How To Effectively Structure Your Facebook Ad Account
As Facebook campaigns get more complex, so is the account structure required to manage these campaigns.
Endless combinations of objectives, targeting, and ad unit types yield numerous ways to promote your business across the platform. While options are great, too many can can cause confusion and reluctance to start.
We’d like to share some of our tried-and-true methods that we’ve acquired from years of managing various Facebook accounts across many different businesses.
Read on for ideas on how to effectively structure Facebook advertising account for easy management based on business type and objectives. Perhaps you can use these tips for inspiration as you lay the foundation for success on Facebook.
First off, a quick obligatory refresher on the high-level set-up of a Facebook ad account structure.
Facebook account structure consists of 3 Levels.
Campaign Level: Objective
Having a clear understanding of your marketing goals at the campaign level is the first step to a strong foundation of your Facebook account. Because Facebook optimizes the campaign based on the chosen objective, you want to isolate each objective under its own campaign.
Ad Set: Budget, Bidding, Placement, and Audience
Organizing your ad sets by the target audience is good practice if you want to easily understand which audience works and which doesn’t. This also makes shifting budgets from underperforming ad sets to winning ones fast and easy. Avoid audience overlap as this could affect delivery of your ads and cause confusing when trying to identify the successful audience.
Ad: Destination URL, Creative, and Copy
In each hyper-targeted ad set, you are able to include multiple relevant ads with different images, text, CTA, or video to encourage your audience to take action.
Examples of Facebook ad account structure based on business type and objectives.
Now that we got the high-level refresher out of the way, next up are examples of how to effectively structure a Facebook advertising account for easy management according to business type and objectives.
Example 1: E-Commerce/Retailer [Sales]
Company: Women’s apparel and accessory e-commerce retailer.
Objective: Growing new customer acquisitions for their core categories of Shoes, Dresses, and Accessories.
Campaign Level
Because there are multiple categories being promoted - Shoes, Dresses, and Accessories - we suggest creating a separate campaign for each core category. Doing so will allow for easier at-a-glance view of performance by category. It also gives more control to pause down specific category should there be a need.
For example:
Campaign 1: Acquisition_Shoes
Campaign 2: Acquisition_Dresses
Campaign 3: Acquisition_Accessories
Ad Set Level
For each of the campaigns above, we would then build out multiple Ad Sets each focusing on a specific target audience.
For example:
Campaign 1: Acquisition_Shoes
Ad Set 1: LAL_HighValueCustomer-Shoes_1%
Ad Set 2: LAL_WCA_ShoeVisitors_1%
Note
Exclude those users who have already converted.
Exclude audiences from one another to isolate distinct audience segments.
Pro Tip
For multiple product categories targeting the same audience, there are a couple options:
1) Place all products into one ad set and allow Facebook to optimize for best performing product. You can then either move the top performing product into its own campaign with multiple ad variations or just pause under performing ads in the existing campaign.
2) If you want to make sure all products get their fair share of promotion, then break out categories into their separate campaigns as in example above and run the ads targeting the same audience. That being said, audience overlap may affect delivery of your ads. However, if the budget you’re working with is relatively small and your CPA’s and ROAS are strong, then this approach can work as well.
Ad Level
Facebook provides many creative options for businesses to effectively promote their products and services. So many, in fact, this can be a whole separate blog post.
But at the very minimum, ads for this company should:
Have creative, copy, and offer best tailored for each of the categories and target audiences.
Have compelling sales messaging and a clear CTA.
Ensure users are directed to a relevant landing page.
Example 2: Service Company [Mobile App Installs]
Company: Convenience company providing on-demand cleaning services via a mobile app.
Objective: Driving new app installs and growing new customer registrations in San Francisco and Oakland.
Campaign Level
Since this company provides services in specific geo’s only, we suggest breaking out campaigns by city. Just as in the first example, this will help provide a high-level view of performance and allow for better control in the event that you need to quickly pause ad promotion in one city only.
Also this company’s objective is twofold:
1) Driving new app installs - initial goal and more top of the funnel.
2) Growing new customer registrations - if a user installs the app, but doesn’t complete the registration process, we might want to retarget them with a specific message and encourage them to complete the registration.
Keeping the geo’s and different objectives in mind, you might end up with:
Campaign 1: San Francisco_App Installs
Campaign 2: San Francisco_Registrations
Campaign 3: Oakland_App Installs
Campaign 4: Oakland_Registrations
Ad Set Level
There are numerous ways to segment audiences if you have correctly implemented Facebook SDK in the mobile app, and this can be helpful for retargeting users in Registrations campaigns. But best practices remain the same in that for each campaign we want to build out multiple ad sets each focusing on one specific audience.
For example:
Campaign 1: San Francisco_App Installs
Ad Set 1: SF_LAL_CustomerList_1%
Ad Set 2: SF_Broad
Campaign 2: San Francisco_Registrations
Ad Set 1: SF_InstalledButNotRegisteredAudience
Note
Don’t forget to exclude users who have already installed.
Exclude audiences from one another to isolate distinct audience segments.
Pro Tip
If running a separate discount promotion in addition to the existing campaigns, you have a couple options:
1) Create a separate ad set in an existing campaign and pause down the other ad set targeting the same audience. For example, SF_LAL_CustomerList_1%_DiscountPromo.
2) Create a separate campaign for the discount promotion. This option may help with avoiding a situation where a short-term promotion disrupts the success of an evergreen campaign.
Ad Level
Serving each hyper-targeted, geo-specific audience with a relevant ad greatly improves user experience and performance of the campaign.
For this business, you might try:
Adding city name in ad copy.
Thanking users for installing the app and encouraging them to finish their registration.
Example 3: Food Company [Lead Gen]
Company: Lunch subscription service providing affordable lunch during work week.
Objective: Growing new customer sign-ups in top five geo’s.
Campaign Level
There are two separate approaches when growing new customer sign-ups or registrations:
1) Prospecting - targeting new users who’ve never visited your site before.
2) Retargeting - encouraging users who have visited your site, expressed interest, but did not convert, to come back.
Even though both ultimately have the same objective - new sign-ups - putting each into its own separate campaign allows for more control of the account. Another reason to consider structuring them separately is because this particular business has a relatively small number of focus geo’s (5), and messaging might be different for each.
For Example:
Campaign 1: Geo1_Prospecting
Campaign 2: Geo1_Retargeting
Campaign 1: Geo2_Prospecting
Campaign 2: Geo2_Retargeting
Pro Tip
If the company had more focus geo’s, another option would be to create separate campaigns for each geo and put Prospecting and Retargeting on the ad set level below.
Ad Set Level
Depending on whether or not you break out Prospecting and Remarketing into separate campaigns, you will either have more or fewer ad sets within the campaigns. Here it comes down to personal preference, budgets, and the number of different audiences you plan to go after.
For example:
Campaign 1: Geo1_Prospecting
Ad Set 1: LAL_CustomerList_1%
Ad Set 2: LAL_WCA_1%
Campaign 2: Geo1_Retargeting
Ad Set 1: WCA_SiteVisitors
OR
Campaign 1: Geo1
Ad Set 1: Prospecting_LAL_CustomerList_1%
Ad Set 2: Prospectin_LAL_WCA_1%
Ad Set 3: Retargeting_WCA_SiteVisitors
At the end of the day, there are numerous ways one can approach structuring a Facebook ad account. But whether your goal is to drive traffic to the site, get conversions, or increase sales, the above approach is a great start at building a strong Facebook ad account foundation.