strategic terms, a brand awareness campaign aims to introduce your brand to your target audience.

This is achieved by delivering introductory and memorable creative to a broad audience.

Think about the funnel stages of the way you date.

You can run conversion campaigns exclusively.

But it’s the marketing equivalent of walking up to someone and asking them to go out with you – no introduction, no discussion, and a sale.

Of course this might work if you have “high intent” clients/singletons.

However, if you introduce yourself and break down some initial barriers, your chances of closing the deal are higher.

Bottom-of-funnel conversion or lead generation campaigns are designed to get people to take action, while brand awareness campaigns are designed to introduce you, familiarize you, and keep your customers in mind.

Seems easy, right?

That’s true, but the measurements aren’t as sure as bottom-of-funnel campaigns.

Measure brand awareness campaigns the right way

Measuring sales or lead in digital marketing is simple.

Brand awareness success lies in more “confused” and less specific KPIs.

When evaluating success, you should be aware of the following:

Impressions and reach

This one is very simple. We want to deliver as many impressions as possible and reach as many people as possible.

Frequency (impressions/reach)

We can’t always expect our audience to see or absorb our ad content on first impressions.

Sometimes two, three or 10 are needed.

Frequency is the average number of times a person in your audience sees an ad in a given period. The higher the better.

However, high frequencies can signal overdelivery and potential wear.

CPM (CPM)

If the goal of brand awareness is to get in front of your audience and stay there, we want to do that at the most cost-effective way possible.

A low CPM is critical to maintaining efficiency and maximizing the “staying power” of your ad.

Video participation

If the creative you run in your upper-funnel campaign is video, you’ll have access to a wealth of specialized metrics that will help you better understand how your information is being consumed.

We’ll cover these below specifically for Facebook.

Facebook and Upper Funnel Activity: Which Target to Choose?

Facebook offers advertisers a variety of options when it comes to executing awareness or upper-funnel campaigns on the platform. In fact, it can be a little confusing.

Not only are there some campaign types that apply to what we’re trying to achieve, but they may appear in different “notes” sections.

Without a marketing philosophical debate, there is often some gray area between awareness and consideration.

For our purposes, “Video Views” is listed as an upper-funnel goal.

In general, you can’t go wrong with choosing brand awareness, reach, or video views as your upper-funnel campaign goals.

However, there are subtle differences between the three in which KPIs are prioritized.

As Facebook marketers know, the platform is very good at optimizing campaigns for desired results.

Here are the differences:

arrival

• run this Show your ad to the widest audience possible at the lowest possible price.
• measure this Reach by CPM and impressions.
• superpower: Unlike the other two upper-funnel goals, you can set an average frequency goal for reach campaigns
• beware Engagement and click metrics are poor. These campaigns are designed to be cheap and broad, and you won’t see the same number of clicks or video views/completions as you would with other goals.

brand awareness

• run this Effectively show your ad to users who are more likely to recall your ad.
• measure this Lift by CPM and ad recall.
• superpower: Brand awareness is the only campaign objective that gives advertisers a unique metric called Estimated Ad Recall Lift (People). It shows how many people Facebook estimates will remember your ad if asked within two days.
• beware Estimated ad recall lift metrics and their convertibility to other brand awareness metrics across different channels. This is a Facebook-specific metric that probably doesn’t make much sense outside the platform.

In addition to the dedicated “Estimated Ad Recall Lift (People)” metric, any Facebook campaign that spends at least $30,000 or more over its duration is eligible brand survey test.

This brand research test can be found in the Experiments section of the Ads Manager of your ad account and allows you to ask up to two preset questions to help determine your campaign’s brand lift.