Evergreen Campaigns
An Evergreen Campaign Structure is one that does not change much year over year: Ideally the Campaigns and Ad Sets are continually in use, and only the ad creative is changed.
Evergreen Campaigns add some sanity to your Facebook Ad management. They prevent the typical disorganized Campaign sprawl that plagues most Facebook Ad Accounts. Evergreen Campaigns encourage continuous improvement and optimization, facilitates data analysis, and lowers maintenance costs.
It usually takes a few iterations before you land on your ideal evergreen structure, but here are some recommendations to get you started on the right foot.
Campaign Structure Overview
The campaign structure will look like this
| Dynamic Product Ads | Dynamic Product Ads, targeting people who have previously purchased and interacted with your site |
| Past Purchasers | People who have previously purchased from you. |
| Remarketing | People who have interacted with your brand but have yet not purchased from you. |
| Prospecting | People who have never purchased from you, and who have not interacted with your brand. |
Audiences
Before you can create your campaigns, you will need to define some base audiences to capture purchasers and website visitors. A list of essential Facebook audiences that should be created is available here.
Building the Campaigns
Common Settings
All the campaigns you create will have the following settings
| Buying Type | Auction |
| Objective | Sales |
| Catalog | Yes for Dynamic No for Regular |
| Advanced Campaign Budget | Yes |
| Campaign Bid Strategy | Bid Cap |
Conversion Events & Attribution
Initially select “Purchase” as your converion event, with a 1-day or 7 day click only converison window.
If, however, you are unable to obtain at least 50 purchase events per week for an ad set, you will want to instead choose “Add to cart” as your conversion event, with a 1-day click only conversion window.
Campaign #1:
Dynamic Product Ads
This campaign will contain all your Dynamic Product ads and ad sets. This is the most automated campaign type, with generally very little management required.
You will need to have your Product Catalog and Product Feeds setup before you can create this campaign.
| Campaign Name | Dynamic Product Ads |
| Buying Type | Auction |
| Objective | Sales |
| Catalog | Yes |
| Advanced Campaign Budget | Yes |
| Campaign Bid Strategy | Bid Cap |
Ad Sets
1. Dynamic Remarketing < 30d
| Ad Set Name | Dynamic Remarketing < 30d |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 1-day click |
| Product Set | All in-stock products |
| Audience | Create new Audience Retarget Ads: Viewed or Added to Cart but not Purchased: 30d |
| Audience Exclusions | None |
2. Dynamic Remarketing 30d-180d
| Ad Set Name | Dynamic Remarketing 30d-180d |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Product Set | All in-stock products |
| Audience | Create new Audience Retarget Ads: Viewed or Added to Cart but not Purchased: 180d |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase All Time – AddToCart 30d – Website Visitors 30d |
3. Dynamic Past Purchasers > 30d
| Ad Set Name | Dynamic Past Purchasers > 30d |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Product Set | All in-stock products |
| Audience | Create new Audience Find Prospective Customers – Purchase 180d – Purchase All Time |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase 30d – AddToCart 30d – Website Visitors 30d |
4. Dynamic Prospecting
| Ad Set Name | Dynamic Prospecting |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Product Set | All in-stock products |
| Audience | Create new Audience Find Prospective Customers (no explicit targeting) |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase All Time – Purchase 180d – AddToCart 180d – Website Visitors 30d – Website Visitors Top 25% 180d |
For high-volume sites, or for periods of high sales such as Black Friday, you can also consider creating additional more granular ad sets, with shorter time windows, or explicitly targeting cart abandoners.
For lower-volume sites, you may need to change your conversion event to “AddToCart” instead of “Purchase” if you have less than 50 purchases per week.
Campaign #2:
Past Purchasers
This campaign targets people who have previously purchased from you.
| Campaign Name | Past Purchasers |
| Buying Type | Auction |
| Objective | Sales |
| Catalog | No |
| Advanced Campaign Budget | Yes |
| Campaign Bid Strategy | Bid Cap |
Ad Sets
At it’s most basic, the campaign contains a single Ad Set containing all your past customers:
1. Past Purchasers All Time
| Ad Set Name | Past Purchasers All Time |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Audience | – Purchase All Time – Purchase 180d |
| Audience Exclusions | – AddToCart 30d – Purchase 30d – Website Visitors Top 25% 30d |
For high volume businesses that have large amount of customers, multiple Ad Sets could be created to have more granular control based on past purchase date.
Campaign #3:
Remarketing
This campaign targets website visitors and people who have previously engaged with your brand on facebook, instagram, or otherwise, but who have never purchased from your business.
| Campaign Name | Remarketing |
| Buying Type | Auction |
| Objective | Sales |
| Catalog | No |
| Advanced Campaign Budget | Yes |
| Campaign Bid Strategy | Bid Cap |
Ad Sets
Ad it’s most basic, the Remarketing Campaign contains only two Ad Sets: One targeting site visitors up to 30 days ago, and another targeting site visitors up to 180 days ago (the Facebook maximum)
1. Remarketing < 30d
| Ad Set Name | Remarketing < 30d |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 1-day click |
| Audience | – Visitors 30d – FB Engagement 30d – IG Engagement 30d |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase All Time – Purchase 180d |
2. Remarketing 30d-180d
| Ad Set Name | Remarketing 30d-180d |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Audience | – Site Visitors 180d – FB Engagement 180d – IG Engagement 180d |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase All Time – Purchase 180d – Visitors 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… Or separating ad sets into stronger/weaker pruchase intent such as Add to Carts, Product Views, Social Engagement, etc…
Campaign #4:
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, but the more you can manage to spend here, the more you will be able to spend on Remarketing.
| Campaign Name | Remarketing |
| Buying Type | Auction |
| Objective | Sales |
| Catalog | No |
| Advanced Campaign Budget | Yes |
| Campaign Bid Strategy | Bid Cap |
Ad Sets
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 lower funnel Remarketing audiences so that there is no overlap with your campaigns.
1. Prospecting 1% Look-a-Like
| Ad Set Name | Prospecting 1% Look-a-Like |
| Performance Goal | Maximize number of conversions |
| Conversion Event | Purchase |
| Bid Control | TBD |
| Attribution Setting | 7-day click |
| Audience | – 1% Look-a-like Purchase |
| Audience Exclusions | – Purchase All Time – Purchase 180d – Visitors 30d – Visitors Top 25% 180d |
More to Explore
In a follow-up post I will give some guidelines into how to:
- Calculate your Bid Caps
- When (and how) to change your Conversion Event from Purchase to Add to Cart.
- Building your first ads and replicating your organic posts into this campaign structure.
Alex Czartoryski 