Chapter 3: Ads Structure
To navigate to the Meta ads manager, simply go to business.facebook.com, sign in, and click “Ads Manager” from the menu on the left side of the screen. There are two other important buttons on this menu: “Events Manager” and “Audiences” - we just went over the “Events Manager” during our pixel setup, and we’ll go over “Audiences” in a later section. For now, let’s dive into the Ads Manager and how to create our ads.
At the top of the screen next to "Campaigns”, you are going to see the ad account that you currently have selected. From here, we can switch between any ad accounts or business portfolios that your personal Facebook account might have access to. For now, let’s focus on the ad account we just created.
Moving down the page, you’re going to see 3 different tabs: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. This is the fundamental structure of the ads manager, and will be common between other social media ads managers as well (for example, TikTok ads manager). Each of these tabs represent a new level of organizational structure when it comes to your ads. Here’s how it works:
Campaigns: Campaigns are the highest level of organizational structure in your ads manager. A campaign can have one or multiple ad sets, and each ad set can have one or multiple ads (all within the same campaign). You can think of this as the base to a pyramid consisting of campaigns, ad sets, and ads. At the campaign level, we decide what type of campaign we want Meta to optimize for. This includes things like website purchases, leads, traffic, app downloads, etc. We also have the opportunity to set a campaign-level budget, or choose to set the budget at the ad set level.
Ad Sets: Ad sets live within a specific campaign, and can house one or several ads. The point of ad sets is to set up your targeting, or who is going to see a given ad.
Ads: Ads are the actual creative and copy that your customers will see, and live within a specific ad set. From the Meta ads manager, your ads will generally appear as sponsored social media posts in the feeds of users (or they might show up in other placements, more on this later). But the general structure is usually a social media post. With that in mind, the Ads tab is where you pick your photo or video for your ad, and write a caption.
Overall, the Ads tab is for your actual ads that you create. All Ads are part of an Ad Set, which determines the targeting, and all Ad Sets are part of a Campaign, which determines the campaign objective and optimization.