When should you create multiple ad sets?
I’ve been vocal about my preference to limit the number of ad sets. There are a couple of reasons for this, but there are always exceptions.
Reasons to Limit Number of Ad Sets
1. If you use broad targeting or any audience expansion, multiple ad sets are rarely necessary for targeting. Regardless of what you use for the initial audience, the expanded (and largest) portion will be mostly the same. There will be a ton of overlap, which drives up costs and hurts performance.
2. The more focused you are, the more focused the algorithm will be. Don’t spread your budget over countless campaigns and ad sets. Limiting your ad sets makes you more efficient.
Exceptions
But there are exceptions. Sometimes, there’s no way to avoid it.
1. You need to target multiple countries that have different CPM costs. This is less of an issue when optimizing for a purchase, but you should separate countries by CPM cost groups otherwise. If you don’t, most of your budget will go to the cheapest countries.
2. You have multiple priorities for sales. You could use one ad set with Advantage+ Shopping or catalog ads, and Meta would distribute your budget as it sees fit to get you the most purchases possible. But, you might have company priorities to push specific products, so you need to control the budget by product.
3. You want to test different optimization options. To accomplish this, you need to create an ad set for each optimization, regardless of whether it’s an A/B test. This would be temporary, of course. Once the test is complete, you should move forward with the most effective version.
It’s not that you need to have only one ad set. Just make a conscious effort to limit extra ad sets when possible.
What do you do?