How to Organize Your Facebook Ads Campaign

Hey, everybody, Adam with ParaCore. In today’s video, I’m gonna review the basic structure of a Facebook Ads account and how you should organize the Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads so that they make the most sense for managing your campaign and hitting the objectives that you want with the different types of ads that you want, all right? So when you’re in your Facebook Ads account, this is the interface that you see. I published a small change that apparently is taking an hour to publish. But basically, your Ad account is broken down into three different sections.

You have this Account Overview, which doesn’t provide a lot of value. It just kind of shows Reach and Amount Spent. I’m just showing like today, right here, so there’s not a lot of data. You have, then, Campaigns, which is the highest level of organization. And I’ll talk about what differentiates campaigns in a second. You then also have Ad Sets. And then, you have Ads. And so, each one of these goes from more generic to more specific. And it’s important to know what the differentiating factors are between the different levels of your campaign. So on the Campaigns side, you really have, the primary differentiator between campaigns is the objective of that campaign. So the objective being, what is Facebook trying to do with this campaign? Is Facebook trying to optimize for brand awareness, optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, optimize for video views, optimize for lead forms? So on and so forth.

So at the Campaign level, you need to select an objective, and that objective is gonna dictate what types of ads you can put within the campaign. As an example, if you select a objective, if you wanna create a Lead form ad, you have to select the Leads objective in order to create lead forms within that campaign. So for example, you cannot create a campaign with a Traffic objective, and then try and put lead forms within that campaign. It just doesn’t work like that. The same goes for Messenger ads. If you wanna create Messenger ads that open your ad in Messenger when someone clicks it, you can’t create a Messenger ad in a Traffic campaign. You have to create a Messenger campaign, and then create Messenger ads. And same vice versa. Well, actually, I think vice versa, you actually can do that. I think you can send people to a website in a Messenger campaign.

All right, so let me show you these real quick just so that I’m not talking about that and you’re understanding what I’m saying. When you create a new campaign, you have to choose your objective. And again, this is the primary differentiator between your campaign. So we organize campaigns more or less by objective. And then, we might wanna segment them further into, like, Retargeting and First Touch, or maybe a certain market. Even though those aren’t the differentiating factors at the Campaign level, sometimes we like to subdivide at the Campaign level just for ease of management and reporting. However, when you create a new campaign, you have awareness objectives like Brand awareness. So this gives you the ad recall lifts metric, which I have in another video. It gives you Reach. Here on Consideration, you have Traffic, Engagement, App installs. So that’s another one where you need to select App installs if your goal is to install apps. Video views, Lead generation. This is lead forms. Messages allow you to open a Messenger ad right away. And then Conversions, Catalog sales is products, and then, Store Visits, right?

So getting more people to your nearby brick and mortar. So when you are creating a campaign, you wanna select the objective, and then you can see the objective here. So if I hit Edit, this is a Lead generation objective. You can see that I cannot change this. I cannot change this objective. So once you select the objective, it’s in stone. You can’t change it. So if you select a Lead generation objective, and you wanna run Messenger ads, you have to create a new campaign. You can’t just change this campaign into Messenger because it messes with all the statistics and optimization. And then, Buying Types. Auction, you also cannot change this. And there’s a couple other options here like distributing your budget across the entire campaign, rather than Ad Sets, things like that. But I’m not gonna get into that at the moment. All right, so campaign structure. So you’ll see here, we’ve labeled, this is OAM. We have a First Touch Messenger campaign, which is the one that seems to still be publishing. We have a Retargeting campaign.

So this is where I said that I pulled it out. But you also notice that I labeled it Traffic. I like to label the campaign with the objective so that I know what objective that campaign is working within. And you’ll also see here that this section on Results shows also what the objective is. So here, this is Retargeting – Traffic. There were two link clicks today. Link Clicks, it’s showing. Here’s First Touch – Lead Gen. You can see Lead Form, zero today. You can see First Touch – Traffic. We’re optimizing for Landing Page Views instead of clicks. And then, Webinar, Landing Page Views. You can see here, we’re looking for Messenger Conversations. This is the Messages campaign. Here’s a Video Objective, so 10-Second Video Views. And then, here’s a Brand awareness campaign with Estimated Ad Recall Lift for people. So when you create the campaign, your Results, your default Results column is gonna show what the objective is. And that’s what Facebook really optimizes on, okay? So that is your campaign. And then, within the campaign, you then have Ad Sets. So I’m gonna do First Touch – Traffic right here. And here, I have five ad sets. And the differentiating factor between ad sets are the geographic location and the placements. So the audience, the geographic location, the placements, and then a few other variables in there that are generally not as big of a consideration or as common of a consideration.

