Here’s how to approach campaign construction in 2024…
Things have changed, but people still approach this like it’s 2017. How Meta determines who sees your ads and optimizes for delivery has changed since then, and you should change, too. Otherwise, that old approach can be counterproductive and hurt your results.
1. Limit the number of active campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More.
As a rule of thumb, create one campaign for each unique objective that is a priority. You could have one for sales, one for leads, and one for engagement (or whatever those priority objectivesWhen you create a campaign, one of the first things you'll do is select an objective. The campaign objective is your ultimate goal. Your selection will impact options, including optimization and delivery. Options include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. More are).
There are always exceptions, but I see too many advertisers indiscriminately creating multiple campaigns with the same goal and confused why they aren’t getting optimal results.
2. Limit the number of ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More within those campaigns.
This is the biggest evolution in campaign construction, and it’s due to the development of audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More expansion. If you use Advantage+ Audience, your targeting inputs are only suggestions. If you use original audiences while optimizing for conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More, the audience is usually expanded.
In the past, it made sense to create multiple ad sets representing several distinct cold-targeting audiences. But now that expansion is usually at play, the auction overlap will be significant. Those extra ad sets aren’t helping you.
Look to Advantage+ Shopping as an example. The targeting inputs are nonexistent and you aren’t allowed to create more than one ad set. And yet — magically — advertisers get better results with Advantage+ Shopping than with manual sales campaigns (on average). One reason for that is the fact that the single ad set makes it more efficient.
You should rarely need more than one or two ad sets now. When you do, it usually won’t be for audience segmentation reasons. If you need more than one ad set, use Advantage Campaign Budget.
These are the biggest changes to campaign construction over the past few years. Creating unnecessary (and that’s the key word here) campaigns and ad sets will often make you less efficient. It may not always be reasonable to stick to this suggestion. But prioritize and consolidate your budget when possible.
Where you can create lots of variations is with your ads. Use multiple text options. Create different ads with different formats. Give the algorithm options. They won’t all be shown equally, but that’s okay.
This is a significant divergence from the “good old days” of advertising, and it’s taken me some time to come around to it. But it makes sense — this construction is consistent with the way things work now.
If you want your campaigns to work optimally, this is the way.
