Facebook’s New Campaign Hierarchy

The upcoming structural changes to the latest Facebook Advertising API (due March 11th 2015) provides an opportunity to streamline the creation and management process. AdParlor has taken full advantage by releasing a new suite of tools designed to enable advertisers to effortlessly split test and optimize their Campaigns.

The Facebook Hierarchy

The diagram below gives an overview of the basic changes to the Facebook advertising hierarchy. There are no changes to the Campaign levels, only to the Ad Set and Ad levels. The two major changes are the movement of the targeting and bid information (bid type, bid value) to the Ad Set level.

Img_New FB Hierarchy

Before: Too much flexibility allowed for advertisers to develop bad habits that lead to non-optimal results

The previous Facebook Campaign hierarchy saw the bid type, bid value, creative and targeting defined at the Ad level. This posed many challenges, since a single Ad Set within a Campaign could house not only many different creatives, but also different targeting groups and different bid models. This allowed for unfair split tests to be executed (leading to false positive/negative results) and made it difficult to manage these Ads or gain insights from poorly structured Campaigns.

Now: More structure encourages advertisers to follow best practices and ultimately drive better performance

Moving the targeting and bid information (bid type, bid value) to the Ad Set level means that advertisers can no longer target different groups of users or advertise for different apps within the same Ad Set. It also means that Ads are now just different creatives, with no targeting attached. This might appear to restrict flexibility initially but it actually greatly improves efficiency for the whole process:

  • Well structured campaigns simplify the management process
  • Well defined budget management for target groups
  • Default bids can now be set for all Ads within Ad Sets
  • Fair testing of creatives separate to targeting
  • Provides the Facebook delivery algorithms with more structured, known data to drive more accurate deliveries and better ROI for you

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The Transition Period

If you want to keep running your existing Campaigns:

  1. You cannot upload new Ads into old Ad Sets because the new Ads do not carry the targeting information required for delivery; Facebook will prevent you from doing this. You will need to create new Ad Sets for new Ad uploads.
  2. If you want to keep running existing Ads without making any changes, your delivery should not be impacted by the structural changes

If you are creating new Campaigns:

  1. Targeting is set at the Ad Set level so you will need one Ad Set per targeting group.
  2. Bid types and bid values are now set at the Ad Set level. These values are cascaded down to the Ads contained within the Ad Set, but you can opt to override the default values at the Ad level if you wish. Bear in mind that if modifications are made to the Ad Set level, these will in turn override the Ad level settings and you will need to re-apply your custom changes to the appropriate Ads.

Build your Advertising Success with the AdParlor Tools

The new Facebook Campaign structure allows you to more effectively split or A/B test your target audience and the creatives used. Split testing is important because it enables you to understand the demographic characteristics of your high quality users and the creatives they respond to, so that you can refine your campaigns to get the best return on your advertising spend. However, the process of proper split testing can be time consuming and cumbersome to create, analyze and optimize without the necessary tools.

The new AdParlor toolkit allows for easier:

  • Effortlessly create unique groups of targeting combinations (e.g. USA Males 18-24, USA Females 18-24 etc) with our targeting ‘split’ function
  • Automatically create Ad Sets using 1:1 mapping of targeting groups to Ad Sets
  • Effortlessly create many Posts as combinations of different creatives (e.g. 4x images, 2x messages, 2x call to actions = 16 unique posts)
  • Save and reuse targeting and creative groups for even faster creation across Campaigns
  • Use our pick-and-mixer to upload Ads to multiple Ad Sets at once
  • Apply a tag-team approach to process for trafficking teams for even more efficiency
  • Use our advertiser objective tailored Presets to generate one-click reports
  • Optimize Campaigns efficiently with the all-in one reporting and management tool to apply changes in bulk
  • Automate your optimization changes with our highly flexible Rules engine
  • Get deeper insights to your data using our Ad Intelligence tagging system

If you’d like to read about how to use these tools, see our detailed how-to article in our support centre.

Get Started with AdParlor

Want to know more or get an account setup? Contact our support team at support@adparlor.com.

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