Meta. Campaigns. Targeting. Structures. Ad sets. Audience stacking.

What on earth does it all mean?

And more importantly, how are they relevant to growing my business?

If you’re tired of feeling frustrated when it comes to online advertising, I get it — it can be overwhelming. Pouring budget into Meta (for Facebook and Instagram ads) that doesn’t result in a healthy profit can get old. Like, real quick.

That’s why I want to introduce you to my trusty sidekick.

My digital marketing Holy Grail.

Something that can help you take your ad campaigns to the next level — squeezing more money, more revenue, and more profit out of the behemoth that is Meta.

There are three million advertisers on Meta. But, remarkably, less than 1% are using it to its fullest potential.

If you plug and play this Meta Campaign Structure Framework, you’ll become part of that 1%.

And you’ll be miles closer to your end goal. Whether that’s scaling your business to exit-level territory, expanding internationally, or growing revenue to the point where you can hire new staff and reclaim your long-lost hours.

Whatever your 1, 2, or 5-year plan, this little-known framework will help you get there. 

So, let’s crack into it. Using my secret (well, not anymore) Meta Campaign Structure Framework, I’ll walk you through – step by step – how to set up your account to connect with your customers better. And ultimately, to get more sales for less advertising spending. What’s not to love?

Looking at a wellness/skincare brand as an example, here’s my step-by-step walkthrough to set up your account to get more profitable campaigns. 

NOTE: For this to work, you need to download the Meta Campaign Structure Framework

How to get more customers using the Meta Campaign Structure Framework

Ready? Let’s jump into it.

The first three steps are easy:

While it might look like a random jumble of words and numbers as a CSV file, when you get to the next step, it’ll automatically sync up – and it’ll start to beautifully come together.

You’ll get a few warnings pop up at this stage.
That is totally fine – because we’ll circle back a little later to fix that. It just means you haven’t uploaded your images yet.

The first testing structure we’ll dive into is the cold testing.

What does cold mean?

It’s people who haven’t interacted with your brand before. Fresh faces. Definitely not past customers, and not people who’ve scoured your website or social media channels.

This campaign here is set on ABO, which means it’s on Ad set Budget Optimisation. Compared to CBO (Campaign Budget Optimisation) you can have more control over the nitpicky details and more manual input.

Now is where we start to add in the variables. The exciting stuff!

This is the section where you’ll change the demographics — age groups, genders, locations, interests and behaviours. 

It’s important to note that I’m not just pulling them out of thin air here — 99% of the time, I’ll get these insights from Google Analytics. That’s what Performance Marketing is all about. 

There is one caveat though:

Generally, because Facebook is such an advanced platform, it can learn quickly and find your best customers — often overriding your assumptions about who your ideal customer really is. For this reason, I like to leave the targeting broad, to let Meta work its magic.

Of course, if you’re a women’s clothing brand, it would make sense to still only target women. But if you’re a homewares or alcohol brand, for example, this is where you’d want to cast a wide net.

Let’s say we’re a skincare business with an anti-ageing angle. 

We want to test benefits, pain points or focus points that are different enough to warrant a test.

As Anny shows us in the video, make sure to name the creative test. 

In Creative Test 1, people are buying the health/wellness product because it helps with their wrinkles thanks to the papaya ingredient. In Creative Test 2, we could use the angle that the skincare product is anti-wrinkle, thanks to hyaluronic acid.

Spread out angles, such as these, so you can really narrow down why people are buying. And then within our different ads, we change the format This is when we go change the pixel and the audience details too. 

One of the benefits of our campaign upload template is that we do have UTMs already in there. So this is fantastic — since iOS 14, it’s pivotal to have UTMs to make sure you’re tracking where your clicks are coming from, especially if we’re we’re working off a last-click attribution method.

Rinse and repeat for as many creative tests as you want to run. The more meaningful tests you run, the more data you get!

Then just hit publish and you’re on your way!

The Campaign Upload Template comes up with sample audiences based on what we find works best with several health and wellness clients (and several other industries), stacking Google Analytics and Market segments together. 

Keep in mind: At this point, you’ll see an instruction to “remove non-converters”. 

Under “people who match”, this stuff covers the highest converting market segments that Google Analytics comes up with. 

Make sure to cross out the non-converters and non-relevant targeting sections.

So, if you’re a skincare client, you wouldn’t want the “men’s fashion” segment hanging around in there.

Then there’s a fork in the road:

OPTION ONE — If the Facebook page has a lot of background information and data, we can actually stack a bunch of audiences that are already known to have converted. It’s a shortcut and a wide net of proven success.

OPTION TWO — If we don’t have a lot of data, it’s best to test a single interest base. So if it’s a skincare client, we might test different makeup, different apparel brands or an interest like self-love. The more assumptions we test, the more data we’ll get.

Now’s our opportunity to go more granular in demographics.

Highlighted in blue in the above screenshot, this is just a spare audience that we can use. It can either be another cold campaign, or you can use this for the purpose of scaling — which is what we do a lot, when we want to increase revenue and get more sales (after we’ve found that sweet spot, of course).

Next up, a personal favourite: catalogue ads! 

(but you might have heard them thrown around as dynamic ads)

This style of advertising takes data directly from your Shopify site — headlines, product images, product names and more. 

As you can see on the left (screenshot below), you have the option to push it to a cold audience, warm audience, or both.

And just for a friendly reminder…

Cold audience = fresh faces.

Warm audience = people who’ve interacted with your brand before in some capacity.

When you get to this stage you have a few options.

For example, people who’ve visited your website in the site 14 days and added to their cart. Or, people that have checked on your Instagram page in the last 30 days — there’s a handful of options to choose from when creating your custom audience. 

Again, this is the structure using catalogue campaigns. 

Before I jump into how it all works, let’s get up to speed on retargeting as a general concept. It’s something I use every day in my digital marketing for health and wellness clients, as well as pet brands, food businesses, sports brands, and so many more.

Imagine that you go to a store and check out a cool product, but you decide not to buy it. Then, later when you’re browsing the internet or scrolling through social media, you see an ad for that same product! That’s retargeting – except it’s usually all digital!

Basically, when you visit a website, it puts a little tracker on your computer or phone. This helps us as marketers know what you’ve looked at, so we can send you ads for those things later on. Long story short, it’s a way for brands to remind you about things you were interested in, in the hopes that you’ll come back and buy them.

Now, back to the walkthrough.

The general retargeting set-up is usually focused around single image or video ads. Remember, this is very different to catalogue ads, which featured a carousel of different products or/ads. For retargeting, it’s just the one focus point — whether that be a UGC video, a static ad, or a GIF, for example. 

Click on “edit” and it’ll bring you to the screen in the screenshot below.

As the instructions in the Campaign Structure Template indicate, this is where you’ll need to add in your audiences. This could be a stacked audience or an individual channel like Instagram — a tactic that’s useful to retarget people that have visited the Instagram page in a certain amount of time. 

What does that mean?

In Anny’s video walkthrough, “warm” refers specifically to people who have already purchased – within the last 180 days specifically 

HOT TIP: A really good audience to upload here is the Shopify backend data —and download the audiences and reupload them to the here in the Meta Campaign Structure Framework.

What’s most important to know?

Alright, we’ve been through A LOT.

There are a lot of niche digital marketing words in there.

But at the end of the day, it can all be summed up in a few key points. So long as you have the Meta Campaign Structure Framework ready to go, as long as you keep these things front of mind, you’re on the right track.

Before you go…

At the end of the video, Anny walks us through another real-world scenario. If you want to see how this entire structure works with a brand in the jewellery industry, skip to the last couple of minutes. Visual learners, this one’s for you.