Set up your campaign structure

Campaign structure decides whether B2B ad data tells a clear story or becomes an expensive riddle. I once inherited an account where every campaign used “Q3 push” as its name. Reports looked impressive, yet no one knew which spend filled the pipeline.

This chapter fixes that chaos. You will pick one objective per campaign, apply a strict naming convention, split budget into clear categories and build the account so reporting answers real business questions. The result is fewer, cleaner campaigns that surface insight fast.

Set one objective per campaign and let the platform optimise for it. Awareness needs impressions or video completions. Consideration measures clicks or landing-page views. Conversion focuses on qualified leads or opportunities.

Mixing objectives confuses algorithms and muddies analysis. If you must serve multiple goals, create separate campaigns. A lead-gen form should never share the same budget pot as a remarketing video.

Document the chosen objective in a campaign brief before building ads. This habit prevents late-stage revisions that fracture learning.

The objective now anchors the campaign. Next you need a naming convention that keeps every test readable at a glance.

A strict naming format turns the account into a live database. Use five tokens: stage, audience, hook, format and date. An example reads “SA_SaaSFin_CostLeak_Carousel_2025-05”.

Stage codes awareness level, audience names the segment, hook records the angle, format notes the creative type and date marks the start month. Every asset—campaign, ad set and ad—inherits these tags.

Avoid spaces and random capitalisation; filters break when labels wobble. Store the key in a shared document so new team members tag correctly from day one.

Clear names make budget analysis easy, which is the next piece of the structure puzzle.

Divide spend into three buckets. Learning receives twenty per cent for fresh hooks. Scaling holds sixty per cent for proven ads. Retention keeps twenty per cent for low-funnel retargeting.

Allocate budgets at the campaign level, not ad set, to respect algorithm learning phases. Move ads from learning to scaling only after they clear cost-per-objective benchmarks for seven consecutive days.

Pause underperformers rather than trimming bids. Hard stops reset learning less than daily budget tweaks and keep results cleaner for comparison.

With budgets set, you can design the account for effortless reporting, covered in the final section.

Build one ad set per unique audience. Nest multiple creatives inside each ad set to isolate audience performance from creative variables. Use custom columns that mirror your naming tokens: stage, audience and hook.

Create saved views for each funnel stage. A single click then shows spend, cost per result and pipeline value per stage. Export reports weekly and archive raw data. Historical snapshots let you track learning without platform noise.

Add UTM parameters that replicate the naming convention. Analytics tools then align with ad dashboards, closing the loop between click and revenue.

The structure now feeds insight automatically, saving hours and guiding smart optimisation.

One objective per campaign, disciplined naming, planned budget buckets and a reporting-first build turn ad accounts from messy spreadsheets into decision engines.

Adopting this structure limits noise, speeds learning and lets you scale only what proves profit. Next we will craft scroll-stopping creatives that amplify these clean foundations.