Back in February, Facebook introduced a new ad campaign structure, which it said would make it easier for advertisers to organize, optimize, and measure their ads. It went from a two-level approach to a three-level one (campaigns, ad sets, and ads).
The company just announced some updates to the structure. It’s still organized into the same three levels, but now audiences, bidding, and placement for campaigns are determined at the ad set level, as opposed to the ad level as it was in the past.
“This is a subtle but important change that helps businesses follow best practices for advertising on Facebook,” the company says in a blog post. “Moving audiences, bidding and placement to the ad set level helps advertisers keep these settings consistent across all of the ads within an ad set. This makes it easier to test different ad creative (links, imagery, copy, video, etc.) against the same budget, audience and placement. That way advertisers can see which ad creative works best for each ad set they create, and make more informed decisions about the specific ads they use in their campaigns.”
Facebook shares some best practices for using the current campaign structure here. In a nutshell, you’ll want to: create ad sets for each audience, so you can test different ones; create multiple ads to optimize creative; and use creative and content that people actually want to see.
The changes will be rolling out worldwide over the course of the next several weeks.
“Once the Ads Create tool, Ads Manager and Power Editor are updated, all newly created ad sets will define targeting, placement and bid settings at the ad set level,” the company says. “The delivery, spend and performance of ads in existing ad sets will not be affected. Existing ad sets can continue defining targeting, placement and bid settings at the ad level in the Ads Create tool, Ads Manager and Power Editor and will continue to run without interruption. Advertisers will not be required to migrate existing ad sets until after January 2015. For advertisers that want to migrate their existing ad sets to the new ad set settings now, we are providing migration help in Ads Manager and Power Editor.”
There’s a campaign structure guide available here.
Image via Facebook