Meta Announces Updates to its Ad Campaign Set-Up Process to Better Align with Primary Objectives

It’s a little late in the year for significant system shifts, but Meta has snuck in one more update ahead of the holiday break, with the announcement that it’s making some big changes to its ad objective listings in Ads Manager, in order to simplify and streamline the campaign set-up process by enhancing the focus on the most practically relevant options and tools.

As explained by Meta:

“In order to effectively guide advertisers to optimal campaign setups, we’re redesigning the objective selection experience when creating new campaigns in Ads Manager. We’re moving to an outcome-driven ad experiences model (ODAX), where advertisers can select their designed business outcomes (e.g. Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, Sales) and the interface will guide advertisers to the most optimal campaign setup/creation paths to achieve that outcome.”

That will mean that the Ads Manager interface will get an overhaul, which you can see in the below screenshots, with the current set-up process on the left, and the new, ODAX system on the right:

The main difference, as you’ll note, is the reduction in objective options from 11 to 6, and a move away from the ‘Awareness’, ‘Consideration’ ‘Conversion’ banners, in order to make it clearer what each objective stream actually is, and how they can be used in your promotions.

Which make sense. Those segments are more aligned with ad industry lingo, which your regular SMB owner is probably not as familiar with, and by stripping the objective options back even further, that could make it easier for newcomers to generate better results, by honing their options onto the ad tools and processes that will work best for their aims and objectives.

You can see thew shift in objective alignment in this chart:

Meta says that the changes, which will mostly impact advertisers that use Conversions, Messages, and Video Views campaigns, will be gradually rolled out through 2022, so there’s no set date, as such, for a switchover or change, but you will see it come through at some stage.

Right now, Meta is alerting those that use its ads API to update their processes in line with the change ahead of any impacts – so if you’re an everyday advertiser, it won’t be a major change straight away. But a change is coming, which will impact your Facebook and Instagram ads process.

It could be good, with a more streamlined, simplified ad set-up system, helping to better align your campaigns with your actual, desired objective. But it could be limiting in some ways too.

We won’t know for sure until the new system is launched sometime in the new year.