Facebook Campaign Structure for Long-Term Success

Evergreen Campaigns

Evergreen Campaigns add some structure and sanity to your Facebook Ad management. They prevent the typical disorganized Campaign sprawl that plagues most Facebook Ads Accounts. Evergreen Campaigns encourage continuous improvement and optimization, facilitates data analysis, and lowers maintenance costs.

An Evergreen Campaign Structure doesn’t change much year over year: The Campaigns and Ad Sets are continually in use, and only the ad creative is changed.

Campaign Structure

The campaign structure is relatively simple: 3-4 primary campaigns targeting 3 main segments: Past Purchasers, Remarketing, and Prospecting.

Past Purchasers	Remarketing	Prospecting
People who have previously purchased from you.	People who have interacted with your brand via your website, social media, or otherwise, but have not purchased from you yet.	People who have never purchased from you, and who have not interacted with your brand in the past 180 days.
CPA $	CPA $$	CPA $$$
Budget $$	Budget $$$	Budget $

Audiences

Before you can create your campaigns, you will need to define some base audiences to capture purchasers and website visitors. A full description of the essential Facebook audiences that should be created is available here.

Building the Campaigns

Campaign #1: Past Purchasers

This campaign targets people who have previously purchased from you. Generally your cost per acquisition will be low, and your budget will be a function of how many customers you have.

Campaign Name	Buying Type	Objective
Past Purchasers	Auction	Conversions

Ad Sets for Past Purchasers Campaign

At it’s most basic, the campaign contains a single Ad Set containing all your past customers:

Ad Set Name	Audiences
Past Purchasers All Time	Purchase 10d Purchase 30d Purchase 180d Purchaser All Time

For high volume businesses that have large amount of customers, multiple Ad Sets could be create, one for each audience to have more granular control based on past purchase date. However, a single campaign targetting all past purchasers is also quite effective, trusting Facebook’s algorithm to take purchase recency into account.

Campaign #2: Remarketing

This campaign targets website visitors and people who have previously engaged with your brand on facebook, instagram, or otherwise, but who have NOT previously purchased from your business.

Your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) will be relatively low, and therefore you should manage to have a relatively large budget while maintaining a profitable CPA.

This campaign actually needs to be setup as two separate campaigns

Campaign Name	Buying Type	Objective
Remarketing	Auction	Conversions
Dynamic Remarketing	Auction	Catalog Sales

Ad Sets for Remarketing Campaigns

Ad it’s most basic, the Remarketing Campaign contains only two Ad Sets targeting visitors who engaged with your brand up to 30 days ago, and another for people who engaged with your brand up to 180 days ago (the Facebook maximum)

Ad Set Name	Audiences	Exclude
Remarketing 30d	Add to Cart 30d Visitors Top 25% 30d FB Engagement 30d IG Engagement 30d	Purchase 30d
Remarketing 180d	Add to Cart 180d Visitors Top 25% 180d FB Engagement 180d IG Engagement 180d	Purchase 180d Add to Cart 30d Visitors Top 25% 30d FB Engagement 30d IG Engagement 30d

For higher volume sites, you can consider adding more granular Ad Sets for 10, 60, 90 day etc… remarketing audiences.

Ad Sets for Dynamic Remarketing

Ad Set Name	Audiences
Product View 30d	Retarget Ads: Viewed or Added to Cart but not Purchased: 30d
Product View 180d	Retarget Ads: Viewed or Added to Cart but not Purchased: 180d
Cart Abandon 30d	Cart Abandon 30d
Cart Abandon 180d	Cart Abandon 180d

For high-volume sites, or for periods of high sales such as Black Friday, you can also consider creating 10, 4, or even 1 day Ad Sets.

Campaign #3: Prospecting

This campaign will target “brand unaware” customers. People that have never purchased from you, and that have not interacted with your brand or site in at least 180 days.

This campaign will feed your Remarketing campaigns. You can expect your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) to be relatively high and your budgets will need to be relatively low to remain profitable. But the more you can manage to spend here, the more you will be able to spend on Remarketing.

Campaign Name	Buying Type	Objective
Prospectiv=ng	Auction	Conversions

Ad Sets for Prospecting Campaign

At it’s most basic, the prospecting Campaign should target a 1% look-a-like audience (based on the Purchase pixel event).

More advanced campaigns can also target 2%-10% look-a-like audiences, or custom interest based audiences. But it is important to always exclude your Past Purchasers and Remarketing audiences so that there is no overlap with your campaigns.

Ad Set Name	Audiences	Exclude
1% Look-a-like Purchase	1% Look-a-like Purchase	Purchase All Time Purchase 180d Add to Cart 180d Site Visitors Top 25% 180d FB Engagement 180d IG Engagement 180d

The Big Picture

Once all the above is setup, your Campaign and Ad Sets should look something like this:

All that remains now is to create ads or duplicate your posts into these campaigns. But that is a topic for another day.

Related Reading

• Essential Facebook Audiences