Facebook Ads Structure Explained (Stop Overcomplicating It)

Welcome to Let's Run Facebook Ads with me, Nick Boddington. This podcast is your go-to for mastering Facebook Ads, but as you know success doesn't stop at the ad itself. We'll dive into everything from funnels and e-commerce to even marketing, lead generation and more. If you're ready to take your skills to the next level, check out my new school platform at school.com/theadseclinic. Inside, you'll find how-to videos and live-dropping clinic calls where you can ask your Facebook questions and get the answers you need to grow your business. And lastly, if you enjoy the podcast, it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the channel. It's the best way to help the podcast grow and keep bringing you valuable content every week. Let's get on with the podcast. Okay, so this question came up inside the ad's school and it's a really good one because it highlights the confusion I see all of the time, even with experienced advertisers. And Maddy asked, "Within ad sets, you test creative hooks, real static CTAs, etc. but within campaigns you test different audiences. So would you test different USPs of the business to see what attracts what kind of person?" If you've ever felt like Metarrad's structure is unnecessarily complicated, you're not alone. So in this video, I'm going to simplify this once and for all. Explain what you should actually be testing at each level and more importantly, what you should stop testing. Because that's where most of you go wrong. Hey, while I've got you, I just wanted to ask you, would you like me to go into your ads manager and actually see what's working? Because I bet your ads aren't broken and I bet we can fix something. There's a reason our top clients stop guessing and start scaling. So if you've got campaigns that are burning cash or you're having trouble barely even breaking even on them, let's have a look and let's see what we can fix. 100% no fluff, no sales pitch, just a pro level ad review. So book your 30 minute free Facebook ad review session and walk away with some instant wins. Go to the adsclinic.com and book your call today. Do it now before you forget but make sure you come back to listen to the rest of the podcast. Enjoy. The biggest mistakes advertisers make is thinking campaign equals audiences, ad sets equal creatives, ad minor tweaks. That's not how Meta sees it and it's not how you build it and if you structure accounts like that, you're fighting the algorithm instead of working with it. It doesn't want complexity, it wants clarity, volume and consistency. Think of Metro ads as having three very clear jobs. Campaign, which is the objective. The campaign level is not for testing ideas. It's job is simple. What outcome do I want? Sales or leads? That's it. If you're duplicating campaigns to test messaging or USBs, you're already creating an efficiency. Most businesses only need one prospecting campaign, one retargety campaign. That's it. The ad set is who you're showing ads to. Ad sets are one question only. Who is the ad for? That might be broad. Look like. Retargeting. Geographic split. But here's the key that most people miss. You don't need separate ad sets for every idea or USB. In fact, Meta is increasingly better at matching creatives to people within the same ad set. So instead of one ad set for price-led messaging or one ad set for quality-led messaging or one ad set for speed-led messaging, which is our top middle and bottom of the funnel, you usually want one strong audience with multiple creative angles in it. This is where almost all of your meaningful testing should happen. Ads are where you test hooks, angles, USBs, formats, CTAs, messaging, visual style. This is where Meta does its best work. You give it one audience, multiple different messages and Meta figures out which message resonates with a person, at which time and in which placement. So the answer to Matt's question directly is, yes, you test different USBs. And no, you don't need separate campaigns or ad sets to do it. You test USBs at the ad level, not the campaign level. Let me be really clear, because this is where account get bloated and performance tanks. Do not create a new campaign for every idea. Create dozens of ad sets with tiny budgets and lock one USB to one audience. That approach worked in 2018. It does not work anymore. Meta needs enough budget, enough data and enough creative variation. When you over-segment, you starve the algorithm. Here's what I recommend for most businesses. One prospecting campaign. One or two ad sets max. Multiple ads in each ad set. And inside those ads, one focuses on price, one focus on speed, one focus on trust, one focus on results, one focus on emotion. Then you let Meta do what it's actually good at. Your job isn't to outsmart the algorithm. Your job is to feed its good inputs. So if you're confused about structure, remember this. Adding equals objective. Ad set equals audience. Add equals message. Test ideas at the ad level. Not by duplicating campaigns. And if your account feels messy or hard to manage, that's usually a sign that you're testing structure instead of testing creative. I hope that clears that up. If you're inside the ad, you can go to school and have more questions like this. Drop them here and I'll break them down just like this one. See you in the next one. Thank you for joining us again today. If you want to find out more, please head over to our socials at Let's Run Social, where we share daily content. And please feel free to drop us a message. We'd love to hear from you and any questions that you would like answered, we can do that here on the podcast.