Running successful campaigns on Facebook might be complex, especially for beginners. Competition in the auction is on the rise and players in the industry are more savvy compared to a few years ago. As a consequence, the CPM or CPC may increase getting harder to reach profitable results in some countries and industries. A higher CPM means fewer ad impressions also lower chances of conversions.

Nobody likes throwing good money after bad, myself included.

Picking the right campaign structure is critical to success because it directly influences its profitability and audiences, reporting and delivery.

Let’s look at 4 advice to set up a successful Facebook Ad structure.

1. Have a plan in place.

Before executing new campaigns know the strategy, first. Ask yourself a few simple questions:

• Where I am set in the sales funnel? Depending on the stage you might have different goals: Conversion, Engagement, R&F, Video Ads
• What audience to use? eg. Remarketing, Lookalike or Demographics. 
• What do I want to test? Depending on the nature of your business, might make sense to test performance between countries, or single cities or placements. We will see this in more detail in the next paragraph.

2. Break down ad sets

Before you read any further, keep in mind that Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) is Facebook’s automated bid feature released in 2018 to automatically distribute budgets to best-performing ad sets. Advertisers have the choice to activate this feature for each campaign.

Source: Adscook.com – Facebook CBO Guide: Facts, Tips, Strategies

If I had set up a BOFU (Purchase) campaign for eCommerce with a total budget of €500, I’d create one single campaign splitting up ad sets following a logic behind it. Most commonly, I might consider breaking ad sets down by:

• Demographics: including one interest only in each ad set (eg. gardening lovers). Assess their performance, pause ad groups or increase the budget over time.
• Geographic location: if the business sells globally can be helpful to split ad groups by countries to measure CPM against each other
• Placement: for well-established advert accounts I would use this method: a single placement for each ad group: Example:
  • AdSet A: Instagram Stories
  • AdSet B: Instagram Newsfeed
  • AdSet C: Facebook Newsfeed
• Custom Audiences: grouping similar audiences along the sales funnel into the same ad set. For example:
  • AdSet A: FB Engagers (Last 30 Days) + IG Engagers (Last 30 Days) + ViewContent (Last 30 Days)
  • AdSet B: FB Engagers (Last 14 Days) + IG Engagers (Last 14 Days) + ViewContent (Last 14 Days)
  • AdSet C: FB Engagers (Last 7 Days) + IG Engagers (Last 7 Days) + ViewContent (Last 7 Days)

Source: Metrictheory.com- Facebook Audience Targeting – Filling the Sales Funnel

There are no rules, however, I might activate one ad set targeting lookalikes only, one cold audience, one warm traffic and so on. This ensures that you assess which segments perform best for you.

3. Naming conventions for Facebook Ads

Naming conventions are an important aspect to help ad agencies, freelancers and clients to have their accounts well-organized. Also, this helps to provide reports that are much easier to read for clients. An AdSet naming convention I sometimes use is:

Audience Type | Campaign Name | Placement 

or

Audience Type | Targeting | Location 

This is totally up to you how to name them but make the campaigns as clear as possible.

4. UTM Tags to your Facebook Ads

Last but not least, the UTM tags are in the URL parameters. If you are not familiar with the UTM tags, learn more here. Be consistent when setting UTM tags, it does not matter if you name the medium parameter “CPC” instead of “Paid media”. The most important thing is that the whole team uses the same parameters over time so you do not mess up the report. Here you find my favourite settings:

• Source: eg. Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or stories
• Medium: paid social or CPC
• Campaign: {{campaign.name}}
• Content: {{adset.name}}
• Term: {{ad.name}}

Wrapping up

Online advertising can be a very challenging task. If you don’t have the expertise to run previous performance campaigns for similar clients, you may also incur losses by allocating the budget inefficiently.

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