Facebook Traffic Ads can be one of the most cost effective ways of driving traffic to your website, ecommerce shop or app.

You can largely determine the success of traffic ads through two elements: how much and how good?

Getting the balance right between the amount of traffic you’re driving to your website against the quality of the people visiting is what most digital marketers are continuously striving to achieve. 

We’ll explore below the reasons why you should be using Traffic ads within your social media advertising and how you can achieve the best balance between volume and value. 

Facebook Traffic ads – why you should be using them

As the name would imply, the main objective for Facebook Traffic ads is to, well, drive traffic. More specifically, it’s to drive people to somewhere outside of Facebook or Instagram – most likely, a website. 

Traffic ads create a bespoke ad unit that, on Facebook, includes a link underneath the main image or video that can guide your target audience to where you want them to go. So this helps to get as many people as possible to your desired location. 

With all Facebook and Instagram advertising, choosing the traffic objective will optimise your ads to be shown to people who are more likely to click on an ad and visit that website. 

That means if you choose to use traffic ads, your ads will have the best possible chance of getting as many of your target audience to go where you want them to go. 

The difference in performance between traffic ads and reach / engagement ads for the amount of clicks and site visits you can get can be stark. By testing and trialling this out yourself you should see a significant difference in performance between your traffic ads and most other ad objectives. 

Optimising towards Landing Page Views

Your traffic ads can also be optimised for Landing Page Views.

These are similar to Link Clicks (the standard metric for success for traffic ads) in that they track visits to websites. However, unlike Link Clicks, they only register when someone lands on a fully loaded website. 

This might seem like a subtle difference but Landing Page Views can be a much better way of measuring actual traffic that wants to visit your site rather than people with overactive thumbs or spam clicks.

Finally, Traffic ads can utilise a wide range of ad formats and content types – from videos and images to Carousels and Collection ads. This gives you a good range of creative options for how you drive traffic to your chosen sites. 

Facebook Traffic ads – why you shouldn’t be using them

The downside to using Traffic ads can be the quality you get. Sometimes increasing the volume of traffic you’re able to generate can come at the expense of quality – and vice versa. 

It is always important to track and monitor the traffic you are able to generate to your site using additional tools such as Google Analytics. This will help you monitor what happens when traffic arrives at your site. 

Are they leaving without doing anything? If so, then your Bounce Rate will be high. 

Are they going through to your shop / products but not taking their purchase further? If so, then perhaps your ecommerce experience may need to be explored. 

These learnings will inevitably help you make the traffic you are sending to your site better and more effective. While it’s not a major negative for using traffic ads, lots of brands can often overlook the analysis of the traffic that they’ve been able to generate. 

Social Acumen opinion on Facebook Traffic ads

Traffic ads should become a staple of your social media advertising. They are the most effective way of moving your customers out of the awareness stage and into the product / brand consideration stage of the purchase journey. 

Because of this, your ads will be optimised to consumers and audiences that regularly engage and click through to websites from Facebook and Instagram advertising. 

We often find that our traffic ads generate as many comments as our Engagement ads, while also driving people towards our client’s sites. This is due to Facebook’s optimisation work and its ability to show your ads to a higher quality of audience that frequently engage and respond well to ads of this nature. 

Related links and Case Studies 

If you’re keen to explore how we helped London Planner to increase the amount of traffic their website received by 1,000% then have a look at our London Planner Case Study.