Challenge Every Choice That Adds Complexity
Advertisers have a tendency to overcomplicate their campaigns with multiple ad sets, restricted targeting, removed placements, and turned-off enhancements, often without clear reasons for these decisions. Jon challenges you to audit your current campaigns and question every piece of complexity you've added by asking why you made each decision, what problem you were solving, and whether there was a better solution that didn't require watering down your budget or limiting Meta's optimization.
Why do you need to do that?
A common problem I’m seeing with advertisers is that many seem to have this need to make things more complicated than they need to be. I recommend a simplified approach to campaign construction that prioritizes a minimal number of campaigns and ad sets with very few customizations to settings.
That doesn’t mean there are never exceptions when more complexity is necessary. But the vast majority of times advertisers add complexity, they don’t need it. And when that happens, they invariably hurt results. Maybe it’s difficult to measure for a single decision, but these choices add up.
So this need to complicate things has me thinking about an exercise I want you to go through yourself.
Look at the current campaigns you’re running. Pick out the most important campaign. If you had to eliminate all the others and focus on one, which would it be? Start there.
How many ad sets do you have? If you have more than one, why? What was the initial reason for this decision? What was the problem you were trying to solve?
Is it actually a problem? Does creating that separate ad set solve that problem? Was there possibly a better way to solve it?
Now look at your main ad set in that campaign. Did you restrict your targeting? Did you restrict by placement? Why? What is the history behind those decisions?
Then look at the ads.
Go through all of the various enhancements that Meta offers and focus on the ones you turned off. Why did you turn them off? Is it because you don’t like how they look, or is there a known brand risk for leaving them on?
What has happened when you’ve left them on in the past?
Once you’ve completed this exercise for your main campaign, turn to all of your remaining campaigns. Why were these extra campaigns needed? Have you proven that they add value?
Then go through each of those campaigns’ ad sets and ads and ask the same questions we’ve been asking.
Remember that the point of this exercise isn’t to tell you that all of this added complexity is wrong. Instead, I want you to take another look at your strategy, approach, and habits when it comes to campaign construction.
Challenge yourself, and don’t let yourself off the hook easily.
It’s natural to run into confirmation bias and list a bunch of reasons that explain what you do that sound reasonable. But really push back on that initial choice.
Understand that every time you add complexity, there’s a risk.
By restricting targeting and placements, you limit the inventory and can drive up costs. By turning off enhancements, you reject opportunities to diversify your creative. By creating separate campaigns and ad sets, you water down your budget and create situations where auction overlap or audience segmentation are likely.
It’s inefficient.
Your goal scenario should be to consolidate your budget as much as you can. By splitting it up across multiple campaigns and ad sets, you make it less likely for any one ad set to thrive.
So here’s the bottom of the glass.
I get that creating a single campaign and ad set isn’t always a reasonable goal. While it should be for small budgets, there are always times when you need to add complexity. There could be a business reason or a problem that needs to be solved.
But I ask you to ask yourself these questions related to every element of complexity that you add.
Why did I do this? What was the problem I was trying to solve? Is it actually a problem? Was there a better solution? Is adding this complexity worth the risk?
I encourage you to take some time with this and create a spreadsheet if you need to. This will allow you document these decisions so that you can come back to them later.
Maybe a decision was based on old thinking. Maybe things have changed.
I encourage you to test those assumptions and always come back to a goal of a more simplified approach.
The more complexity you add, the more confusing things get. It’s difficult to assess what is working and what isn’t. And complex systems will make getting optimal results more challenging.
The closer you get to the simplest structure possible, the more clarity you’ll have.