How to Best Structure a Facebook Ad Campaign

Ignore the structure of your Facebook campaign at your own peril. Sure, it might not sound as sexy as optimizing your targeting or ad creative; I mean those ensure the right content gets to the right people, so what does good structure contribute to your campaign’s success?

At a basic level, the overview of a solid structure provides allows you to make quick sense of how your campaigns and each of their component parts are performing, saving you much time and energy.

More importantly, good structure makes keeping track of variables easier and more reliable, increasing the accuracy of your split tests. And, if done correctly, the structure will help Facebook’s algorithm to optimize your ad spend.

So how do you set up this ideal campaign?

Campaign

While this is not the case for every campaign or for every business, you will usually want to create a campaign that uses Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). With CBO, you can set your daily budget at the campaign level. An algorithm optimizes the distribution of your budget across your ad sets.

This will prevent your smaller target groups from becoming saturated. While smaller groups (like warm audiences) might have very low costs for results at the beginning, these greatly increase over time as they saturate. Because it optimizes ad spend for the lowest cost per conversion, a CBO will take note of this and spend less money on saturating ad sets and more on other ones.

Ad Sets

Within your campaign, you should create 3 to 5 ad sets. If you add less, the CBO algorithm won’t be able to optimize much, and any more than 5 will confuse it.

Run the ad sets for just enough time to get reliable results and then pause or replace those performing poorly and group those performing well into single ad sets. After that, it’s a continuous rinse and repeat.

What ad sets should you try out?

One Warm Audience. Customers who already know about your business, either by having visited your website, interacted with you on social media, signed up with your newsletter, or otherwise are “warmer” (easier to convert) than other consumers. Include 1 warm audience ad set to your campaign. People who have already purchased a product from you are also very warm, but should only be included in an ad set if your product is something people buy twice.

One to Two Lookalike Audience(s). Facebook can find users that are similar to the members of your warm audiences, creating a lookalike audience. This is great because you’ll be able to advertise to people with a higher chance of being interested in your product than the general population but without being limited by audience size (you can make lookalike audiences that are magnitudes larger than the size of your warm audience).

One to Three Interest-Based Audience(s). You can target Facebook users with specific interests that could be relevant to your business. For example, for a floral shop, you can target people interested in gardening.

You can make an interest-based audience larger by grouping together interests, and smaller by either adding interests cumulatively (interested in gardening AND owns a house) or by reducing the number of interests in the ad set. The audience size should not be too large or too small. Too many interests grouped together, and you won’t be able to tell which ones are performing well or poorly, and audiences that are too small have much higher costs per view.

Ads

Each ad set should contain the same set of 3 ads. It is vital that the ad sets contain the same ads because otherwise, your split testing would become inaccurate. You would have too many variables and wouldn’t know if an ad set was performing well because of its audience or its ads. You shouldn’t have less than three ads or a lot more than four, because then Facebook’s algorithm will either have too little or too much to work with.

As with ad sets, test your ads by running them for a short period of time and replacing ones that perform poorly. You should test everything from text length, message, different images, to whether you should use an image or a video. The more aspects of your ad you test, the more likely you are to get the most out of your advertising.

Conclusion

A good Facebook campaign structure plays a crucial role in the results you can achieve with your advertising.

It gives you a better overview of your ads, increases the accuracy of your split tests, and supports Facebook’s algorithm in optimizing your advertising and ad spend.

If you are in doubt about whether you are getting the most out of your Facebook Ads, we are happy to offer you a free performance analysis.

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