When to Use Multiple Campaigns or Ad Sets

Question

Hi Jon, it's Bob Hiler. So my question is, are there situations today where you'd still recommend multiple campaigns, and why?

Answer

Great question, Bob.

So, Bob is a long-time member of my Power Hitters Club - Elite community, and he’s awesome. I know Bob is asking this because I’m always talking about a simplified approach to campaign construction.

Far too often, advertisers overcomplicate things when they don’t need to and make their results worse. In a high percentage of these situations, they would be better off with a single campaign and ad set.

While I recommend prioritizing a simplified approach, there are always exceptions when you’ll want to add complexity. So, I want to answer Bob’s question about creating separate campaigns and the thought process behind it.

Before I answer that, let’s talk about a common situation when advertisers create separate campaigns and don’t need to.

Creative testing.

This is an old school approach, and I get generally why they do it. They want to have a separate campaign that forces budget to individual ads so that they can see what works.

But I find this approach so counterproductive, especially for anything other than the highest budgets. I’ve talked about this a lot separately, and I won’t go into all of the details here.

The main thing is that a much more efficient approach now is to use the creative testing tool in the main ad set where the ads will live after the test is over.

So when should you create separate campaigns?

The obvious example would be when you have multiple business goals that you want to dedicate budget to. So you might have a Leads campaign to build your email list and a Sales campaign to increase revenue.

EVEN THEN I’d say that you should only do this if you have the budget to get volume and optimal results from each campaign.

Unless you’re creating a separate campaign based on the objective, many of the reasons behind creating separate ad sets and separate campaigns are the same.

So if you have business goals to promote more than one product or product line that requires dedicated budget, you might keep them separate. You’d separate them either by campaign or ad set.

Or you need to promote multiple locations for your business, so you need to dedicate separate budget to each location.

But even in these cases, you need to have the budget to efficiently drive results in each campaign or ad set. If not, you’re just making results worse.

Another example could be related to targeting.

Now, I don’t want to waste much time talking about creating separate ad sets based on things like detailed targeting and lookalikes because that approach is so outdated now. But it still happens, as much as I hate to see it.

Just remember that interests, behaviors, and lookalike audiences are only used as suggestions when optimizing for a conversion. You’re wasting your time by separating them, and likely making results worse.

Another time this comes up is related to remarketing and prospecting.

YES Meta prioritizes remarketing automatically now, so you don’t need to isolate them to show Meta which people to target. But the one problem can be Meta spending TOO MUCH of your budget on remarketing.

Now, this isn’t going to be an issue for most brands. But the problem can happen for brands with huge remarketing audiences or if their product is such that prospecting is vastly more profitable.

You could attempt to control this by separating your remarketing and prospecting. While you could do this with separate campaigns, I’d prefer separate ad sets. Then you’d establish a set budget for each.

The bottom line

You should prioritize minimizing unnecessary campaigns and ad sets. If you’re going to create a separate campaign, ask yourself why.

Make sure there’s a clear business goal or problem to solve. And understand the risks of splitting things up and watering down your budget.

Thanks for your question, Bob!