How to Master Meta - Takeaway 3: Go Deep
A series on the 8 key lessons learned from sending seven figures in ad spend to Mark Zuckerberg. Takeaway 3: How to choose the right optimization goal for your campaigns.
Hey 👋🏼 I’m Fabian, nice to have you here. In my newsletter “Get Hooked! Marketing”, I share proven tactics from the trenches of performance advertising every week. Built to make you a top 5% marketer.
The eight lessons from my series, “How to Master Meta”, are what I consider the mental guardrails for successful social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Each post comes with a Resource Prompt that you can plug and play into your favorite AI chat tool. This provides additional useful resources on lessons learned, helping you apply them step-by-step inside your ad account.
While the takeaways are written first and foremost for advanced beginners, I think they also provide value to seasoned professionals. It is by no means exhaustive. So, share your thoughts and ask your questions in the comments!
Enjoy.
Previously on “How to Master Meta”
Our second lesson was all about the ideal Meta Ads account structure to maximize performance.
And it is surprisingly simple.
The golden rule is this: one campaign per business goal.
So if your goal is lead generation, for example, you should ideally run a single campaign.
Consolidating all your ads within one campaign gives Meta as many options as possible to convert your target audience. This speeds up learning and reduces the time it takes to see better results. It also eliminates the risk of your ads competing against each other across multiple campaigns.
Taking the next step and looking inside a campaign, the second important takeaway is:
Your campaign setup should make it easy to identify and manage the most important performance driver. Your creatives.
I recommend having one winning ad sets that include your best-performing ads, alongside several testing ad sets. This is where you experiment with new creative ideas. The goal is to increase the number of winning ads over time so you can scale your campaign with more budget.
If you haven’t had the chance to read the first takeaway, you can do that now here.
Takeaway 3: Go Deep
Now that we’ve aligned our data and account structure based on the previous chapters, we can take a closer look at the optimization goals your campaigns should be aiming for.
The difference between business, campaign and optimization goals
I’ve been using different terms when talking about Meta ad goals. Let’s take a moment to separate them clearly.
The business goal defines success within your organization. What do you want to achieve by running Meta ads as a business owner, marketing team or agency? The answer to that question is your business goal.
Next is the campaign goal. This is the first goal Meta asks you to select inside your ad account and the very first step when setting up a new campaign. You are given six options:
Awareness
Traffic
Engagement
Leads
App promotion
Sales
Depending on which business goal you choose, you will get different configuration options for the optimization goal.
The optimization goal* is set one level below the campaign, at the ad group level. Here you decide which conversion event you want to optimize for. These events should have been set up inside your events manager.
While you can technically run multiple ad groups with different optimization goals, you should stick to a single optimization goal per campaign.
(*Named “Performance Goal” inside the ad manager)
Go deep
Let’s answer the important question of which goal to choose for your Meta ad campaign.
Your mental guardrail is this:
Always choose the deepest funnel event that can achieve at least 50 conversions within 7 days as your optimization goal.
First, and this is crucial, don’t optimize for top-of-funnel events like awareness, traffic or engagement. Ignore these options when choosing your campaign goal. Why? Because anyone can view your ad or click onto your landing page. Letting Meta optimize for these actions leads to poor targeting and low-quality traffic.
The 50 conversions per week benchmark is what Meta sets for ads to exit the so-called “Learning Phase.” During this phase, results can fluctuate. Once the learning phase is complete, your campaign results stabilize.
A piece of advice: Don’t wait 7 days for your campaign to gain traction if you haven’t seen results in the first two days. With a testing budget of $50 to $100 per day, you should be able to see early results. If not, the problem usually lies outside your optimization goals.
Why your campaign doesn’t generate results
You started your campaign and then… nothing. No sales, leads or app downloads.
So you might think, “Okay, if these don’t work, we’ll move up the funnel to generate more results.”
Wrong.
Changing your optimization goal won’t fix the problem. The issues are usually rooted somewhere else.
The first thing you need to be honest about is the quality of your offer. Are you marketing something people actually care about? These are your business fundamentals. If you don’t get them right, no Meta campaign on the planet can help you.
Assuming you have a great offer, the next thing to examine is your ads. Are people actually stopping their scroll and motivated enough to click through to your website?
If you can answer yes, the last thing to optimize is your landing page. Do prospects complete the intended conversion action on your website?
Only if you can answer all three with yes will your campaign start generating results.
My recommended goals for each business type
Starting with B2C eCommerce businesses: every successful B2C eCommerce business I know that runs ads on Facebook and Instagram optimizes for website sales. No exceptions.
Moving on to B2B. Choosing the right optimization goal here is a bit more nuanced, mainly because sales cycles are much longer. Optimizing for direct sales is usually not an option. On Meta, a conversion action must occur within 7 days after the click in order to be attributed to the campaign and to be used for ad delivery optimization.
The minimum goal you should aim for is website leads. But I recommend optimizing toward qualified leads (for example, marketing or sales qualified leads from your CRM), given that you can produce a sufficient number within 7 days.
Businesses that market Android and iOS apps operate in similar waters. The minimum optimization goal is usually app installs. Often, deeper events are recommended. For example, you can optimize for qualified users - people who complete a predefined set of actions in the app within seven days after first clicking the ad.
What’s next?
In our next takeaway, I will show you how to properly reach your audience by choosing the right targeting and placement settings.
We’ll dive deeper into Meta “Advantage+” settings and how they can help increase your ad performance. We’ll also discuss why you should question Meta’s machine learning features from time to time.
Stay tuned.
All the best,
Fabian
Resource Prompt
Plug this into your favorite AI chat tool to get hands-on tutorials and guides for choosing and setting up the right optimization goal for your campaigns:
“I want a curated list of the best step-by-step video tutorials, guides and practical resources to help set and optimize Meta ad campaign goals for Facebook and Instagram. Focus on actionable content that I can follow to choose the right business, campaign and optimization goals. Cover all of the following areas:
Meta Ads Manager - How to set up campaigns, select the correct campaign and optimization goals and monitor performance metrics. Include walkthroughs showing B2B, B2C and app-specific examples.
Conversion Events & Tracking - How to connect events from websites, apps or CRM systems to optimize toward the right conversion goals. Step-by-step guides for using Meta Pixel, Meta SDK and CAPI for optimization goal tracking.
CRM & Lead Qualification (B2B) - Tutorials on sending marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads from CRMs (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce) to Meta for optimization.
Landing Page & Conversion Optimization - How to measure whether your ads are driving meaningful conversions on your website or app, including step-by-step guides for analytics and A/B testing.
App Install & Deep Event Optimization - For iOS and Android apps, guides on optimizing toward qualified users or in-app actions rather than just installs.
Performance Benchmarks & Testing - Practical advice for identifying when campaigns reach the 50 conversions per week benchmark, exiting the learning phase and testing early results.
Prioritize video tutorials, but include written guides or templates if they provide clear implementation steps. For each resource, provide direct links, estimated duration and specify which business type (B2B, B2C, apps) it applies to. Organize resources by topic for clarity. Make it practical, hands-on and beginner-friendly.”
The prompt part is my favourite. Thanks for sharing, Fabian!