One of the most common challenges online brands face is keeping up with Facebook’s algorithm changes.

Whenever it’s tweaked, the biggest task for digital marketers is to reevaluate and optimize the structure of their campaigns. This is how they ensure the highest possible returns on every dollar spent.

On Facebook, campaign structures are usually determined by a brand’s business model and product range. There are however some universal campaign structures that can be used by any business. These primarily focus on maximizing transactions to increase revenue. In this article, we’ll be concentrating on one which successfully utilizes Facebook’s ‘Campaign Budget Optimization’ feature.

To ensure we are all on the same page, let’s take a step by step approach to learning this new campaign structure.

Step 1: Ask Yourself These Questions

‍When attempting to restructure your Facebook campaigns, have you ever asked yourself some or all of the following questions:

• How do I reduce self-competition?
• How can I use the campaign budget Optimization feature?
• How can I reduce ‘campaign-to-campaign’ and ‘ad set-to-ad set’ audience overlap?
• What is the ideal structure for a broad range of products in a variety of categories like fashion, furniture, food?
• How do I create a funnel to target potential buyers from the awareness stage to the purchase stage?
• Will my new structure support better optimization?

Step 2: Understand the User Funnel

‍All potential customers can be divided into three specific groups across the funnel: existing customers (bottom of the funnel), existing visitors (middle of the funnel), new audiences (top of the funnel). If you don’t have multiple product categories with totally different audiences, you could start with three campaigns to represent each group and stage of the funnel.

Step 3: Understand Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization Feature

‍Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization is used at a campaign level and numerous advantages:

• The daily budget option in this feature gives more control over expenditure.
• It allocates budgets automatically to the best performing ad sets.
• It manages the overlap between ad sets.
• It gives exposure to new ad sets and evaluates the performance of ad sets.

Additionally, because of this new optimization feature, Facebook has advised digital marketing teams to refrain from launching more than 6 ad sets at the same time into a single campaign. Facebook recommends that marketing teams should not run more than 6 ad sets under “learning mode,” to have optimal results.

Step 4: Start at the Bottom of the Funnel

‍It is often more profitable for online brands to work with existing customers. This is because companies have more information on their past/existing customers, like email addresses, phone numbers, buying patterns and order values, which makes engaging with this audience easier.

Given this ease, it is common for e-commerce companies to target all their existing customers. However, this kind of targeting is not precise and not always profitable because not every customer on your list intends to make a purchase immediately.

A bottom of the funnel campaign should have multiple ad sets based on different audience combinations as there are multiple ways to target existing customers and increase retention.

• Upsell
• Cross-Sell
• Repeat purchases (same product)

Step 5: Middle of the Funnel

‍A middle of the funnel campaign lets you target existing visitors. One of the biggest advantages of targeting existing visitors is that you can be more precise because you already have information about them such as the pages they viewed, number of sessions, time spent on a page, engagement with the fan page and if they did a cart dropout.

Moreover, mid funnel campaigns can take a two-prong approach. One mid funnel campaign should target all cart dropout visitors because historically they perform better than other audiences since they showed a strong intent to buy. Any e-commerce company would be losing out if they didn’t launch a specific campaign targeting cart dropouts.

The second mid funnel campaign should target existing visitors based on their website behavior. However, digital marketing teams shouldn’t target all website visitors because there are visitors who stumble upon websites by accident or for a random reason and were not thinking of making a purchase.

Digital marketing teams should categorize audiences based on their behavior using data science. Rule-based audiences can be created using Facebook’s Audience Manager or Facebook Analytics. Examples of a common rule-based audiences are the top 10% of visitors based on time spent on the site, visitors who have viewed more than one page and visitors who have come to the website more than three times.

Finally, digital marketing teams should ensure that they exclude existing customers from these campaigns to avoid any overlap with bottom of the funnel efforts.

Step 6: Top of the Funnel

‍In top of the funnel campaigns, digital marketing teams should target new visitors and exclude all existing visitors and customers. In particular, there are two specific types of audiences that are ideal for top of the funnel campaigns:

• audiences based on interests and demographics
• audiences based on lookalike audiences.

Audiences based on interests and demographics can be created by developing different scenarios and different rules for those scenarios. Additionally, lookalike audiences can be created by taking purchases, cart dropouts and engagement into consideration.

Step 7: Reflect

‍A proper funnel structure is required to reduce campaign overlap and better utilize campaign budget optimization. Furthermore, online brands should ensure that their digital marketers launch an adequate number of ad sets that target different audiences, so the company can find more high-performing ad sets. If an online brand has more than one product category, it would be ideal if marketing teams create three campaigns for each product category. This effort would allow teams to control budgets and optimize campaigns at a product level.