The Three Pillars of Optimization

Digital advertising success hinges on choosing the right optimization strategy. While platforms offer various optimization goals, understanding how each works—and why conversion optimization often proves most effective—can dramatically impact campaign performance.

In this guide, we’ll explore the three main types of Meta Ads optimization goals (and some other ad platforms), examine how each functions, and demonstrate why conversion optimization typically delivers the strongest results for most businesses.

Meta Ads optimization goals are grouped into the following:

Think of ad campaign optimization like controlling water flow through different taps. Just as you can adjust hot and cold water to achieve the perfect temperature and pressure, you can adjust your optimization strategy to achieve the ideal balance of reach and intent. 

Turning on the cold water tap causes a strong flow of water to burst out – this is similar to awareness (impressions) optimized campaigns where ads are delivered quickly and abundantly. 

As the hot water tap is turned on, the flow decreases because there is a limited supply of hot water. This is similar to engagement optimized (click or traffic) campaigns where the audience is smaller based on likelihood to engage with your content.

With the hot water tap turned on fully, the flow of water decreases to just above a trickle. This represents conversion optimization where audience size is restricted the most as the platform algorithm looks for those most likely to take action immediately after engaging with an ad.

Awareness Campaigns

Reach

Reach campaigns are designed to drive as many impressions as possible within a specified budget. These campaigns are billed on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and will typically try to drive the lowest CPM possible.

Examples of these goals include:

These goals are particularly effective at reaching a broad audience. This means that if the user is included in your target audience (demo, geography, interests, etc.) then they are eligible to receive ads.

For this reason, it’s extremely important to know specifics about the target audience prior to running this objective as all guardrails (targeting) must be specified by the advertiser.

Video Views

Similar to awareness, video view campaigns are billed on a CPM, but instead of delivering as many impressions as possible, the campaign tries to find individuals that will watch a specified amount of a video.

This differs based on platform – Pinterest optimizes for completed views, Youtube counts views as 30 seconds, and Meta measures ThruPlays (15 seconds of watch time) or even shorter durations like 2 second views. These are named in each platform as follows:

Compared to reach objectives, video views reduce the total audience size as the platform tries to find individuals that will actually watch a video. This highlights an important distinction with all optimization methods – the harder the action is to complete, the smaller the audience size will be and more expensive to reach.

In summary, awareness campaigns excel at reaching broad audiences but require careful audience definition. This campaign type is most effective when targeting a small audience aggressively.

Now that we understand awareness campaigns, let’s examine how engagement optimization builds upon these principles.

Engagement Campaigns

Traffic

Traffic campaigns are aimed at driving the most new users to a page as possible. There are two methods of payment associated with this campaign type: Impression (CPM) or Click (Cost per Click). This means that it’s possible to pay only for the traffic received instead of the chance at driving traffic. Platforms like Google or Reddit operate on a CPC bid model, while platforms like Meta or Pinterest still operate on a CPM model.

These campaign types include:

The benefit of this model is that user acquisition is typically very efficient (clicks are cheap). However, it opens up the door for spammy traffic with no real value. Use this campaign type only under specific circumstances where broad reach is desired in addition to engagement.

For a more targeted strategy, certain platforms like Meta Ads have developed a second optimization goal – landing page views.

Landing Page Views (LPV)

This goal tracks landing page users instead of simply tracking clicks on ads. This improves traffic quality as any clicks that result in an immediate bounce are not fed into the optimization algorithm. 

The issue of low quality traffic can still persist if the landing page is not optimized or the ad and landing page content do not match (creating a disruptive user experience). However, landing page views is usually a better optimization goal than traffic.

While Meta is the only platform with a dedicated LPV goal, other social platforms can leverage a similar method through conversions.

Engagement campaigns are effective at reaching broad audiences while maintaining some direct response. A savvy strategy will leverage them with engaging content to build awareness and consideration.

While awareness and engagement campaigns play important roles in the marketing funnel, conversion optimization represents digital advertising’s most sophisticated targeting capability—one that warrants a deeper examination. By understanding how conversion campaigns operate, advertisers can unlock their full potential to drive measurable business results.

Conversions Campaigns

Long considered the go-to optimization method due to the focus on actionable intent, conversion optimization prioritizes action on or off site depending on the nature of data fed into the ad platform.

Conversions can include a host of online or offline actions and are typically broken down into two categories:

While these actions typically take place online (tracked using a tag on the website), offline conversions can also be uploaded as a way of providing high quality data to optimize campaigns. We’ll address these in a later article.

There are two primary methods of optimizing for conversions: maximize conversions and maximize conversion value. These can include:

While action can vary based on specific goals (page views, purchases, add to cart, etc.), the mechanism used to optimize the campaign stays the same.

