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
Campaign | Ad Group | |
Controls | Budget, schedule, eligible stores | Store selection, bids, targeting, dayparting |
Required | Yes | Yes — at least one per campaign |
How many | One per advertising effort | As many as your strategy needs |
What do do next
Learn how to use targeting for campaigns
Learn about Ads’ reporting capabilities
