The New Facebook Ad Structure - What The Hell Are Ad Sets?

I’m going to keep this as simple as possible, since the social media ad space is already getting a little cluttered (If you’ve already been running ads within social, then you know what I’m talking about).  Facebook has launched a major change to their ad structure that will give significantly more control over campaigns and reporting.  Not officially rolled out amongst the entire Facebook populace, the change will soon move out to all users by the end of the month.

Here’s how the new structure breaks down:

In essence, Facebook has created another subcategory for us to group ad targets within a single campaign.  These ad sets will have all of the ads that you’ve created organized neatly into ad sets.  Confused?

SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?

With the introduction of ad sets, we will now able to target different users within the same campaign.  For example, I could run a single campaign but include ad sets that target particular groups within the same campaign.  Each ad set can target a particular group like an email list, custom audience, or any other targeting paradigm.  Now ad managers will be able to create a single campaign for one particular post and then allot a number of ad sets for each audience that they wish to target.

This is a huge bonus for data analytics.  Now we can simply filter campaigns by name and see all of the data that we need through the ad sets.  In addition, we will be able to determine with much greater efficiency the performance of ads by target without having to take a multitude of steps within Ad Manager/Power Editor.

In closing, this change is huge for Facebook advertisers.  By grouping targets as a subset of campaigns, it has made our jobs a lot easier.  Not only offering an additional level of control over our ads, but making the data we need more readily available will help to shape the Facebook ad space for the better.  If this is their first step towards optimizing ad content for their platform as a whole, it is definitely the right step.

Boom Baby.