Chapter 3: Ads Structure
To create your first campaign, simply click the green “Create” button near the Campaigns tab. This will prompt us to select our campaign objective and buying type. For buying type, there are two options: Reservation, and Auction. This is how they’re described from Meta:
“Reservation: Lets you plan and buy your campaigns in advance, with predictable performance goals and more control over your frequency controls. Ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram.
Auction: Offers more choice, efficiency and flexibility, with less predictable results. Ads can be placed across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Meta Audience Network.”
For 99% of campaigns, Auction is going to be the right choice. For a more detailed look at the difference between auction & reservation buying types, check out Meta’s blog post on it here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/654484604719506?id=842420845959022
For now, we’ll continue with “Auction” selected, since it will likely be the best choice in most circumstances. The next option we have is to select our campaign objective. As of June 2025, there are 6 available campaign objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. These buckets are fairly self explanatory, and hovering over each one will show a list of the more detailed conversion events that fit into each objective. The most common objective is Sales, which you will choose if you’re looking to sell something on your website. Another common objective is Leads, which would be a good option if you’re a service based business, or if you’re doing anything that requires you to engage directly with customers before they purchase your product or service.
Assuming you select “Sales” as your objective, the next screen is going to give you the options to start building out your campaign. On the right side, you’re going to see your "Campaign Score”, which is a new metric designed to push people towards using as many Advantage+ (Meta AI) options as possible in their campaign structure (did I mention I hate this?). At the top, we have the option to name our campaign whatever we want, or create a naming template to allow for consistent naming conventions across our ad account.
Next we have the option to create a catalog ad, which we’ll go over later. Below that is the option to set a campaign wide budget. Meta recommends that you use the Advantage+ budget optimization at a campaign level. This can be great for scaling, and will be what we refer to as a CBO (or ASC, Advantage+ Sales Campaign). Setting the budget at the campaign level like this will allow the Meta AI to direct budget between all ad sets in the campaign however it seems fit. Like I said, this can be great for scaling, but might not be the best option when building data in the beginning (more on this later).
The next option is AB testing, which allows you to split test things like different creatives within the same campaign. Results with this vary, and I prefer to manually split test things by simply creating more ads, but to each their own.
Finally at the bottom is the option for special ad categories. This is kinda it’s own thing, so continue for an in-depth look: