Understanding “Ad Sets” – How to Structure Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

When Facebook rolled out it’s new Power Editor interface, it introduced a new level to Facebook ads: the ad sets. Here is a sample structure of a campaign and how I’d recommend separating your ads into ad sets:


How to structure your campaign

Campaign: Guide to List Building

What’s the goal of this campaign? To get people to sign up to receive my free guide to list building using Facebook ads.

Objective (a term used by Facebook to help you optimize your campaign): website conversions. In this case, my “conversion” is a sign-up to my list.

Ad Sets: Women and Men

Why these ad sets? Because I want to test out who responds to my offer better, men or women. Once I’m running these two ad sets side by side, I’ll be able to see whether women or men are more likely to click on my ad by looking at the CTR (click-through rate) of the ads as well as the cost per conversion, or the cost per email sign up.

Ads: 1A – 1B – 2A – 2B

What do the letters mean? I use letters and numbers to indicate which images and which ad copy (a.k.a. the ad’s text) is include in each ad. Letters are images and numbers are ad copy.

I always like to start small, testing out one piece of copy and two different images (ad 1A and ad 1B). After a day or two, I take the more successful image and use it with new ad copy, creating 4 ads in total (ad 2A and ad 2B). That way I’m testing which copy works best while using the image that proved to be the most successful.

Grab some inspiration for your campaigns

Here are two of the ads I was running recently for Erin Stutland’s free workout challenge. After only about a day of running these ads, one ad got a lot more likes and shares than the other:

 

Facebook Ad Examples

 

Ad 1B had a lot more likes and shares than than Ad 1A. So I took image B and tested it out with different sets of copy to see if I could increase the CTR even more.

(Disclaimer: an ad is successful not only because of the ad copy and the image, but also because of the target audience you determine your ads should be shown to. Click here to learn more about targeting your Facebook ads.)

So that’s one example of an Facebook ads campaign structure. Because of how confusing the whole ad sets thing can be, here are a few other examples of ways to split up your ads into different ad sets:

Example Campaign Structures for Facebook Ads

In both of the above campaigns, you can see that I’ve got the same ads in each ad set. Like I mentioned above, ad sets allow you to test out which target audience responds the best to your ads without having to take the time to create even more ads.

What kind of structures do you currently have set up in your campaigns?

Everyone’s got different ways of dividing up their Facebook ad campaigns. But beyond that, the number of ways you can label and name your ads is literally infinite! My letters-and-numbers system is working for me for now, I’m but I’m always interested in hearing how other people organize their own campaigns. If you’ve got any ads running right now, or you’re planning to set some up, take a second and jump into the comments to tell me a bit about your campaign, who you’re targeting and how you’re labeling your ads. If you need some feedback, just say the word and I’ll try my best to help you out!