Start with One Campaign. Seriously.

If you're not running cost controls (you’re probably not, and you probably shouldn’t), this is the structure you should be using. No complicated funnels. No stacked campaigns. No old-school scaling logic. Just one clean system that does the work for you.

For most brands, all you need is a single Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) campaign. That means your budget lives at the campaign level, not the ad set level. Meta then decides where to allocate spend based on performance.

What does that look like in practice?

Every time you launch a new batch of creatives, you launch a new ad set inside that one campaign.

That’s it.
No splitting creative tests across campaigns. Just 3–5 new creatives, and a new ad set. You can read more about that process here, but the short form is that each ad set has a 'theme' or specific idea.

So if you want to test an angle where you highlight your tee is 100% cotton, you’d make 3 creatives: a UGC video, a static photo ad with callouts, and a UGC photos with callouts.
Then next week you want to test an angle where you're offering 10% off hoodies for autumn. Same idea. A New UGC video with a hook, product value prop static ad, and a street interview ad. That’s another new ad set.

Every test stays clean and isolated.

Never add new ads to an old ad set. Each batch deserves its own space. That way you test an idea and clearly see which creative angle within that batch performed strongest.

Let Meta Handle the Budget. You Focus on the Creative.

Here’s where CBO shines.

Meta takes your total campaign budget and automatically allocates spend across ad sets. It will spend more on what performs, less on what doesn’t. Real time. Without you manually turning knobs.

That means no overspending on bad performers. No under-spending on breakout creatives. Meta handles budget distribution based on return.

Let’s say your average ROAS across the campaign is 3.0 (Meaning is you spend $1 you get $3 back). If one ad set is consistently at 1.0, Meta will reduce its spend. If another is performing at 5.0, Meta will ramp it up. This makes your entire system more efficient without intervention.

And compared to ad set budget optimization (ABO), CBO reacts faster and smarter. Humans guess. Algorithms know. I promise you their algorithm is smarter than you and me. If you run ads, you will upload a creative you think is great and it will flop. Don’t be tempted to push its budget. Meta knows best.

Creative Is King. Every Ad Set Is a Test.

This entire structure is built around creative. Not audiences. Not exclusions. Not funnels.

Each ad set exists to test a single idea, delivered through multiple formats, tones, and executions.

Let’s take a real example from Nude Project’s recent drop. Their one core message for the ad set is “The new collection is here.”
 But that message was delivered five very different ways, all inside the same ad set.

Same ad set. Same message. But five lenses, each built for a different customer.

This is what creative testing actually looks like. You’re not just testing colors or headlines. You’re testing how different people connect with the same idea.

Meta knows who’s more likely to watch reels. Who responds better to minimal design. Who taps carousel two, not four.
It uses their behavior to match them to the right variation.
That’s the power of letting creative do the work. And inside the ad account, one of these will win. Sometimes two.
 But every version teaches you something about your customer, and that’s where the scale comes from.

Forget Targeting Tricks. Let Creative Do the Work.

As we just saw with Nude Project the creative does the targeting now. Not interest groups. Not lookalikes. Not stacked exclusions. Use Meta’s default Advantage+ Audience for every ad set. The only exclusion you should run is for previous purchasers.

Why?

Because Meta already knows who is most likely to convert. Trying to guess or force it into a specific audience just limits its accuracy. If you’re launching an ad around your tee being 100% organic cotton and having a lovely boxy fit, the copy and creative will attract people who care about that look. Meta will find more of them.

That’s the system and it’s beautifully simple.

When to Break the One Campaign Rule

This is where structure matters.

If you’re only selling to one country, the above system is all you need.

But if you’re advertising across multiple countries or have a multi-niche store, then you want to split by niche and by country.
Let’s say you’ve founded an outdoor clothing brand using our catalog and you sell ski, snowboard, hiking, and biking graphic tees. When summer rolls around, you may want to start cutting your ski and snowboard campaign budgets while increasing your biking and hiking campaigns as their relevance is seasonal.

Same goes for international campaigns. Shipping to Australia with Airventory costs $3.99 for a tee, while it only costs $2.99 to the USA. During BFCM you’re able to offer free shipping to the USA but not Australia, so your United States campaign performs better, and you want to give it more budget.

These things are impossible to do if everything’s jammed into one campaign. Keep them separated.

So here’s the layout:
One CBO campaign per niche per country
Run creative tests based on the same idea inside their own ad sets
Simple. Scalable. Clear.

You want to make sure each campaign has access to at least half you AOV (Average order Value) daily. If you have a small budget its best to start with a few countries and one niche. You can also combine similarly located countries. i.e. combining Europe into one is generally okay when your spending less than $1000 a day on ads. Its best to not combine niche's however.

Final Recap: The Only Structure That Scales

1. One campaign per product or country

2. CBO only. No ABO.

3. One ad set = one creative batch

4. Advantage+ Audience with only past customers excluded

5. Let Meta allocate spend based on performance
   
   
   

This structure is the only one you need. From small clothing brands to billion-dollar companies, they all use this. If anyone says otherwise, they’re probably trying to overcomplicate things to sell you their ad agency.

It gives your best creative room to scale and keeps your budget working toward acquisition, not wasted complexity. If your account is still split by funnel stage or built around targeting tricks, it’s time to evolve. With the increasing capabilities of AI and Meta's technology, ads on their platforms have become much less about the backend setup and much more about the creative. Which is great news for people like us who aren’t very technical.