The most efficient way to approach Meta ads campaign construction is to start with one campaign. Consolidate your budget into a single business goal for optimal results.
But there are always exceptions. Limiting yourself to a single campaign also isn’t particularly realistic in certain circumstances.
With that said, it’s important that if you’re creating more than one campaign, it’s because a viable exception applies. Otherwise, you’re intentionally watering down your budget without any obvious payoff.
How many campaigns should you have at once? Well, it depends. But to figure out what is best for your situation, you should ask yourself the following questions…
1. What Is Your Overall Daily Budget?
Every decision to create multiple campaigns ultimately starts here. The lower your budget, the more you should scrutinize splitting it up into separate campaigns.
The problem is that there is no clear answer to the next logical question: “What is considered a low, medium, or high budget?” On one hand, you know it when you see it. On the other, it’s not relevant yet.
The main thing is that you know you have $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 per day to spend. Without knowing the underlying factors, it’s impossible to know whether creating multiple campaigns would be helpful or necessary.
But let’s define that budget first before moving on to the next question.
2. What Is Your Primary Goal?
I don’t care if you have multiple goals. There’s one that’s more important than the rest. If you are currently running multiple campaigns for different business goals, which ones would you eliminate if you could only keep one? What would survive?
To simplify, start with the available campaign objectives:
- Sales
- Leads
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Awareness
- App Promotion
Theoretically, your business goal may not match your campaign objective. So how you ultimately define your primary business goal should be determined by the performance goal. It’s where you define the action you want, which is what directs the delivery algorithm.
So if your objective doesn’t match your performance goal, the objective itself isn’t relevant. Here are a few examples of optimized actions from performance goals:
- Purchase website events
- Lead-related website events (leads, completed registrations, etc.)
- Instant form leads
- App installs
- ThruPlay views
- Landing page views
What is the average cost per optimized action?
This is where your available daily budget starts to matter. It’s also why it’s impossible to define a small, medium, or large budget without understanding the underlying factors.
When considering only your primary goal, what is the average cost per optimized action? Averages may be necessary if selling different products or collecting different types of leads.
Establishing a rule of thumb
A common rule of thumb that I and other advertisers use is 50 optimized actions in a week. That’s what it generally takes to exit the learning phase, though there are exceptions.
The point of this exercise isn’t to say that anything under 50 is insufficient. But your results will be far less predictable and repeatable if you’re dealing with less volume.
Note that we’re not even considering the number of ad sets that you have in a single campaign at this point. That’s not the focus of this post. We’re only thinking about it at a campaign level.
Is this primary goal worthwhile?
Let’s assume you can dedicate your entire daily budget to this primary goal. Are you able to get the volume and return to make it worthwhile?
A common advertising dilemma is a smaller budget that is incapable of generating productive results when optimizing for purchases. If that’s the case, abandoning this goal for another one (like leads) that produces more volume may make sense.
3. What Are Your Secondary Goals?
Next, let’s think about the secondary goals that you may have that could result in separate campaigns. Common setups could look like this…
Setup #1:
- Primary Goal: Purchases
- Secondary Goal: Leads
Setup #2:
- Primary Goal: Purchases
- Secondary Goal: Awareness
Setup #3:
- Primary Goal: Purchases
- Secondary Goal: Engagement
Essentially, advertisers are often attempting to create a funnel with a secondary goal. They want to drive awareness, engagement, or traffic that will hopefully be nurtured to eventually develop into a purchase.
What is the average cost per optimized action?
While the primary goal is often an action that can cost quite a bit of money since it tends to rely on a purchase, secondary actions are often much easier to acquire. That may be less true if your secondary action is a lead, of course.
But reach, clicks, and engagement of any kind won’t cost much. The question will be the quality of those actions. And really, the answer to that question is almost always “bad.”
Is a secondary goal worthwhile?
When budget is directed away from a primary goal to a secondary goal, it’s almost always a waste of money. The reason is that the primary goal is the place you’re least likely to struggle with quality issues. As you venture into secondary goals, it’s a battle to make sure you’re reaching people who will actually buy from you.
When it comes to whether secondary goals are worthwhile, you first need to answer whether you’re generating suitable volume for your primary goal. If you’re not, redirecting a portion of your budget to a secondary goal tends to be inefficient.
This is where I tend to say that those with the highest of budgets have the most flexibility. Let’s say you’ve found a sweet spot of budget dedicated to purchases. If you scale any more, the campaign is no longer profitable. But you have more budget you can spend. If you have such resources, separate campaigns for secondary goals make sense.
