Ad Sets and Creatives

A campaign is not one thing. Inside it sits an ad set, which holds the audience, the budget and the schedule, and inside that sit the ads, the actual images and words people see. Once a campaign is live, this is the level where the useful changes happen.

Two ads in the same ad set compete for the same budget in front of the same audience, which is how you find out whether the photo beats the artwork without splitting a campaign in two and halving what each one learns.

Where to find it

Open a published campaign from Ads then Campaigns. Below the metric cards you will see the Ad sets and ads panel. Drafts do not show it, because there is nothing live to act on yet.

Beside the heading sits a ? explaining what an ad set is, and next to that the ad network's own verdict on the campaign: In review, Approved, Rejected or With issues.

What each ad set shows

• Its name and its current status.
• Its budget, either an amount and type of its own, or a note that the budget lives on the campaign.
• What it is optimising for, when the network reports it.
• A strip of figures: Spend, Impressions, Clicks, Conversions.

Changing an ad set budget

A Budget button appears only when the budget belongs to the ad set. On campaigns where the budget sits at the campaign level, the network will not accept a change here, so no button is offered.

1. Click Budget on the ad set.
2. Enter an Amount greater than zero.
3. Pick the Type. Daily spends up to that amount every day the ad set runs. Lifetime spends that much in total across the whole schedule, paced against the end date.
4. Click Save budget.

Pausing an ad set

Click Pause on the ad set to stop that audience being served, while leaving the rest of the campaign alone. The button becomes Resume to switch it back on.

This is the tool for a campaign running in several places at once, when one of them is burning budget and the others are working.

What each ad shows

• Its headline, or its name if it has none.
• Its status, and a second badge when the network disagrees with it. That second badge is the one to believe.
• A preview of the body copy.
• The same figures strip: spend, impressions, clicks, conversions.

Read down the list and the comparison writes itself. Two ads, one audience, one budget: the one with the better click-through rate is the one to put your money behind.

Adding a second creative

1. Click Add ad on the ad set.
2. Give it a Name. Internal only, never shown to anyone who sees the ad. Name it after what you are testing, like "Photo version".
3. Fill in the Headline and Body.
4. Pick the Button and set the Destination URL.
5. Add an Image, by uploading a file or pasting a link.
6. Add a Video if you want. On Meta the image then becomes the video's thumbnail, so a video needs both.
7. Click Add ad.

It goes live inside the same ad set, against the same audience and the same budget.

Editing an ad

Click the pencil on an ad to change its name, headline, body, button, destination or media, then Save ad. A field you leave empty is left as it was rather than cleared.

After you save, keep an eye on the verdict badge at the top of the panel. A network may look at a changed ad again before it carries on running.

Pausing or cancelling an ad

• The pause icon stops that single ad while the rest of the ad set keeps running. It becomes a play icon to resume.
• The bin icon cancels the ad for good. Its history stays on the campaign, but it will not run again.

Pause the loser of a test, and let the winner take the whole budget.

A simple testing routine

1. Publish the campaign with one ad and let it run long enough to gather clicks, usually two or three days.
2. Add a second ad to the same ad set, changing one thing.
3. Give both a few more days.
4. Pause the weaker one.
5. Add a third against the winner, and repeat.

Every round runs against the same audience, so the comparison stays honest, and the campaign keeps everything it has learned along the way.

Where to go next

• Publish, pause and archive from managing campaigns.
• Sharpen who the ad set is aimed at with custom audiences.
• Build the next campaign from creating a campaign.
• Back to the ads overview.