Facebook ads campaigns strategy & setup

Crafting a top-performing Facebook ads strategy must take into consideration many variables with the most important being the client industry, sales funnel and pricing structure.

 

In this guide:

 


Strategy breakdown

Before we jump into the correct strategy setup let's break up the strategy into three parts to better understand each element. By working on these individual components first and then tying them up together we will ensure the best performance results.

  

Creative Strategy:

Creatives play a crucial role in enabling Facebook ads to be profitable. You need to have a lot of creatives of different types ready i.e UGCs, Carousels, Statics, Short Videos, GIFs etc.

 

Giving your campaigns a lot of creatives to start off with allows the Facebook algorithm to do its magic and find a winning creative to allocate budget to. The more creatives you provide the better the algorithm works. I suggest giving the campaign 7 - 10 creatives to start off with.

 

Once your first batch of creatives is in, plan for your next round of creatives so that once your campaign suffers from creative fatigue, you have new creatives to introduce into the campaign.

 

Remember, your goal with creative testing is to find a winning creative combination to use in your scaling CBO campaign.

  

Audience Strategy:

One of the keys to Facebook ads' success is to identify winning audiences that work well for your business. This requires you to test audiences in an ABO campaign environment against an equal budget and then determine what brings results.

 

However, note that ever since the IOS update, Facebook tends to favour broad audiences, and these tend to support scale. Hence, we recommend starting with broad targeting only, and then depending on the results, decide whether to go for further narrowed-down audience testing or not.

  

Campaign Strategy:

Every business/niche needs to have an ad approach tailored to it.

 

Your strategy should include a:

  1. Creative testing campaign

  2. Audience testing campaign

  3. Scaling campaign.

Depending on the business, you can also have a:

  • Catalogue Sales campaign

  • Promo campaign (for seasonal or short-term projects)

  • Additional campaign to test products OR use it for scaling

 


Strategy setup

Once you have planned out these above 3 strategies, the next step is to set everything up on the Facebook ad account as an overall strategy.

 

Currently, Facebook favours and supports a consolidated and structured ad account. Too many campaigns will confuse the algorithm and waste your money since your campaigns might compete against each other in the bidding auction.

 

The ideal structure consists in:

  • 1 x Creative Testing campaign

    • ABO bidding type

    • 15% of your total ad budget

    • 1 x Broad ad set per test

    • Multiple ad variations in each ad set

  • 1 x Audience Testing campaign

    • ABO bidding type

    • Multiple ad sets (depending on the budget)

    • Winning creatives in each ad set

  • 1 x Scaling Campaign

    • CBO bidding type

    • 60% to 65% of your total budget

    • Winning ad sets (audiences)

    • Winning creatives (in each ad set)

 

Here's a bullet point summary on how to action the above:

  1. Test creatives in the 1st campaign.

  2. Introduce winners in the 2nd campaign.

  3. Test audiences in the second campaign

  4. Introduce winning combos (audiences+creatives) in the 3rd campaign.

  5. Choose to run additional Catalog sales, Promos or Retargeting campaigns.

 


 

You can also read about your PPC campaign naming convention here.