Write a plan for one product's campaigns before you build anything.
Before you open the ad manager, set aside about twenty-five minutes and a blank page. On that page you will plan your first paid campaign: one goal, one conversion, one platform, one campaign, two or three ad sets that each answer a question, consistent names, and two or three planned ads per ad set. The test of the page is that someone else could build the campaign from it.
Most people start by opening the ad manager, clicking Create and answering each screen in the order the platform asks. The campaign that comes out is built from whatever seemed reasonable at each step, with no plan behind it. Deciding on paper first costs nothing, and you can see the whole plan at once. You will build from this page in modules six and seven, so keep it.
Write the business goal for the next few months as one sentence. Include a number if you have one. Under it, write the single action on your website or app that shows a customer is moving towards that goal. This is your conversion. The platform treats it as the target and looks for people likely to take it.
Lesson 2.1, "The objective tells the platform what to find", gave you the rule for picking it: choose the deepest action you can measure reliably. If your tracking is not set up yet, write the action down anyway. Module three sets up tracking before any money is spent.
Write one goal only. A first campaign with one clear conversion is easier to judge than one chasing sales, leads and followers at the same time.
Ask where your buyers are when they have the problem you solve. If people search for what you sell, Google Search is a natural place to start. If people need to see the product before they want it, Meta or TikTok may suit you better. Lesson 4.1, "Intent versus interruption", goes into more depth on when search or discovery platforms fit a business.
Stay on one platform unless your budget is big enough to test two fairly. A small budget split across two platforms usually leaves neither with enough data. It is the same trap as having too many ad sets, which lesson 2.3, "Keep the structure simple enough to read", describes. Once you have the platform, pick the objective on it that matches your conversion, and plan one campaign.
An ad set (Google calls it an ad group) is a unit inside a campaign. For the first test, plan two or three at most, and write next to each one the question it is meant to answer. Most people skip the question, and without it the results are hard to read. Some examples of questions:
Do parents of Primary 5 children respond better than parents of Primary 6 children? Does a broad audience with good creative find buyers more cheaply than an audience built from interests? On Google, 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 ad set.
Name the campaign, each ad set and each ad using the naming pattern from lesson 2.3. Then plan two or three ads per ad set. Do not write the ads yet; module five covers writing them. For now, note what each ad will be about.
Farah owns a small online shop selling modest workwear. Her goal is to grow online orders from new customers over the next three months, with a test budget of S$900 for the first month (an example figure only). Her conversion is a purchase on her online shop, recorded with the order value so she sees revenue as well as the number of orders.
She picked Meta, because her customers usually find clothes while scrolling Instagram and rarely search for them by name. Her objective is Sales, with purchase as the event the platform optimises for. The campaign is named meta-sales-newcust-2026-03 and uses a shared budget: one budget at campaign level, so the system can move money to the ad set that sells.
Her plan has two ad sets. Ad set 1, meta-sales-firstjob-2026-03, targets women in Singapore starting their first office job. Its question is whether they buy at a lower cost than returning workers. Ad set 2, meta-sales-returning-2026-03, targets women returning to work after a career break and asks the same question from the other side. Each ad set has three ads: one about fit and sizing, one about breathable fabric for the commute, and one showing a full outfit for a first week at work.
Farah also left three ideas out. She thought about one ad set per age band but dropped it, since she would have written the same ads for each. She thought about separate campaigns for Facebook and Instagram and dropped those for the same reason. She skipped an awareness campaign because her goal is orders, and S$900 would not cover two jobs. Each line she kept answers a question she cares about.
A finished plan fits on one page. Someone else could build the campaign from it without asking what you meant. Every ad set has a question, every name follows the pattern, and the conversion is named precisely enough to set up in module three. If your plan runs past one page, you are probably testing too much at once.
Take one product or service from your own business and work through the four steps: set one goal and one conversion, choose one platform and one campaign, plan a small number of ad sets with a question for each, then check the page against the standard above. In the activity below you will write the plan out in full.
On one page, plan the campaigns for one product: the goal, the conversion, the platform, the objective, the structure, the names, and the question each part answers.
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