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Fundamentals of campaign structure

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In Smartly.io, campaigns have three levels: campaign, ad set, and ad. 

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There may be slight variation between different ad platforms about how these are structured and named, however.

Think about your audiences first

Selecting between different audiences is always a tradeoff between accuracy and reach.

  • The more accurate your audience is, the fewer people you're going to reach.
  • The less accurate your audience is, the more people you're going to reach.

In order not to target the same group of people multiple times, exclude the used audiences from other audiences. Duplicate targeting may lead to delivery issues.

Campaign structure examples

Here are a few examples of fixed campaign structures.

The strategy is to use the same campaigns and ad sets longer instead of creating new ones frequently. Refresh ads by pausing old ads and adding new ones to existing ad sets.

The benefits of thinking about your audience first are:

  • campaigns are easier to manage and analyze;
  • audience performance history is collected to one ad set, making optimization and analysis more reliable; and
  • optimization triggers work better. Improving results requires iterative changes over five-plus days. A fixed structure works better.

Campaign per objective

The best practice is to organize campaigns according to objectives. This means that one campaign has one objective (product sales, mobile app installs, etc.). This allows you to control campaigns and set targets based on the objective you're focusing on.

Campaign per customer segment

If you have similar objectives in all of your campaigns, another alternative is to create one campaign per goal (Prospecting/Retargeting/Re-engagement). This way, you can distinguish between the campaigns for new customer acquisition and retargeting.

It also helps to follow the different CPA levels that different customer categories will most likely have.

Dynamic ads

The most advanced way to do retargeting is to use dynamic ads, replacing the website custom audiences from the previous example. With dynamic ads, you just need to drive new traffic to your website with other campaigns, and dynamic ads will retarget visitors with the products they viewed on the website.

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