Older advice told you to build dozens of tightly segmented ad sets. That advice is out of date. The systems now perform better with fewer, larger ad sets and more room to find people themselves.
The three levels
- Campaign: the objective — usually sales, or leads. This is where the goal lives.
- Ad set: budget, audience, placements. This is where the learning happens.
- Ad: the creative itself.
Consolidate
A common failure is ten ad sets at $10 a day. Each one needs a meaningful number of conversions per week to leave the learning phase, and none of them will get there. One ad set at $100 a day with several creatives inside it learns far faster and usually performs better.
Rule of thumb: fewer ad sets, each with enough budget to produce a reasonable number of conversions weekly, with three to six creatives inside each to test.
Let placements be automatic
Manually excluding placements is usually a way of paying more for the ones you kept. Start with automatic placements and only intervene when the data — not your taste — shows a problem.
Stop editing mid-flight
Every meaningful edit restarts the learning. Changing budgets by large amounts, swapping audiences, or editing creative resets the process and wastes the data you just paid for. Decide, launch, and leave it alone for a week unless something is actually broken.
Try it
Look at your current setup and count ad sets and daily budget per ad set. If any ad set cannot produce a handful of conversions a week at that budget, consolidate it into another.