Brand awareness ads can seem like one of the most straightforward objectives to be using as part of your social media advertising.

However, there’s more to Facebook Brand Awareness than just getting people to see your ad.

Here we look at the pros and cons behind using Brand Awareness ads on Facebook and Instagram and whether or not they can form an effective part of your social media strategy.

Facebook Brand Awareness ads – why you should be using them 

Brand awareness ads are specifically designed to generate ad recall. In reality, this means that Facebook will show your ad to as many people as possible in a controlled manner. They will then survey samples of your target audience to determine the key metric for success – Estimated Ad Recall.

Estimated Ad Recall is a way of measuring the amount of people that took notice of your ad up to two days after seeing it. This is an important metric for establishing the effectiveness of brand building campaigns as the most important aspect of brand awareness is building long term memory of your brand that can convert into future sales/leads.

So if you are to believe Facebook and what they say about their own ad objectives, brand awareness ads would seem like the best and most useful way of generating interest and recall of your brand, right?

Facebook Brand Awareness ads – why you shouldn’t be using them 

Unfortunately Facebook advertising isn’t always that simple.

There are a few difficulties with using Brand Awareness ads within your Facebook and Instagram advertising.

Brand Awareness ads require a broad audience to accurately forecast and estimate their uplift metrics, meaning that your ads will be shown to as many people as possible, potentially at the expense of the quality of your audience. Simply put, it can be quantity over quality.

The other major drawback is that Facebook Brand Awareness ads tend to only really produce reach and impressions, as well as their Estimated Ad Recall metric.

We point this out because with other Facebook ad objectives, you are able to generate reach and impressions, as well as a number of more meaningful responses from your target audience.

Reach and impressions are great and all. But if you can combine this reach with website traffic, leads and/or sales then you’re able to generate more active and meaningful responses from your audience, helping them to engage with your brand and messaging at a deeper level.

With Brand Awareness ads, this can be lacking and it’s for that reason that we tend to avoid using them within our social media advertising.

Social Acumen opinion on Facebook Brand Awareness ads 

When there are 12 other Facebook ad objectives at your disposal, which are capable of driving more important actions from your target audience, Brand Awareness feel like a slight waste of money.

Of course, there is some value in delivering your ads to as many people as possible. And the Estimated Ad Recall metric can be an effective measure of brand awareness and ad recall.

But we’re always dubious about the quality of those seeing your ads and feel that true brand recall comes through performing actions towards that a brand or product.

Related links and Case Studies 

If you’re keen to explore how we helped BOL Foods to improve their brand awareness nationally by 2 million people, then have a look at our BOL Case Study.