You will be able to explain what is set at each level of a campaign on Meta, Google and TikTok.
The first time most people open an ad manager, they see a screen full of settings and assume every one of them needs an answer straight away. Farah did. She spent an evening on her first Meta campaign, changed the budget three times, moved the location setting twice, and still could not say afterwards which choice lived where. When results came in, she did not know which knob to turn.
The settings are less chaotic than they look. Meta, Google and TikTok all organise a campaign into three levels, and each level controls a different kind of decision. Once you know what sits where, the screens make more sense, and you can change one thing without accidentally changing another.
At the top is the campaign. This is where you choose the objective from lesson 2.1, The objective tells the platform what to find. Everything beneath it inherits that instruction, so a campaign set to sales has sales as the goal for all its ad sets and ads.
The campaign level often holds the budget too. Google sets the budget at the campaign level. Meta and TikTok let you choose: you can set one budget for the whole campaign and let the platform share it between ad sets, or set a separate budget on each ad set. The current names for these options change, so check the help centre, but the choice is the same idea. One shared budget lets the system move money towards what is working. Separate budgets give you control over how much each part spends.
Below the campaign sits the level Meta and TikTok call the ad set and Google calls the ad group. This is where you say who should see the ads and where.
On Meta and TikTok, the ad set holds the audience: location, age, language, any interests or custom audiences, and how much freedom the platform has to look beyond them. It holds the placements, meaning where the ads can appear, such as Facebook feed, Instagram Stories or Reels on Meta. It also holds the schedule and, if you chose that way, the budget. For conversion campaigns, it is usually where you pick the exact event to optimise for, such as a purchase.
On Google Search, the ad group holds the keywords: the searches you want to appear for. Some settings that Meta keeps in the ad set, such as location and language, sit at Google's campaign level instead. Module seven covers that structure in detail.
The middle level is the one you will use most when testing. If Farah wants to compare women starting their first office job with women returning to work, she puts each group in its own ad set. The results for each then appear separately.
At the bottom is the ad. This is the creative: the headline, the main text, the image or video, the call-to-action button and the link to your landing page. On Google Search it is the headlines and descriptions of a responsive search ad, plus the final URL.
An ad set or ad group usually holds a few ads. The platform shows the ones it predicts will do best, which is one more reason the creative matters so much. Module five covers how to write them.
A simple way to hold it all in your head: the campaign says why, the middle level says who and where, and the ad says what.
Here is why the levels matter beyond tidiness. Each platform's system learns as your campaign runs. It works out which people respond, at which times, to which ads. That learning sits mostly at the middle level on Meta and TikTok, and it builds on the settings above it.
A change at a level affects everything below it. Change the campaign's objective or optimisation event and every ad set under it is now aiming at a different target, so what they learned about the old one is far less useful. Change an ad set's audience or make a large budget change and that ad set has to re-learn who responds. Changing a single ad usually disturbs less, though Meta counts adding new ads as a significant edit for the ad set too.
Lesson 8.3, The learning phase: why results wobble at first, explains this period in detail. For now the practical point is simple. Decide the higher levels carefully before you build, because they are the expensive ones to change later.
Farah's second attempt was calmer. She wrote the campaign on paper first: one sales campaign, two ad sets for two kinds of customer, three ads in each. When she built it, every setting had an obvious home.
Do the same now for a campaign you might run. In the activity below you will sketch the three levels and write what you would set at each one.
Draw the three levels for one campaign you might run and write what you would set at each level.
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