So you’ll see here that we have OAM that we just prefaced with OAM because we also have ParaCore, so this helps us remember which account we’re on. Facebook – Travel & Tourism. And then, this is our Calculator ad set. This is the same thing, not the Calculator ad set. This is OAM – Facebook. And this is a Branded campaign. And then, so this is a different audience. So you’ll see that I put in the placement and then also the audience that we’re choosing. And in this case, we have a Calculator feature where I added the Calculator. Let me just expand this a bit. So these two ad sets are the same. But in this one, we’re running Calculator ads. And we have a Calculator feature. And we wanted to make sure that that got its own budget and its own designation, so we put it in its own ad set. Even though I could’ve put these ads in this ad set, it doesn’t allow me to say I wanna spend $10 of the Calculator ads and $5 on just these generic ads. It doesn’t allow me to do that. So that’s why we broke it up this way. And if we switch over to, let’s say Lead Gen., here you can see that we did a similar sort of designation where we identified the audience in the ad set name. And then, I have Instagram here, Facebook, and then Instagram and Facebook Stories.

So this is telling me what my placements are. So in the Instagram & Facebook Stories, I’m using very specific Creative because stories have different Creative than just a regular image feed and things like that. Even though the images can roll over into a story, we create specific Creatives that actually looks like story Creative, which is important. All right, so I’m gonna hit Edit on one of these just so you can see it. So I’ll do the Stories one first. All right, so here, we have the ad set name, which is where we’re putting OAM – Instagram & Facebook Stories as the placement. And then, here’s the audience. And when I scroll down, the budget is also a consideration for your ad set. So if you want certain amounts of money allocated to certain regions or certain audiences, they need to be in different ad sets. Now, you can also use the Campaign setting that I was showing you very briefly before. I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re just starting that. Basically, it tells Facebook, hey, you can optimize wherever you want amongst these ad sets. AdWords has a similar feature. But for now, I would probably just put your daily budget in the ad set that you want. I selected Audience. We almost always do Saved Audiences. So if I click this, I get to choose my audience. So that way, if I change the audience, it propagates across all my ad sets. I highly recommend that. I don’t think it’s wise to be managing audiences within this ad set interface. I think you should be creating audiences in the Audiences section of your business manager and then pulling them in by selecting a previously saved audience, right? You can do New Audience here. I do not recommend that. You can also edit this one. I don’t recommend that either. Facebook likes to do automatic placements. I don’t recommend that. We always edit our own placements.

So here, this is the Stories ad set. And it’s a Lead Gen ad set. So we did Instagram, we have Facebook Stories only, and then Instagram Stories only. And we unselected all of these other ad placements. So that allows us to control exactly where this ad is gonna be, is gonna show, right? So I have very specific Creative for this. So I selected, this is a Lead Gen campaign, so I Lead form campaign. That doesn’t work in the Audience Network and it doesn’t work in Messenger, so you don’t have the options. It also doesn’t work in Right Column or In-Stream Videos. So my options here are more limited because of the objective that I selected. So going back to the campaign consideration, I selected a Generate Leads objective. Now, when I’m in the ad set, I can only select certain placements that make sense for lead forms. So if you’re in your ad sets, and you’re wondering, why can’t I select certain placements or whatever, these are not available with Lead generation objective. It does tell you that right down here at the bottom. This isn’t available with the Lead generation objective.

