Why You Shouldn’t Be Spending on Traffic Optimized Campaigns on META

Believe it or not - many brands think they need to buy traffic from META to drive awareness.

We still get asked if brands should buy campaigns optimized for traffic from META to boost awareness. Let’s talk about why buying traffic-optimized campaigns on META is a mistake for your brand:

You Aren’t Nike 

Nike’s ad budget was $4 billion last year. This scale of advertising is all about reaching as many people as possible and as many times as possible. This leads to many-layered media plans across many different channels. Nike doesn’t count on one channel performing for them. They count on an ecosystem of strategic messaging to add up to results. They conduct rigorous modeling, research, and attribution to find out which channels and campaigns drive results. They can afford to invest in micro-steps of the funnel at that scale.

You can’t. You need every dollar in your ad budget to perform for you, so you need to allocate your dollars to the campaigns with the highest impact first. These aren’t traffic campaigns, and we’ll talk about why next.

Traffic Campaigns Aren’t What You Think They Are

When you buy traffic-optimized campaigns, you think you are buying real users clicking on your ad and visiting your landing page. Unfortunately, this ignores a couple of essential differences in traffic vs. conversion optimization campaigns.

1. Not All Users Are Created Equal - META’s algorithm gives you precisely what you ask for. You want clicks - you got it! They don’t care if those clicks come from users who have never bought anything online before, may not even have the means to purchase from you, or worse, aren’t even human! You think these people are going to engage with your funnel over time, but unfortunately, many aren’t even eligible for your funnel from the beginning. 

2. Bots, Bots, Bots & More Bots - When you purchase traffic, META places your ads in all available locations to secure clicks, including on their own Audience Network. These placements extend beyond the META platforms. This exposes you to potential traffic from bots. Why would bots click on your ads? They do so while crawling the web, engaging in ad arbitrage, or scraping data. And the worst part? They can click repeatedly, driving your costs up while ensuring they will never enter your funnel. 

3. Converters Aren’t Just Clickers - When you tell META you want clicks, you might assume that would include those who convert. However, META has limited ad inventory, so if they can show an ad to someone who might convert at a higher CPM, they will prioritize that ad. Consequently, your audience consists of people and bots that click, but not those who would convert if they saw your conversion-optimized ad. 

While you might be excited about those cheap clicks and watching your page views soar, we’ve discovered that click-based traffic is significantly lower in quality compared to conversion-optimized traffic. Typically, we observe about 2 seconds on-site for click-optimized campaigns, in contrast to 20 to 30 seconds on-site for conversion-optimized campaigns. Which type of traffic do you truly prefer? How much more would you be willing to pay for customer engagement that lasts 30 seconds instead of just 2 seconds?

The Funnel Is Way Flatter Than You Think

One of the common concerns about running conversion-optimized campaigns is that you can’t build awareness or reach with them. But this ignores some essential truths about this media:

1. Prospecting Campaigns Reach New People - You worry if you “target converters” you aren’t reaching new people to grow your brand. This isn’t true, it’s just that you are targeting people that CAN and might convert. Meanwhile, with traffic campaigns, you are just targeting people who click. Reach can be less with conversion-optimized campaigns, but spending into a pool of people with the ability to buy seems smarter than spending into a larger pool of people we don’t see buying. And again - you aren’t Nike - the converters pool is likely plenty large for your budget.

2. Conversion Optimized Campaigns Build Brand Awareness - Brands also worry these campaigns won’t lead to brand awareness in the marketplace. However, prospecting conversion-optimized campaigns can target people who have never heard of your brand and deliver repeat impressions. This will expose them multiple times and drive them through the AIDA funnel.

3. A Purchase Is the Highest Form of Engagement—We live in a world where we can prompt users to make a purchase within the short timeframe of an ad impression, landing page view, and cart experience. This occurs daily at a high volume. Therefore, when choosing between getting people to “know about us” or “buy from us,” the decision is clear. Those who make purchases will become brand advocates and hold much greater present and future value for the brand than those who never try us. 

4. Media Should Make the Funnel Short & Flat - The best media in your ad stack is going to be whatever creates the most buying intent at the highest volume. Conversion-optimized campaigns do this - that is why brands spend so much on them. Spending on campaigns higher in the funnel when you haven’t maxed out your conversion-optimized spend is a misappropriation of resources.

5. You Don’t Need Awareness Advertising to Fill Your Conversion Campaigns. Again, because conversion campaigns target people who can convert but are still new to your brand, you don’t need to fill this funnel with higher-funnel media. You need to maximize this media first before considering going even higher up the funnel. 

The Botton Line

Buying media on engagement metrics, like clicks, is a mistake for the vast majority of small to mid-size brands. Many brands can spend upwards of $4m+ on META a month before reaching into other campaign types or prospecting channels. Chances are you aren’t topping out the potential on the META platform to drive sales. So, while diversifying your spending is always wise, don’t diversify into less impactful sources of traffic. Follow the ROAS waterfall - spend the most you can on where return is the highest. If you are concerned you aren’t building your brand, start measuring it with solutions like Tracksuit. If you are concerned that prospecting at scale on META isn’t yielding a high enough impact, start modeling it with an MMM or conduct incrementality tests. But don’t, whatever you do, come to the conclusion that traffic-optimized campaigns are the answer.

Joke of the Week:

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