You will produce a written plan for one product's campaigns before you build anything.
The usual way to start paid ads is to open the ad manager and click Create. The screens ask questions in their own order, you answer them as they come, and by the end you have a campaign that reflects whatever seemed reasonable at each step. It is much easier to make good decisions on paper first, where nothing costs money and you can see the whole plan at once.
This exercise produces that paper. It takes about twenty-five minutes, and it becomes the reference you build from in modules six and seven.
Write your business goal for the next few months in one sentence, with a number if you have one. Under it, write the single action on your website or app that tells you a customer is moving towards that goal, because the platform will treat it as your conversion and hunt for people likely to take it.
Lesson 2.1, The objective tells the platform what to find, gave the rule: the deepest action you can measure reliably. If you have not set up tracking yet, write the action anyway. Module three gets it working before any money is spent.
Resist the urge to list several goals. A first campaign with one clear conversion is easier to judge than one trying to win sales, leads and followers at the same time.
Choose where to start. Ask where your buyers are when they have the problem you solve. If people search for what you sell, Google Search is a natural start. If they need to see it before they want it, Meta or TikTok may suit you better. Lesson 4.1, Intent versus interruption, explains the difference in more depth.
Start on one platform unless you have enough budget to give two a fair test. Spreading a small budget across two platforms usually means neither gets enough data, the same trap as too many ad sets in lesson 2.3, Keep the structure simple enough to read.
Then pick the objective on that platform that matches your conversion, and plan one campaign.
Plan no more than two or three ad sets or ad groups for the first test. For each one, write the question it is meant to answer. This is the part most people skip, and it is the part that makes results readable.
A question might be: do parents of Primary 5 children respond better than parents of Primary 6 children? Or: does a broad audience with good creative find buyers more cheaply than an audience built from interests? On Google, it might be: which of two keyword themes brings bookings at a lower cost?
If you cannot write a question for an ad set, merge it with another one.
Before you leave this step, apply your naming pattern from lesson 2.3 to the campaign, each ad set and each ad. Plan two or three ads per ad set. You do not need to write them yet; module five does that. Just note what each will be about.
Here is Farah's one-page plan for her modest workwear shop. Treat the budget as an example figure only.
Goal: grow online orders from new customers over the next three months, with an example test budget of S$900 for the first month. Conversion: a purchase on her online shop, recorded with the order value so she can see revenue as well as orders. Platform: Meta, since her customers usually discover clothes while scrolling Instagram and rarely search for them by name. Objective: Sales, with purchase as the event the platform optimises for. Campaign: meta-sales-newcust-2026-03, with one shared budget so the system can move money towards the ad set that sells. Ad set 1: meta-sales-firstjob-2026-03. Women in Singapore starting their first office job. Question: do they buy at a lower cost than returning workers? Ad set 2: meta-sales-returning-2026-03. Women returning to work after a career break. Same question from the other side. Ads: three per ad set. One about fit and sizing, one about breathable fabric for the commute, one showing a full outfit for a first week at work.
Look at what Farah left out. She had thought about an ad set for each age band and a separate campaign for Facebook and Instagram, and dropped both because she would have written the same ads for all of them. She also skipped an awareness campaign, since her goal is orders and S$900 would not stretch to two jobs. Every line that survived answers a question she cares about.
A finished plan fits on one page. Someone else could read it and build the campaign without asking you what you meant. Every ad set has a question, every name follows your pattern, and the conversion is named precisely enough to set up in module three. If your plan runs past a page, you are probably testing too much at once.
Take one product or service from your own business and work through the four steps. In the activity below you will write the plan out in full.
Write a one-page plan for one product with goal, conversion, platform, objective, structure, names and the question each part answers.
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