But if the budget you’re spending on a secondary goal could instead be spent on a primary goal (like purchases) while remaining profitable, start there. Minimize extra campaigns if they aren’t helping you.
And your ability to define whether or not these extra campaigns are helping you is a critical step. It’s easy to say, “I’m running traffic or awareness or engagement campaigns, and I know that they are positively impacting the results of my sales campaigns.” But can you prove it?
This is where testing a minimalistic setup focused only on your primary goal, even for a few weeks or months, may be helpful.
4. Are There Unique Business Requirements?
So far, I hope that you have a general framework for determining how many campaigns you need. To start, the number of campaigns you need should be tied directly to your budget, primary and secondary goals, and the costs to get those primary and secondary goal actions.
I encourage you to approach this with the mindset that the most efficient approach for most brands is a single campaign that consolidates budget toward the primary goal. Those who create additional campaigns for other goals can do so due to budget flexibility.
But we can’t ignore that there are also exceptions where you simply don’t have a choice. This is usually due to business requirements that force complexity onto your campaign setup.
An obvious example would be that you’ve been given incentives to drive both revenue and leads. Regardless of the budget or whether doing both simultaneously makes sense, driving both actions is how you’re judged and what you’re stuck with.
Other added requirements that could add the complexity of additional campaigns include multiple business locations or diverse product categories that all deserve attention. While you could technically separate these by ad sets rather than campaigns, that becomes less possible if you need to separate by both location and product category.
I understand that you don’t always have a choice. But what I want you to do is recognize that simpler is almost always better, and you should prioritize that simplicity. When you’re getting direction that requires campaign complexity, help the decision-maker understand the potential negative impact of watering down your budget.
5. What About Creative Testing?
When we talk about campaign complexity, we can’t ignore one of the most common reasons for creating more campaigns: Creative testing.
Look, I’m pretty loudly on the side of anti-creative testing these days. I understand wanting to know which creative or headline or combination drives the most results. You can learn from that information.
But I think we can get lost in the weeds here, especially given how ad creation works now. Every ad can include up to 10 images and videos (whether with the new creative workflow, flexible format, or dynamic creative), five primary text variations, five headlines, AI-generated text, AI-generated images, AI-generated videos, and all of the various enhancements that may be used.
The old-school approach of creative testing to find the winning combinations of copy and creative misses the fact that today’s successful ads require many winning combinations. You can reach multiple customer personas by focusing on different pain points and highlighting unique solutions and creative variations. This is the point of creative diversification.
Where this makes the least amount of sense is when you’re already limited by budget. Far too often, advertisers are given a nominal testing budget, which steals from budget that could have been used for the primary campaign. And then they act on small-sample results, choosing winning ads that don’t perform the way they expect when given more budget.
These advertisers are often victims of the breakdown effect, where decisions are made based on small volumes of data that don’t scale. It’s why this micromanagement can be incredibly counterproductive.
But once again, budget matters. If you have extra budget to spend that you don’t know what to do with, feel free to dedicate it to creative testing. If you find that this extra campaign has provable benefits, keep using it.
For most advertisers, though, this is both unnecessary and potentially damaging to results. The reward of creative testing needs to outweigh the risks of watering down your budget and creating a situation that could lead to auction overlap.
If you want to test creative, I advise that you instead use the creative testing tool in your main campaign. That way, those ads also continue running normally after the test is complete, rather than trying to replicate testing performance when you move the ads later.
Keep It Simple
The takeaway from this post should be to use these questions as a guide when determining how many campaigns you need. There isn’t a clear right or wrong about how many campaigns you need. But the goal should be simplicity.
Start with a single campaign for your primary goal. Then there needs to be a very clear business reason or problem to be solved every time you add a campaign. Because when you add campaigns, you understand the risk involved.
I hope that it’s obvious you shouldn’t want to spread a $10 daily budget across 10 different campaigns. There’s a basic understanding about why this wouldn’t be helpful, and it undoubtedly has a negative impact on results.
Now apply that understanding on a broader scale. Make sure that your primary campaign is productive. Otherwise, choose a better goal. Avoid creating additional campaigns when you can, knowing that each new campaign adds complexity that could hurt results.
And when those additional campaigns are created because you have no choice due to business requirements, make sure that those making these decisions understand the negative impact these campaigns may have on the bottom line.
Your Turn
How many campaigns do you have running at once, and why?
Let me know in the comments below!
