Traffic campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More ALMOST never work.
I’m not alone in that I discourage advertisers from using traffic campaigns. The quality of traffic Meta sends with this optimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More tends to be terrible.
Since the algorithm’s only goal is to send you cheap traffic, it doesn’t care whether these people do anything else. And in most cases, they don’t. Lots of quick abandons.
But, I heard from someone in my community with a story that is an exception. His traffic campaign actually generated a high number of purchases and an amazing ROAS. This wasn’t a small sample size either.
Like you, I was skeptical, to put it mildly. But, he willingly shared further details and answered every question I had.
His Ads Manager reporting stands up. One of my assumptions was that his results were inflated by view-through conversions. Nope, the vast majority of those results were 1-day click purchases.
Well, maybe events were set up incorrectly and he wasn’t actually getting those purchases. Nope, his results were supported by third-party tracking software and real-world data.
I was baffled, and maybe you are, too. How is this possible?
My theory is that if you have an ad with an amazing offer or social proof, it can override the weaknesses of a traffic campaign. Meta wasn’t actually trying to get him purchases. But his ad still attracted the right people.
But the weaknesses are still there. And that’s the part that I keep coming back to. Yes, he found great results with a traffic campaign. Call it a miracle. But I still contend he’ll get even better results by optimizing for conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More.
He’s going to test just that, and I can’t wait to see what happens. Might he actually get better results from a traffic campaign? If he does, I might start questioning all of life’s apparent universal truths.
Do you ever get good results from traffic campaigns?
