Search engine marketers have long struggled with the question of how best to organize their ads. Google and Bing allow advertisers to organize their ads into a three-tiered structure (ads organized into ad groups, ad groups organized into campaigns). This structure has been the standard for quite some time now, and it seems that Facebook has decided to take a cue from the competition. With a new feature that started rolling out on March 4, Facebook advertisers can now organize their ads into “ad sets”, and those “ad sets” will be contained within campaigns.
Neat Freaks Rejoice!
If you’re like me, you like to try and bring some semblance of order to your advertising efforts. Until now Facebook has left advertisers with incredibly long lists of campaigns to contain everything. This quickly becomes cumbersome to anyone running more than a handful of ads.
To bring order to the chaos, in this new structure Facebook recommends that you make a campaign for each one of your objectives (e.g. website conversions, page likes, app installs), then organize your ad sets by audience. This makes perfect sense, given the way they’ve distributed the settings for the structure. The new options are as follows:
Campaign Level
On/Off control
Objective
Ad Set Level
On/Off Control
Schedule
Budget
Ad Level
On/Off control
Bidding
Targeting
Creative
Advertisers can still set an overall account budget to keep their spending in check, but it looks like the campaign budgets will now be moved to the ad set level. Reporting will be available at all levels, which is thankfully no different from the way things were before.
What Should I Do?
Facebook says that the rollout will be complete within the next few weeks, and that existing advertisers have nothing to worry about. Their ads will be seamlessly transitioned into the new structure. While you wait for the notification that your account has been transitioned, you might want to take some time to consider an organizational method for your existing and future ads. Having that plan in place will make the transition smoother for you, and will allow you to keep a much cleaner account moving forward. If you’re looking for more information on best practices, Facebook has put together this guide for the new campaign structure.
