Simplifying campaign objectives with Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences

What is Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences (ODAX)?

Update 1/31/21: Added links to the changelog. Clarify read/write values and use cases for ad accounts.

In order to effectively guide advertisers to optimal campaign setups, we are redesigning the objective selection experience when creating new campaigns in Ads Manager. We are moving to an Outcome based Ads Manager, 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.

View our changelog to see the full list of API changes.

• ODAX can provide logical choices that are aligned with widely accepted marketing concepts.
• ODAX can help advertisers discover on-site solutions to use in their campaigns.
• ODAX can help reduce the complexity of campaign setup, aid scalability, and avoid duplicity of options

Why is this change important?

The ads ecosystem has become increasingly fragmented, difficult to use, and complex. Advertiser confusion around Objectives has been a noted pain point, specifically, advertisers do not understand which Objectives to select to achieve their desired outcome during campaign setup and creation.

Today, there is no clear or consistent taxonomy that determines what an Objective is and what features live within each Objective. In addition, there are redundant options being used for the same or similar purpose. These misalignments further advertiser confusion and often result in suboptimal campaign setups.

The changes will most impact advertisers who predominantly use Conversions, Messages, and Video Views campaigns.

What does the change look like?

We will be consolidating the 11 objectives into 6, focusing on marketing-outcomes:

1. Awareness
2. Traffic
3. Engagement
4. Leads
5. App Promotion
6. Sales

Simplifying the objectives

By simplifying the objectives and consolidating the 11 to 6, our aim is to achieve the following:

1. Simplify objectives: Simplifying objectives and mapping them to widely applicable marketing goals that are used in the broader marketing industry, making it easier for advertisers to communicate their true goals.
2. Enable cross-channel campaigns: Once Cross-Channel Conversion Optimizations are available (e.g. website + app, website + shop), communicate the value of, and default advertisers into, these solutions make it easy for advertisers to adopt.
3. Provide Guidance: With better information about advertiser intent, Ads Manager is able to provide more guidance for advertisers through campaign setup, making it easier for them to achieve their marketing goals

Note: Although the Store Traffic objective will not initially be supported by ODAX, it will still be supported as a legacy objective. We will exclude Ads Managers that use Store Visits in our gradual rollout of ODAX, as we work to support Store Traffic in ODAX in the future.

Impacts to the API and developers

ODAX will result in changes to the API for all developers in mid/late January. These changes include:

1. New objective values
2. New destination types
3. New restrictions on conversion location, conversion events, and optimization goals for the new objective values

We plan to gradually roll out these changes to Ads Manager throughout 2022. As such, we recommend developers implement the below API changes by April 2022 to help advertisers have a consistent experience when using Ads Manager and your app. (This blog will be updated with additional developer documentation once the API is available in mid/late January).

What Changed

Ad Account

Read

Update 1/31/22: The new field has_advertiser_opted_in_odax indicates whether an ad account can create new campaigns using ODAX objectives. During the rollout phase of ODAX on Ads Manager, some advertisers will have the updated objective experience, and others will not. As such this field will enable you to align your app’s experience with the ad account’s Ads Manager experience for a consistent experience across interfaces.

Write (testing purposes only)

Update 1/31/22: The new field odax_opt_in enables the advertiser to opt-in an ad account to create ODAX campaigns via the API. This field is meant for developer testing purposes only and is provided to help test the new ODAX experience on your app to prepare your apps to align with the new objective experience in Ads Manager.

Note:

• This field enables the ad account to create ODAX campaigns via the API. It does not opt-in or opt-out the ad account’s Ads Manager experience to ODAX.
• For testing purposes, once you have used this field to opt-in your ad account to ODAX over the API, you can create an ODAX campaign via the API and see how it works in Ads Manager. While you may not be able to directly create a campaign that uses ODAX in Ads Manager during the rollout phase (as your Ads Manager may not be opted in yet), you can view and edit the existing ODAX campaign created over the API in Ads Manager, similar to all campaigns created over the API.

Campaign

Read

Write

To create an ODAX campaign, you need to provide a new ODAX objective. You can compare code samples for objective of the new ODAX values vs the current legacy values in our developer documents.

Ad Set

Read

destination_type is an existing field. New ODAX values will be returned for ODAX campaigns. Note that destination_type corresponds to conversion location and engagement type in Ads Manager.

Write

If the campaign is an ODAX campaign group, you will need to provide a new destination type that may be required for certain outcomes such as Engagement and Leads. You can compare code samples for destination_type of the new ODAX values vs the current legacy values in our developer documents.

Restrictions

There will be new restrictions on ODAX campaigns. You can view the set of restrictions in our developer documents.

Ad

Restrictions that were based on legacy objectives, are now decided by destination type, promoted object and optimization goal.

Examples:

• Asset customizations for DCO will be compatible with OUTCOME_ENGAGEMENT + on_video destination type but not compatible with OUTCOME_ENGAGEMENT + on_post