Written by ContentPowered.com
Relatively recently, Facebook added a third layer to their advertising campaign organization, and it’s incredibly effective. Now you can efficiently organize your ads in a number of ways, to make them as effective as possible. To do this, though, you need to utilize all three levels. If you’re skipping the new level just because Facebook changed and you were perfectly fine with the old way of doing things, well, you’re Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud.
The Ad Level
Let’s start from the bottom up. At the very bottom of the hierarchal pyramid, you have the ad itself. Every ad is a unique entity. It has an image, a positioning, a title and copy. It has a URL. It has targeting factors for a specific audience. It has a budget and a spending plan.
If you wanted a variation on that ad, you would need to create a copy of that ad. In the past, before Facebook added the second level in the hierarchy, you would need to create that ad within the same campaign. This meant if you wanted a completely different ad base, you would need to make a new campaign. More on all of this later.
There is no ad unit smaller than an individual ad. Split-testing ads comes from a step higher.
The Ad Set Level
The Ad Set level is the new level Facebook added. Think of this like a grouping of similar ads. You have one base ad, and five variations of that ad, testing different images; these are all part of the same ad set. You might use ad sets to test different budgets, or different audiences, or different copy.
Within each ad set can be as many ads as necessary to test each feature you want to test. Ad sets fit within campaigns. In general, you will divide ad sets by budget, targeting or scheduling.
The Ad Campaign Level
The ad campaign is the top level for ad organization, at least within Facebook’s system. It’s the group that contains all ad sets for a given objective. You might use a campaign centered around a particular event. Within that campaign, you have ad sets for each individual type of ad, like a news feed ad, a sidebar ad, and a mobile ad. Within those sets, you have variations on each ad, testing changes in copy or in image.
The implied fourth tier in the hierarchy is your business. All ads you run are part of this uber-campaign, divided into campaigns for objectives. There’s no need to create this tier artificially, as it’s implied by the very existence of you creating ads.
Ideal Organization
At the top level, you have your campaigns. Create a new campaign for each major objective you want to complete. For example, say you’re a small business, and you want to earn more product sales. At the same time, you want people to download your mobile app. These are two different objectives, and thus warrant two different campaigns.
In the ads manager you will want to create two new campaigns. Name one “app downloads” and the other “product sales.” Or something like that, I don’t care what you name them, just name them something you can remember, or that’s descriptive enough that you don’t need to remember.
With in each campaign, you will create as many ad sets as you need. Divide ad sets based on your targeting, your budget, or your schedule. For example, under your Product Sales campaign, you might create three different ad sets, each with a different target audience. Everything else – budget and schedule – will be the same. Alternatively, you can use the same audience for all three, but change your schedule. One set might run continuously, one set might run for a month only, and one set might run only during specific hours of the day.
The Ad Set level is also where you choose the ad placement. For your App Downloads campaign, you might run three campaigns; one for desktop users, one for mobile users that runs all the time, and one for a different audience of mobile users that runs for a short duration.
Within each ad set, you create your individual ads. Ideally, each ad should be more or less the same, with one thing changed. This is called split testing.
When you split test your ads, you’re going to want to keep as many variable the same as possible. This means the same budget, the same targeting, the same copy, but a different image. Or the same image, but a different title.
The primary ways you will track your split ads are through UTM parameters or through the Facebook offsite pixel.
UTM parameters are a Google device. You use these in conjunction with a Google Analytics installation on your website. For each ad, you’ll want to go to the URL builder and create a specific campaign and ad set flag for each URL. When you run the ad, you use this extended URL as the landing page. This allows you to track information about the people who click through your ad. Make sure you use a different URL for each ad, or else your data will aggregate and you won’t be able to tell who came from which ad.
The Facebook offsite pixel is a bit of code you can create through the Power Editor. You can read all about it here. It’s a conversion tracking tool; it follows people who click through your ad and records data about them. It also records when they convert, so they can be added to a special audience.
Why Use Multiple Campaigns?
As mentioned above, you should be using a different campaign for each business objective. What you shouldn’t do, however, is try to finish one campaign before you start another. There’s no reason not to run multiple campaigns.
The biggest benefit of multiple campaigns is the ability to run time-sensitive campaigns in addition to the standard ads you run all the time. You don’t have to disable or edit your existing campaign; you just make a new one. You can bet a company like Sony has a dozen different campaigns running at once.