Advertising on Facebook gives marketers nearly limitless options when it comes to how you can target and promote your business on the platform, which is great for your creative types. That being said, taking a measured and methodical approach to structuring your account is key to getting the most out of Facebook ads. To grow in Facebook, you need to have a foundation for success. You wouldn't build your dream home without taking a few steps, and your Facebook ad account should be no different.
If you've already read our AdWords account structure guide, get ready for a completely different animal. by nature, Facebook and Google AdWords are very different platforms. A key difference that completely changes your approach from a structural perspective is the fact that Facebook budgets are controlled at the ad set or targeting level rather than the campaign level. This detail allows for better control over the spend you spend on specific audiences and the ads those audiences see.
Facebook Ad Account Structure: Campaign Level
Having a clear understanding of your campaign-level marketing goals is the first step to laying the groundwork for your account. How Facebook optimizes a campaign based on the chosen objective ultimately affects every decision going forward. For example, if you want to drive traffic to your website, but also want to generate leads for your cell phone number list business, you'll want to create two separate campaigns. The campaign whose goal is to drive traffic will ideally have different ads than the one optimized for conversions. The reason is the way Facebook's algorithm serves ads.
If the nature of the promotion is short-term, cyclical, or frequently changing (like a variety of different blog posts), make the campaign name relevant to the overall goal (blog traffic) . This will make it easier to organize and report on the performance of each ad.
In this scenario, you may have multiple competing ad units displaying the same mix of promotions in each of them. Facebook will optimize for the promotion that works best and within each ad set you can have varying exposure (what works best in one ad set may not work well in another). This makes the success (or failure) of each and the type of traffic you're driving much easier to determine. If your promotion is longer or persistent (as in a conversion campaign), I suggest creating separate campaigns for each individual promotion:
You can scroll through ad units and assess long-term CPAs and conversion rates. You can show the same audience different variations of the same ad and see which offers the best conversion rates and lowest costs. The fact that everything about each individual promotion is under the same umbrella means you have complete strategic control over budget allocation and can optimize based on where you get the best return on investment.
Facebook Ad Account Structure: Ad Set Level
In order to fully understand which target audiences are working and which are not, it is extremely important to be organized at the ad set level. As mentioned earlier, this is where you will be pulling the strings when it comes to spending. So if one target audience outperforms another, you can allocate more budget to the winning ad set. With this in mind, you'll want to make sure there's no overlap in target audiences.
The best way to get optimal results from a structure like this is to cycle through these ad sets in your different campaigns (promotions) and assess the respective associated costs. Breakout ads defined by the targeting method are my favorite way to do this: