In 2025, social media has become an ALL IN or ALL OUT marketing channel.

By ALL IN, I mean that to get results from organic social media (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), brands (read: marketers) need to work hard.

By hard work, I mean a 100% dedication to a social platform: 3-5 high-quality posts per week that can compete with big brands’ social teams & digital creators.

As I argued in my LinkedIn post (now 60,000+ impressions OMG (✪‿✪)):

In 2015, social media marketing was an intern’s job because the CMO was busy with strategy and paid ad campaigns. In 2025, social media is still an intern’s job because the CMO doesn’t know how to do it.

The Great Complexification of social media marketing 2015-2025

In the past 5 years, paid ads have become easier to manage as Meta and Google add automation.

Meanwhile, the complexity of social media marketing has skyrocketed.

↳ Social media is now 10x more competitive v.s. 5 years ago. Think professional creators posting high-production videos, hyper-engaging brand UGC in Reels and TikTok, celebrity collabs, etc.

↳ People who started marketing careers in 2010 struggle to keep up with Gen Z social media aesthetics, discourse, lingo. It’s become hard for 40y olds to talk the language of 18y old consumers. (I’m 31y and even I think it’s hard…)

↳ In 2025, social media marketing is complex and high-value expertise that companies hire special talent & teams for. Even the size of Facebook posts has become more complex.

In my article on 2025 marketing trends, I wrote: “The key social media trend in 2025 will be: less is more. 

I am not so sure about that anymore.

But surely, what is out is easy audience growth from posting unoriginal ideas with basic static designs.

What does “good” social media mean in 2025?

Here are 5 brands winging the social media game.

Check out their IG profiles if you’re not quite sure what “good social media marketing” means these days. Hint: lots of videos.

• ​Oatly​
• ​Liquid Death
• ​Feeld​
• ​Sephora​
• ​ClickUp

What does it mean for marketers?

As a small brand’s marketing manager, you probably don’t have the skill set of a seasoned social media marketing expert.

So, it’s quite hopeless to compete against big brands and professional Instagram creators on your own.
​
You just don’t have the time to keep up w/ all best practices, come up w/ hyper-creative ideas, and create (write, film, design) high-quality social media content. You also don’t have a video production team.

Should you give up on social media?

Hold your horses. But do consider the ALL IN or ALL OUT approach.

↳ Go ALL IN for a 3-month test period. Although some social media agency people commented under my LI post that it should be a 6-month period, I don’t buy it.

↳ Look at social media as a 3-month experiment into which you invest €3-5k per month.
​
​↳ Shift some paid ads budget to social media. Say you spend €10k per month on paid ads. Shift €5k of that budget to social media as an experiment for 3 months.
​
​↳ Hire a freelance social media expert or agency for that 3-month period and let them work their magic. They’ve got the knowhow, social-media-creative brain, and teams and tools to create high-quality content.
​
​↳ See how far the experiment takes you in 1-2 channels you’ve asked the experts to manage. You may as well see that this €5k is better spend on social media expert’s fee than paid advertising. You can measure the results via general high-level results, blended CPA, and obviously social media growth KPIs.

Pay to play

In 2025, social media is one of the most lucrative growth channels.

But as with any marketing channel, paid or organic, you’ll have to pay the entry price in order to play the game.

This article first appeared in my marketing newsletter. Subscribe here to be the first one to read new posts.

The post Social media in 2025: Go ALL IN or go ALL OUT appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

…

Today, we’re gonna talk about Meta ad creatives…

Every marketer and agency has their own approach to Meta ads. But sadly, most of the Meta ad accounts I’ve audited did not spark joy.

The most common mistakes include:

1. No proper naming conventions, the account is hard to navigate.
2. Campaigns are not reused but always launched as new, disturbing the algorithms’ learning.
3. Ad sets are not optimised on Sales but Clicks and Awareness.
4. Ad visuals do not follow the best practices, there’s bad copywriting and other visual-related mistakes.
5. Ad visuals are not tested on a regular basis.

It’s easy to point out some marketers’ and agencies’ bad work. It’s much harder to do it better yourself. 😓

That’s why I’ve chosen to write about one of the good Meta ad campaign management practices: continuous ad creative testing.

Managing Meta ad campaigns for my clients is one of my favourite things to work on. There are measurable results, lots of creative freedom, and I can spend time designing the visuals. 👩‍🎨

When I start managing a new Meta ads account, I design and launch new ad creatives every single week.

Below is the Meta Media Library of a brand whose ads I’ve been managing for the past 6 weeks. Note the number of different layouts and styles…

​

Want to have an ad creative library that looks just as diverse?

Read on as I’m going to share some advice for ideating + designing new Meta ad creatives faster and elevating your ad experiments game.

We’ll cover three key points:

1. Learn to design your own ad creatives
2. Collect ideas in a structured way
3. Report on every single ad creative experiment

Ok, let’ go!

1. Learn to design your own ad creatives

It takes me about 5h/week to research, ideate, copywrite and design a set of 6 new Meta ad creatives.

If this sounds like too little, there’s a reason for me being so fast:

1. I’ve managed Meta ad campaigns for 10+ years and know what kinds of headlines and visual layouts work best.
2. I’ve been designing Meta ads for 8+ years and have a personal template gallery in Figma.
3. I’ve learned the basics and shortcuts in Figma to give myself complete creative freedom (v.s. counting on a designer who’s always too busy)

(I even designed my own literary blog from zero. See it here.)

This is going to sound uncool and time-consuming and not a low-hanging fruit but…

In order to become a good Meta ad manager, you’ve got to become the creative director, copywriter, and designer.

When hiring a Meta Ads Specialist/Expert, I always expect them to be great at campaign management and at least two more things, e.g. creative director and copywriter. Alternatively, you can hire each one separately (but that’s just expensive.)

2. Collect ideas in a structured way

As you can probably tell, I’m all for organising marketing work. And I apply the same approach to my design work.

Tip 1: Whenever I run out of ideas, I scroll my favourite brands’ Meta Ad Libraries. My go-to brands include Squarespace, Canva, Grammarly, Revolut, Deliveroo, Vinted, Shopify, Spotify, and so on.

Tip 2: Create a Figma file where you design your ad creatives. Add all your ad example screenshots and other ideas into the file, so that you never run out of ideas.

For example, the ads below that I designed for Arbonics were inspired by the Meta ad creatives by other brands in completely different industries.

3. Report on every single ad creative experiment

While it would be so convenient to just launch new ad creatives, let them run for a while (if they deliver good results), and soon replace them with new ones, there’s also a benefit to proper reporting.

If you document your Meta ad creative experiments properly, you’ll get:

1. A long-term overview of everything you’ve ever tested.
2. A quick comparison of the experiments’ and creatives KPIs
3. A collection of takeaways that helps you become better and not repeat the same mistake twice

I like to use Google Docs or Notion to document the hypothesis, results, and takeaways of my Meta ad experiments.

I also maintain a Google Sheets doc where I add each experiment’s per-ad KPIs (example below).

Documenting each week’s experiment takes me about 50 minutes. It’s well worth the time as designing and launching ads takes 5-10x as much time. By having a better understanding of what works, I’ll save hours and hours.

Want more Meta ad creative tips?

Check out this article with 205+ Meta ad examples to get your brain started in ideation.

The post Improve Your Meta Ad Creatives in 3 Steps appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

All those campaign objectives, tens of targeting options, A/B testing features…

So what is the best way to structure your Facebook ad campaigns? What is the approach used by the top agencies and Facebook ad experts?

To be honest, some people who like to create tens of campaigns… And then there are the advertisers who believe that the opposite – having max 3 campaigns globally – works. 🤷

Personally, I am somewhere in between. I like to have campaigns split by countries, but I don’t like to set up a different campaign for every single niche audience.

As I figured this might be relevant to many advertisers, big and small, running Facebook ads, I’m going to share my approach.

You’ll find answers to the following questions:

• What is the best Meta ad campaign structure?
• How to select the right Campaign Objective for your campaign?
• On which events should you optimize your campaigns?
• Which target audiences to get started with and to experiment with?
• How to name your campaigns, ad sets, and ads for fast reporting?

So let’s take a look at how to set up your Facebook ad campaigns up for success.

What is a good Facebook ad campaign structure?

After working on Facebook ad campaign audits for 20+ brands while having weekly calls with Facebook reps, here are Facebook campaign structure best practices that deliver good results.

• Have fewer campaigns with broader audiences.
• Trust Facebook’s algorithms to do the targeting and optimization for you.
• Put a lot of emphasis on having good ad creatives.

One more thing that many PPC advertisers forget: You should not use the same campaign structure as you’ve used for Google ads on Facebook. It doesn’t work.

When it comes to Facebook ads, having fewer ad campaigns is not lazy, it’s smart.

Here’s the high-level Facebook ad campaign structure that I always use:

• Set up campaigns per country or region
• Create separate campaigns for prospecting and remarketing

You can also add brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns on top of prospecting and remarketing. The below chart by KlientBoost explains the 4 stages really well.

Create campaigns for multiple funnel stages. – Image source

Take a quick crash course in Facebook analytics by learning about these 15 Facebook ad metrics and KPIs.

Create a separate set of ad campaigns for each market

Why do I like splitting Facebook ad campaigns per country or region? There are a few reasons for that:

1. Countries have different ad costs. 

A click in the US might cost 5x as much as in say Lithuania. If you put these countries into the same campaign, Facebook is likely to spend 80% of ad budget in Lithuania as it seems like the cost-per-result is cheaper there.

2. The reporting and budgeting will be easier

Having separate campaigns per country will also make the reporting a lot easier – you can immediately see in which markets there’s a good product-market fit.

Also, you can easily define on campaign level how much money you want to spend on advertising in each country.

3. Your campaigns won’t get messy

If you add a lot of different countries to the same campaign, you can end up with a lot of different ad sets or ad designs. 

Especially if you want to use ads in local languages, it’s better to create a separate campaign for each market.

So how will the high-level campaign structure look like?

For each country, you should have the following Facebook ad campaigns:

• Prospecting campaigns
• Remarketing campaigns
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them)
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them)

When it comes to the budget split, I usually go for:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I don’t usually use them): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I usually use them): 0-10%

Let’s take a closer look at each of the campaign types and a few different ideas for setting them up.

Facebook prospecting campaigns’ structure

The prospecting campaign is a Facebook ad campaign that reaches a wide audience and attracts people who are potentially interested in your product. 

These people have not yet heard of your brand, so you’re trying to convert a cold audience into customers.

Usually, the prospecting-level ad creatives introduce your product’s benefits or show how great it looks. Like these two ads examples…

Prospecting-level Facebook ad examples.

If your product’s entry barrier is low, e.g. you’re promoting a free mobile app or run ads for your online store, prospecting campaigns will already bring a lot of new customers.

If your product has a longer sales cycle, e.g. software and B2B products, you can use prospecting ads to lead people to your website and convert them with remarketing campaigns.

Facebook campaign structure for prospecting ads

Here’s the general prospecting campaign structure that I always use.

• There are two ad sets: one with a broad audience and another with (1% or 5%) Lookalike audience.
• Both broad and lookalike ad sets have the exact same ad creatives inside them.

Sometimes, I add ad sets with special interest-based audiences (if I want to show these audiences special ad creatives that are more relevant to them).

And by “broad audience” I really mean BROAD. 🌍

For example, if I’m advertising a consumer-facing mobile app, I would target everyone aged from 18-55 in a specific country, optimize the campaign on in-app events, and let Facebook algorithms find the most relevant target audience for the ads.

The best ad campaign objective for prospecting campaigns is one that best reflects what you want to achieve:

• If you want to lead people to your website, use “Traffic” objective
• If you want people to complete an action, e.g. a purchase or mobile app install, use the “Conversions” objective

Suggested reading: Learn more about Facebook mobile app install ads.

Case study: Scheduled vs 24/7 ad delivery

Here’s one more proof that less optimization = better results.

We did a test with a client and the results were pretty staggering: a 300% difference in ROAS. 

💸 The country was the US, the product was SaaS, the test period was Mon-Thu of 2 consecutive test weeks.

WEEK 1: We used a Daily budget and didn’t use a custom ad delivery schedule.

WEEK 2: We used a Lifetime budget and scheduled ad delivery for Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm. (The total spent budget is higher as we spent more during the reported Mon-Thu period)

As you can see from the table below, the ads that were running daily with no restrictions delivered a higher ROI.

Key takeaways:

➟ Sometimes, high-ROAS conversions happen during non-business hours.

➟ It is better to keep Facebook ad campaigns targeting as broad and the ad delivery as unlimited as possible (use all placements, target entire countries + optimize on conversions)

We also ran the same test in other markets, the results were similar.

Keep your Facebook prospecting campaigns broad and don’t overdo with all the special optimization hacks you read in blogs. 😉

Facebook remarketing campaigns’ structure

The remarketing campaigns target people who have already visited your website or showed interest in some other way (e.g. watched a brand awareness video or downloaded an e-book). 

The goal of this campaign is to convert those lukewarm audiences into customers.

The ad creatives in your remarketing campaigns can be different from prospecting campaigns. Here, you should give people an extra incentive to complete the signup or purchase.

For example, Restream is offering a 20% discount from the subscription.

The most fool-proof remarketing audience that you can create for your Facebook ad campaigns is past 30 days website visitors.

Here are some other Facebook Custom Audiences you could include in remarketing campaigns:

• People who have watched 50% or more of your video ads
• People who have visited your Pricing page
• People who have started the signup process, but didn’t complete it
• People who have visited specific landing pages or blog articles (so that you can show them ads with a custom message around specific topics)

Personally, I like to create 1 remarketing campaign per country with a separate ad for every retargeting audience. This way, I can get a quick overview of how each audience performs.

Facebook campaign structure for remarketing ads

Here’s the general remarketing campaign structure I like to use:

Example Facebook remarketing campaign structure.

• There is one campaign per country: as I like to track per-country results from all campaigns (prospecting, remarketing, etc.) together
• All ad sets include the same ads or if you target special landing page visitors, that ad set’s creatives could be different

When setting up remarketing Facebook campaign, I usually go for “Conversions” campaign objective. Other options I sometimes use are “Traffic” and “Reach.”

Tip: The “Reach” objective is useful if you have a big remarketing or re-engagement audience and most people there would convert anyway.

In this case, there’s no point to optimize on conversions as Facebook would show your ads to people who would take action also without seeing the ad. To reach every target audience member, you can optimize the ad-set-level ad delivery to “Daily Unique Reach” – to that each audience member will see your ad once a day, regardless of how likely they are to convert. 💡

Remarketing ad campaigns’ frequency

Remarketing ad sets tend to be the most profitable ones. The ROI of a remarketing campaign can be 10x than that of a prospecting campaign.

So of course, you’d like to add more budget to remarketing campaigns. 🔥

Thing is, you only have a limited number of people in the remarketing audiences. And if you add too much budget to the campaign, the same people will see your ads over and over and over and over again.

At some point, you may reach the ad frequency of 10 points in a 14-day period. This means that on average, people in your remarketing audiences have seen your ads for 10 or more times.

And you know what? – This is fine.

When running Facebook remarketing campaigns for my clients, I usually see that a 14-day frequency of up to 15 points keeps delivering results at a positive ROI. It won’t drive up your Facebook ads cost.

You may bother some people, but in the end, showing more ads to your remarketing audiences pays off. There’s also more research to prove this point:

Meta ad campaign structure for brand awareness and re-engagement campaigns

I won’t stop on these two for long, as they’re both very similar to one of the campaign setups that we already covered.

Facebook brand awareness campaigns have a similar setup to prospecting campaigns. 

The main difference is the event that you optimize your campaign on + the results that you’ll measure.

For brand awareness campaigns, you could use the obvious “Brand Awareness” campaign objective, although options like “Traffic” and “Video Views” may deliver even better results, depending on your product and ad creatives.

Quite often, Facebook brand awareness ad creatives are videos. And you can target both a broad audience or your existing user base to remind them of your product.

For example, this Facebook ad by Oreo could be considered a brand awareness ad: It reminds you how much you love the 🍪 without directly leading you to an online store to buy it. (Although you may go to the grocery store to get it very soon) 🏃

When it comes to Facebook re-engagement campaigns, they’re targeted at your existing user base: to deliver a positive brand experience, educate them, or advertise special offers.

The campaign structure is very similar to remarketing campaigns: you will have one campaign per country and one ad set per each custom audience.

Potential target audiences for re-engagement campaigns:

• People who used your product/service/app, but haven’t done it for the past 30 days
• Past purchasers of your online store that haven’t made an order in the past 60 days
• People who were talking to your sales team 60+ days ago and didn’t make a purchase back them

For example, this Cos SALE ad could be shown to people who have bought during SALE in the past, but haven’t made a purchase in the previous 90 days.

5 best practices for improved Facebook ad campaign structure

Now that you’re aware of the basics, let’s cover 5 additional suggestions that help you improve your current Facebook ad structure or set up new campaigns from scratch.

1. Run the same campaigns and ad sets over a long period of time.

Instead of setting up a new Facebook ad campaign or adding new ad sets every time you want to add a new audience or ad creatives, edit the existing ones.

Using a single campaign over a long period of time is critical for Facebook’s algorithms to learn from the data. If you’re creating new campaigns every few weeks, you will lose out on this.

2. Less is more

Even if you have 20 amazing ideas for different target audiences or visuals, you will probably get better results if you keep the amount of assets lower.

The way I like to work with ad creatives is to always have 5-8 different ad creatives per ad set. And every time I add new ones, I pause some older ones that don’t perform as well.

3. Let Facebook’s algorithms do the work for you

There are 100+ Facebook ad hacks out there, some suggesting you to set a custom schedule, others showing how to leave out some ad placements.

More often than not, such hacks will actually decrease your results. That’s because you’ll be limiting your ads’ delivery without knowing if it actually helps. You’ll be better off using automated ad placements and 24/7 ad delivery and letting Facebook algorithms do the work for you.

However, for example, if I know that 80% of a company’s customers have a certain age or gender, I usually narrow down the target audience to reach a lower CPA.

4. Review your Facebook ad attribution window

Facebook attributes an action to your ad if someone viewed or clicked your ad and then took an action. 

By default, your Facebook ad account’s attribution window is set to 1-day view and 28-day click, which means that you see attributed actions that happened 1 day after someone viewed your ad and 28 days after someone clicked your ad.

To get a more accurate view of Facebook’s real contribution to your marketing results, change the attribution window smaller, to 1-day view and 7-day click.

Here’s how to do it: 

• Go to Facebook Ads Manager
• Navigate to Settings from the main menu
• Click “Edit” under Attribution
• Select your preferred Attribution Window

5. Name your Facebook campaigns in a systematic way

When your Facebook ad account has a complex international campaign structure, it will make your life a lot easier if all the campaigns and ad sets (and ads) are named by the same convention.

Here’s the framework I like to use:

Campaign level: Country-code_Campaign-type_Campaign-objective_Attribution-window. Example: US_Prospecting_Conversions_7days

Ad set level: Country-code_Audience_Delivery-optimization. Example1: US_20-55_Broad_Landing-page-views. Example 2: US_2%-Lookalike_Purchases

Ad set level: AD-number_Format_Content. Example: AD3_Static-image_20%-Discount-pink

Later on, you’ll be able to quickly filter out your Facebook campaigns based on the country, campaign objective, and edit the ads with the same number or content across ad sets on one go.

—

Hope that you got some inspiration for improving your Facebook campaigns. 🙌 If you want to learn about more best practices, check out the Facebook ad size guide with all the top formats covered.

If you have more questions regarding Facebook ad campaign structure, reach out on LinkedIn.

The post Facebook Ad Campaign Structure – Complete Guide appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.