There are so many reasons to keep campaign construction simple, but the easiest of those reasons to understand is this…

All of your extra and unnecessary campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More, ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More, and ads, are sucking away your budgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More and either making it difficult to evaluate results or hurting your performance.

Limit the Number of Campaigns

If you don’t need to create those extra campaigns, don’t. It makes sense to create multiple campaigns that have different goals. But, avoid creating multiple campaigns that have overlapping goals.

In a perfect world, you could have one campaign for sales, one for leads, and one for top of funnel.

Limit the Number of Ad Sets

If you don’t need to create those extra ad sets, don’t. There was a time when this made a lot more sense. We created multiple ad sets to segment by optimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More, audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More, or even placementA placement is a location where your ad is shown. Examples include Facebook’s mobile Feed, Messenger, Instagram feed, Audience Network, right-hand column, and more. More. But doing this is far less necessary these days — though it hasn’t stopped advertisers from doing it.

Segmenting by audience is often overkill due to the expansion of targeting inputs — either because of Advantage+ Audience or one of the Advantage expansion products.

There are always exceptions, but make a conscious effort to limit unnecessary ad sets when possible.

Number of Ads

If you don’t need to create those extra ads, don’t. You should submit multiple copy and creative options, though there are some good, strategic ways to do it.

One is to create multiple ads within an ad set. But Meta says that there’s no benefit after you’ve created six. This only applies to manual campaigns and not Advantage+ Shopping, of course (Meta encourages more creative there).

You could otherwise use Dynamic Creative or the Text Variations feature.

Stretching Your Budget

Every time you create that extra campaign, ad set, or ad, it waters down your results. It makes them less meaningful. Small sample sizes mean that your evaluation can be altered drastically by a small handful of actions.

This added complexity impacts how much budget you can dedicate to each of your assets. Assuming you don’t have an unlimited budget, it’s the difference between spending $200 per day on one ad set of $20 per day on 10.

If your ad sets aren’t exiting the learning phase, you’re evaluating ads based on small sample sizes, or you’re not getting great results overall, start consolidating.

Your results are more likely to be meaningful and you may even improve performance.