Setting up a Facebook Ad involves adjusting dozens of variables, one of which is the ad objective. The ad objective is what you want the audience to do after they see the ad. There are over ten ad objectives for Facebook advertisers to choose from, and each objective falls into one of three objective categories; awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Below are all the ways Facebook ads can help multi-location businesses accomplish advertising objectives. The objectives that Facebook has defined follow along a typical sales funnel – beginning at awareness, moving to consideration and ultimately reaching conversion.

Awareness Objectives

Ads with awareness objectives are meant to get people interested in your business. These types of ads aren’t designed to get people to buy your product or even learn more about your business. They’re designed to make people aware of your brand. The two awareness objectives are designed to increase brand awareness and reach.

Brand Awareness: Selecting this ad objective tells Facebook to target an audience that is more likely to recall your ad. Facebook conducts studies to gather intel about who can recall ads— polling people two days after they see an ad to see if they remember the brand.

Reach: This objective is simple; your ad will go to as many people as possible within your target audience parameters.

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Consideration Objectives

Consideration is the next step in the funnel after awareness. Selecting a consideration objective for your ad means you’re trying to get the audience to seek out more information about your business. Most likely, those target audience members who are in the consideration stage are already aware of your business; so, consideration ads should provide more context on your business, and why they should choose you as their solution. This information can come from a number of places, including your website, a mobile app or through direct communication with a member of your team.

App Installs: This objective is self-explanatory; the goal is to send Facebook users to the App Store or Google Play Store so they can download your business’ app.

Traffic: This objective is designed to send people to your business’ website or app. The traffic objective is broad, so if you do select this objective, ensure you’re sending the audience to a webpage with a defined resource, empowering them to learn more, or a landing page that provides context on your services with a clear call-to-action (CTA). If you choose to send users to your app, be sure to set the target audience to people who have already downloaded your app.

Engagement: The engagement objective directs users to take some sort of action, whether it’s liking your business’ Facebook Page, claiming an offer on your page, or RSVPing to an event on your page. Using this objective can help you find soft leads; people who’ve engaged with your content.

Video Views: On Facebook, video is king. With over 8 billion video views per day happening on the platform, the video views objective is a popular choice among advertisers.

Lead Generation: This objective gives advertisers the opportunity to collect contact information from Facebook users. The form-fills appear within Facebook, so it doesn’t take much effort on the part of the consumer to provide the information since they don’t have to click on a link that takes them to another page outside of Facebook — the data collection happens natively.

Messages: When a user clicks on an ad with a messages objective, it opens up a Facebook Messenger chat between the person and your business. While this ad objective does open up a direct line of communication between business and customer, it also requires that someone on your team be active and ready at all times to respond to messages.

Conversion Objectives

Conversion is the final step in this three-part customer journey. Ads with this objective are optimized to drive sales, increase in-store visits and promote specific products. Conversion ads are popular because they allow advertisers to track ROI from Facebook ads; a key metric that’s made possible with the Facebook pixel, a Facebook-generated code that must be installed on the backend of your website.

Pixel Conversions: Once the Facebook pixel is installed on your business’ website, you can track users from when they click your ad to when they complete a specific action on your website or mobile app; these actions can include making a purchase on your site, downloading a coupon, or countless other customizable actions.

Catalog Sales: If you have a website where visitors can buy products, you can create an ad that shows specific products natively on Facebook in a slideshow format. The ad will then prompt users to make a purchase on your site.

Store Traffic: This last objective is the most relevant to franchisors using Facebook ads. It’s only available to businesses with multiple locations, and it can be set up so that it targets people within a designated radius of each business location. Calls-to-action like “Get Directions” or “Call Now” encourage users to come into the physical stores.

Determining your ad objectives depends on your business’ advertising goals. While a brand new franchise might need to raise brand awareness in each local community, an established franchise may want to focus more on an objective that drives in-store visits. If you’re just getting started with social advertising, best practice dictates that you should set up campaigns in the same structure as the sales funnel. Meaning, you should target your audience with awareness-based objectives, then consideration, and finally conversion. Ideally, your social advertising is helping your potential buyer move through the stage funnel.

On Facebook, you must select an objective before you create the ad itself. Using a tool like SOCi, however, you create the ad before setting the objective, and can reuse creatives across multiple objectives. With so many different objectives to choose from, it’s easy to implement a campaign structure that creates separate campaigns for various objectives that can be targeted to regions, or particular store locations, while allowing for dynamic text and imagery that can be localized to speak to each location’s target audience.

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