First, it’s important to understand what the campaign objective actually does. Most advertisers confuse the objective for the primary factor that controls ad delivery. It’s not.

Just because your campaignThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More objective is Sales doesn’t mean that delivery will be optimized for sales. Your performance goal does that.

You could pick a sales objective and set a performance goalThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More of link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More, landing page viewsLanding Page View is a Facebook ads metric that represents when people land on your destination URL after clicking a link in your ad. More, or something else. Your ads will be optimized to deliver to people most likely to perform those actions — not necessarily purchase. The objective doesn’t matter.

What the Objective Does

That doesn’t make the objective meaningless. What the objective does is streamline the campaign creation process. It removes options that you may not need and makes certain options available within the ad setAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More.

SIDEBAR: Meta could make this less confusing by removing performance goals that are irrelevant to the objective. There’s no reason to make Link Clicks and Landing Page Views optimization available under the Sales objective. Make those only available for Traffic.

Instead, most performance goals are available for multiple Campaign ObjectivesWhen you create a campaign, one of the first things you’ll do is select an objective. The campaign objective is your ultimate goal. Your selection will impact options, including optimization and delivery. Options include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. More. That’s just confusing.

But, I digress…

What You Should Do

Keep this simple. Start with an objective that represents what you want to accomplish. The most important step will be your conversion location and performance goal. These are selected in the ad set and should be your priority.

If the conversion location and performance goal you want aren’t available, pick a different campaign objective. Eventually, you’ll have a much better sense of what conversion locations and performance goals are available for which objectives.

For an overview, check out my guide to the 21 performance goals.