Dear Facebook Advertisers, Stop Running Traffic Campaigns

If you browse any sort of online forum about digital advertising, there’s one piece of advice that routinely gets offered to new Facebook advertisers. It goes something like:

When you’re starting out, your pixel doesn’t have any historical conversion data. As such, it doesn’t make sense to run a conversion campaign; you should just run traffic campaigns.

This advice is often followed by some variant of the dreaded phrase: running traffic campaigns will help warm your pixel up.