As a campaign generates conversions, the algorithm uses characteristics of converters including demographic, geographic, and psychographic (i.e. shared interests or behaviors) and many more to build a user graph that defines a ‘most likely to convert’ audience.

This audience typically consists of a small subset as the algorithm tries to find similar profiles to past converters. This has some key benefits:

1. Leverage all of the platforms’ user data.
2. Targeting becomes ‘smarter’ as more conversions are tracked.
3. Limited interest or demographic targeting required.

In essence, conversion optimization takes a lot of the challenge in identifying and narrowing an audience based on demographic, psychographic, and geographic and automates it. This however comes with a set of drawbacks:

1. Smaller audiences are more expensive to reach.
2. Campaign naturally retargets site visitors who are more likely to convert.
3. Optimization is only as good as the data being fed into the platform.

So what does this mean for anyone looking to run a conversion campaign? Let’s look at a few recommendations.

Maximizing Conversion Campaign Performance

Data Quality vs Quantity

The longstanding rule with Meta Ads optimization goals is that campaigns need 50 events per week or optimize properly. For the most robust optimization, this number can balloon to upwards of 50 events per DAY. There are two possible scenarios to address this:

Quality

Let’s say you are tracking completed form fills on your website. Most users who fill out the form are legit, but some fill it out with little or no intention of following through with an intro sales call. 

If you are simply tracking completed forms, the platform has no way of distinguishing serious leads and those that filled it out with no serious intention. This tells the platform to find more users similar to these low quality leads, and potentially can hurt the performance of your campaign.

To combat this, it’s imperative to only send conversions for submissions that are qualified. This can be done several ways:

• Import leads after they’ve been vetted
• Create robust form fills that deter casual submissions
• Use CAPTCHA or other bot prevention measures

Quantity

Let’s say instead of leads you are tracking sales of a product on your website. The conversion rate is low (~1%) because it’s an expensive product, so you only generate 5 conversions per week.

This is not inherently bad given those 5 conversions are who you want to be reaching. However, it will be harder to train the algorithm given its limited to five samples of data to optimize per week.

To combat this, creating a second campaign that runs at a lower daily budget optimizing for an event further up the funnel (add to cart, page view) will help fill in the gaps.

This campaign will likely generate tens or hundreds of conversions per week given it doesn’t require an actual payment. This enables the campaign to reach a much broader audience.

The result? Lower CPMs and greater reach. There may be fewer purchases from this campaign, but your product will reach more potential buyers that may come back through the purchase optimized campaign or to your site organically.

We can see this by looking at in-platform CPMs and CPCs:

Reaching the most qualified users sees an incremental increase in both cost per impression and cost per click.

Strategic Exclusions

Exclusions are an often overlooked area for optimization, but are extremely important. As previously mentioned, conversion campaigns are incentivized to retarget site visitors as they are more likely to convert.

This means that while campaigns will show a healthy volume of clicks, this could actually be misrepresenting the number of real visitors to your site. In addition, visitors will be returning and will limit the reach and scale your campaigns can drive.

For this reason, removing site visitors using a browser pixel and ad engagements using Meta or Pinterest’s in-platform ad tracking is imperative.

It’s not uncommon to see the number of new visitors to your site double after including exclusions into targeting.

Creative Optimization

Ad platforms are becoming increasingly smart at targeting potential buyers leaving less for the advertiser to do to optimize targeting settings (think of Performance Max, Advantage+, Performance+).

While these campaign types aren’t perfect (see Why Performance Max is Secretly A Retargeting Engine), this ability to recognize a potential buyer is not new or exclusive to them. In fact, most of the time using a broad audience with conversion optimization is better than creating narrow audience definitions.

In this sense, the job of the advertiser is to optimize messaging (ad copy & creative) and offers (free trial, demo, buy one get one free, etc.). These mechanisms engage the audience which provides valuable information to the Meta Ads for optimization.

This is easy to see with highly engaging creative versus more generic (less sensational) messaging. When calling out a problem faced by consumers, an ad creative can reach up to 2x more new users simply because they engage with the creative telling the ad platform to reach more individuals like them. 

When a creative is bland, only those who are closer to purchase (i.e. site visitors, ad engagers) will click and signal the platform to find more users like them. More so than ever, the creative finds the right audience.

Mastering Meta Ads Optimization Goals

While optimization goals vary based on business needs, conversion optimization in Meta Ads provides the most sophisticated approach to reaching qualified audiences. By understanding its mechanisms—data quality, strategic exclusions, and creative messaging—advertisers can successfully leverage this tactic in their campaigns.

Just as finding the perfect water temperature requires adjusting multiple taps, finding advertising success requires balancing optimization strategies with creative messaging that resonates with your audience. As platforms continue to evolve, mastering the fundamentals of conversion optimization becomes increasingly crucial for digital advertising success.