So if you wanna place it in the Right Column, you need to go back and do a Traffic campaign or Brand awareness campaign or something like that, okay? So that’s why the campaign is so important. So you select a campaign objective, you’re now in the ad set, you select your placements, and there’s some other options here like specific devices, Optimization & Delivery, blah, blah, blah. But really, the most important things that you’re considering are your budget, your audience, and your placement. And then, once you have gotten there, then I’m gonna hit this ad thing up here at the top. And you have, and then, now, we have the ad itself. So here, this is a OAM and Instagram Story. So I label it Story: Flexible Budgets. I have the page and the Instagram account selected. And then, here, with my Creative, I’m selecting Creative that only makes sense for the placement.

Now, this video would look kinda weird if it was in a, just like your Newsfeed or something else. I actually don’t even think it would be approved. I think it would make you kinda select a new one. But we create very specific Creative for this placement, and that has worked out really well, okay? So that’s that. Now, if I go back to some of these, one of these other ad sets, so here’s another one, which is also Lead generation. This is OAM – Instagram – Travel & Tourism Page Admins, and then plus Owners. We have this one kinda narrowed down further. And here, when I go to Edit Placements, again, I’m in the Lead generation objective, I’m only doing the Instagram feed because my graphics are just a video that’s talking about getting more bookings. So the Creative is different in this placement, which is why I have it in a different ad set. And I wanna be able to know which ad sets are performing the best and which are kinda converting. So by splitting them into different ad sets, I can analyze my data just a little bit better. All right, let me head over to, I wanna go back over to the campaigns and show you the different placements for a Traffic campaign. So if I go to this Traffic campaign, and I go to one of these ad sets.

So again, we can decide where we wanna drive traffic. So this is a Traffic campaign. Typically to a website. But you can sometimes go to an app or Messenger. And this says, “Send people from ads “into Messenger conversations with your business. “Your ad will be shown to people more likely “to open Messenger.” So there are some times when you can kind of cross-pollinate objectives, although, I don’t necessarily recommend it. And down here, now our placements are different. So now, we have Right Column. You can’t do an In-Stream Video because it’s not a Video view objective. It’s just a Traffic objective, so you would need those to, so down here, it says, “This placement isn’t available “with the Traffic objective. “Ads can appear in video feeds across services, “including Suggested Videos.” So it’s not available in this objective. So again, now, I have more options. I have the Feed here, I’ve got the Audience Network available, Rewarded Videos, but not Suggested Videos. So it’s just, the objective is really important because it allows you to place ads in certain areas. And then, once I select into the ad itself, then obviously, we have our ads with certain types of goals. And if I look right here, this says, select the type of link for your ad. We have a Website or a Facebook Event. You can see that I can’t actually send it to Messenger here because I didn’t select that further upstream. I can only send it to a Facebook Event or the Website. And then, if I continue to scroll down, I have my Tracking. And so, for example, I can’t attach a Lead form. This is where you attach the Lead forms. Now, if I go back to my campaigns, and I go Lead Forms, and then I just find an ad real quick, and I edit that ad, now, when I go to the bottom, I think this is a Lead form campaign.

Yep, so now, I have a Lead form I can select right here or create a new Lead form, all right? So when you’re creating your Ad account, super important to know what your objective is before you create the campaign. If the objective is to generate leads, you need a Lead generation campaign. If your objective is to drive conversions, then you wanna do the Conversions campaign. There are scenarios where, like you saw in that Traffic one, let me see. I’m gonna do one little research project here. The signature’s changing all the time, so sometimes I forget. I’m gonna create an ad set. So when I created this brand new ad set in the Traffic campaign, now I can choose Messenger. And so, now, if I choose Messenger here, then I create an ad that I have to send people to Messenger. I can’t send them to a website. Or it might actually give me the option. But the thing is, it’s kind of confusing.

So if there’s one takeaway from this, and these things do change periodically, it’s that the objective matters, the ad set matters, and you wanna start with the objective first, and then, for us at ParaCore, we stick with the main objective being Traffic, Messenger ads, whatever, and not kinda deal with driving traffic to Messenger with a Traffic campaign. That’s just so confusing. And Facebook is very confusing about that. All right, so that’s all I have for the structure of your accounts. If you have any questions, please let me know. My name’s Adam, I own ParaCore. We’re a pay-per-click marketing agency. Please comment below if you have any questions or concerns or just wanna tell me how awesome the video was. I hope you liked the video and subscribe. And we will see you in the next video. Thanks a lot.