Understanding Campaigns and Ad Groups

When you run advertising in Ads Manager, everything is organized into two levels: campaigns and groups. They're not two separate options — you always use both. Campaigns set the overall parameters; groups define how those parameters are applied to your stores.

Campaign structure in Ads Manager

A campaign is the top-level container for your advertising. It controls:

• Campaign type — Sponsored Listings or Promotions

• Name — for your own internal organization

• Schedule — start date and optional end date

• Store participation — which of your locations are eligible to run under this campaign

• Budget — total or weekly spend for the campaign

• Campaign Pacing (Sponsored Listings only) — choose how your budget will be managed over the length of your campaign

An ad group lives inside a campaign and controls how the campaign runs across your stores. Every campaign requires at least one ad group. Ad groups control:

• Store selection — which stores from the campaign actually run (can be all of them, or a subset)

• Bid strategy — automatic or custom

• Dayparting — specific days or hours to run ads

• Audience targeting — who sees your ads based on order behavior, membership status, etc.

Multiple ad groups within the same campaign share the same budget and schedule.

Example

Campaign: Summer Sponsored Listings

• Group: New Customers

• Group: Existing Customers

• Group: Lapsed Customers

All three ad groups run on the same budget and dates. Each targets a different audience.

When to use multiple ad groups

Since ad groups share a campaign's budget and schedule, you can use them to run different strategies in parallel without managing separate campaigns.

Common reasons to split into multiple ad groups:

• Different store subsets with different strategies — Put your top-performing locations in one group with a higher custom bid and your remaining stores in another with automatic bidding.

• Testing audiences — Run the same stores against different audience segments to see which drives better results.

• Daypart differences — If your locations span time zones, give East Coast and West Coast stores separate groups with different daypart windows.

• Comparing tactics — Isolate one variable (bid, audience, or daypart) per group so you can read performance clearly.

• Separating offers — Run different Promotion strategies for different customer cohorts

When to create a separate campaign

Use a new campaign when you need a completely separate budget, a different schedule, or a different set of stores that shouldn't share spend with your existing campaign.

For example, use separate campaigns when:

• Different store groups have different budget line items

• A franchise group, market, or region needs its own budget

• A campaign needs a distinct flight date or business objective
  

What do do next

• Learn how to use targeting for campaigns

• Learn about Ads’ reporting capabilities