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In Facebook Ads Manager, there are several ways to create effective ads that will drive relevant traffic to your website, and ultimately be part of a larger strategy to drive conversions. We talk about this at length in our Facebook Ads Classes for Data Driven Academy - but there are more and more learnings happening every day, resulting in us trying more and more things.

Case in point, the "ViewContent" ad. Find out how this differs from "Link Click" Ads, "Landing Page View" Ads and why you should consider running them.

But first, let's take a step back and break this down.

What You're Trying To Achieve: Increase Your Website Traffic.

1. The first thing you'll want to do is select "Traffic" while creating a Facebook Ad.

2. Now, while creating your ad, you'll see this...

Notice that Facebook defaults to "Link Clicks," but then asks you if you want to "Switch to Landing Page Views."

What's the difference?

Link Click Optimization - According to Facebook...

Yes. A link click means that a person clicked a link in your ad. The following scenarios are examples of link clicks that may not result in a landing page views:

  • A person clicks a link accidentally and closes the page before it gets a chance to load
  • A person clicks a link intentionally, but the page takes too long to load and the person closes it before it finishes

Landing Page Views Optimization - According to Facebook...

A landing page view is when a person lands on your ad's destination URL (landing page) after clicking a link in your ad.

Important: In this context, "landing page" refers only to the destination URL you choose during ad creation. It doesn't refer to your website's "home page" (which may be referred to as its "landing page" in other contexts) and won't send people there unless you choose it as your destination URL.

Optimizing for landing page views requires a pixel.

According to Facebook, here is what it looks like to "optimize for landing page views."

Can I optimize for landing page views?

If you meet the following criteria, yes:

  • Your ad set is part of a campaign with a traffic or conversions marketing objective
  • Your ad account has access to a properly-implemented pixel
  • Your website has the pixel base code installed on the page(s) you want to optimize for people landing on

If I can optimize for landing page views, should I?

It depends on your goal and/or ad format:

  • If your goal is to get more traffic on a specific page (or specific pages) of your website: We recommend landing page view optimization over link click optimization, since the former can improve traffic quality. We especially recommend it if you're trying to get people to land on a page (or pages) on their mobile devices.

Here's the deal though, while it seems like "Landing Page Views" Optimization would be the no brainer assuming you have a pixel installed, we've run both kinds of ads, and the data on our end shows that Link Clicks yields far better results.

So we recommend trying both and seeing what works best for you, but then we also found a third type of ad that we wanted to try - called "ViewContent" ads.

The difference between "ViewContent" and "Landing Page" optimization is that If your goal is to get more people viewing more content on your site overall (not landing on specific destination URLs of ads), Facebook recommends optimizing for ViewContent conversions instead of landing page views, since the former optimizes for people to view any page on your site with that event added.

Make sense?

Here's how to do it...

Instead of selecting "Traffic" - select "Conversions."

Then, select "Custom Conversions" ...

And, "Define a New Custom Conversion" ...

Then, select "ViewContent" from the dropdown on the modal window and type in your website URL!

Run three ads, one for each (Link Clicks, Landing Page Views and ViewContent), then see which one helps you achieve your goal best. Let the data drive what you do from that point forward!

Thanks for reading / watching - and have a great day!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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