7 Facebook Wishes For 2014

Facebook will launch an ad campaign structure this week that it says will improve how businesses organize, optimize, and measure their ads.

Facebook's traditional advertising configuration consisted of two levels: campaigns and ads. The social network will add a third level, called ad sets, which will roll out between March 4 and March 30.

Ad sets will fall under the campaign umbrella. Campaigns can have multiple ad sets, and ad sets can feature multiple ads, Facebook said. Adding this secondary layer will help businesses organize ad campaigns, which advertisers complained were messy and confusing.

[Not everything Facebook touches is gold. Read 10 Famous Facebook Flops.]

Once the changes launch, each ad set will have its own budget and schedule. Businesses can organize ad sets by audience segments -- for example, people who live near your store. Facebook said this will help businesses control the budgets for each audience and when customers will see their ads, as well as measure response. The ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set, according to Facebook.

The company explained in a blog post how businesses can set up a new ad campaign using the updated structure:

Facebook will migrate campaigns to the new structure when the update hits an ad account. The migration won't impact the delivery, spend, or performance of ads, Facebook said, and businesses will still have access to old campaign data.

Facebook will launch the campaign structure across all ad interfaces, including the Ads Create Tool, Ads Manager, and Power Editor, as well as third-party ad interfaces built by Preferred Marketing Developers.

Businesses can still plan future campaigns using the new structure as they await the account changeover.

To start, the business decides on its advertising objectives and creates campaigns for each one. Then it define the audience it wants to target with each objective, and it creates an ad set for each. Finally, the business creates multiple ads within each ad set and makes sure all are targeted to the same audience and have the same bid type. Facebook said this will help it optimize for the top-performing ads based on the advertiser's variations.

Engage with Oracle president Mark Hurd, NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle, General Motors CIO Randy Mott, Box founder Aaron Levie, UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh, GE Power CIO Jim Fowler, and other leaders of the Digital Business movement at the InformationWeek Conference and Elite 100 Awards Ceremony, to be held in conjunction with Interop in Las Vegas, March 31 to April 1, 2014. See the full agenda here.