Solved: Campaign Structure - Separate or Group Countries?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Some really good questions you're asking there, stuff that a lot of advertisers get wrong. Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on it.

The short answer is that you should almost never group different European countries together, especially if they have different cultures and economies. The temptation to exit the learning phase faster by pooling budgets is a trap that leads to wasted spend and misleading data. You're far better off with a slower, more deliberate country-specific approach that actually gives you meaningful insights you can scale.

Why Chasing a Faster Learning Phase is a Costly Mistake...

I see what you're getting at with the learning phase timings. The idea of getting stable results in 1-3 weeks instead of 4-8 weeks sounds great on paper. But you need to ask yourself: what is the algorithm actually *learning* when you lump a bunch of different countries together?

When you create one ad set targeting, say, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Sweden, you're not teaching the algorithm to find your ideal customer in Europe. You're teaching it to find the cheapest possible conversions within that mixed bag of an audience. It's a race to the bottom. The algorithm is a machine that follows instructions perfectly. Your instruction is "get me conversions for the lowest price", and it will do exactly that.

Inevitably, it'll discover that a conversion in Poland costs £5, while a conversion in Germany costs £25. So, where do you think it's going to spend the majority of your budget? It's going to pour money into Poland to get as many of those cheap conversions as possible to make the overall campaign CPA look good. Your campaign exits the learning phase, you see a "stable" CPA of £8, and you think you've cracked it. But in reality, you've spent 90% of your money in Poland and generated next to nothing from Germany, your potentially much larger and more lucrative market. The 'learning' is completely skewed and ultimately, useless. You've learned how to sell in Poland, not how to sell across Europe.

It's like trying to find the best restaurant in London by only visiting places that have no queue. You'll get food fast, sure, but you'll miss out on all the places that are actually worth waiting for. Slow, deliberate learning on a country-by-country basis is infinitely more valuable than quick, blended learning that tells you nothing of substance.

You're Right, Different Cultures Don't Optimise Well Together...

Your intuition is spot on. Countries with different cultures do not optimise well together, and it goes far deeper than just language. When you group them, you're ignoring several critical factors:

• Purchasing Power & Price Sensitivity: A €50 product might be an impulse buy in Switzerland but a considered purchase in Portugal. The algorithm can't grasp this economic context. It just sees a lower conversion rate in Portugal and shifts budget away, even if the Portuguese market could be profitable with a different offer or message.
• Creative Resonance: Humour and ad creative styles vary massively. An ad with dry, sarcastic British wit might land brilliantly in the UK but fall completely flat or even cause confusion in Italy. A direct, feature-heavy ad that works in Germany might be seen as boring and uninspired in Spain. You can't run one creative and expect it to work everywhere.
• Market Maturity & Competition: The competitive landscape for your product can be completely different from one country to the next. In one market, you might be a novel solution; in another, you might be one of twenty competitors. This dramatically affects CPCs, CPAs, and the type of messaging that's required to stand out.
• Online Behaviour: Some cultures are more skeptical of online ads and require more social proof and trust signals before purchasing. Others are more open to clicking and converting quickly. This impacts the entire funnel, from click-through rates to landing page performance.

When you group countries, you're forcing the algorithm to find a single "average" path to conversion that works across all these variables. This average path doesn't actually exist. It's a compromise that satisfies no one and performs sub-optimally everywhere. You end up with a campaign that's a bit of a mess, getting dribs and drabs of results from different places without any clear pattern or reason.

I'd suggest a Tiered Approach to Country Targeting...

So what's the alternative? A structured, tiered approach. This method allows you to be strategic with your budget and testing, ensuring you give each important market a real chance to prove itself. It's more work to set up, but the quality of data and results is incomparably better.

Here's how I'd break it down:

Tier 1: Core Markets
These are your champions. Your top 3-5 countries where you have the strongest product-market fit, highest potential revenue, or existing customer base. These markets get their own dedicated campaigns. No compromises.

• Structure: One campaign per country. For example, a "Germany - Conversions" campaign and a "UK - Conversions" campaign.
• Budget: Each campaign gets its own dedicated budget, calculated to achieve at least 50 conversions per week to ensure it exits the learning phase properly.
• Creative: Fully localised. This means translated ad copy (by a native speaker, not Google Translate), culturally relevant imagery/video, and landing pages in the local language with local currencies and trust signals.
• Goal: Maximise performance and scale aggressively. This is where you make your money.

Tier 2: Similar-Culture Clusters
These are smaller markets that you want to target but may not warrant a full Tier 1 campaign budget just yet. Here, you can carefully group countries that share significant cultural, linguistic, or economic traits.

• Structure: One campaign per cluster, using Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO). For example, a "Nordics (CBO)" campaign targeting Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Other potential clusters could be "DACH" (Austria, Switzerland, alongside your Tier 1 Germany campaign), or "Benelux" (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).
• Budget: A shared CBO budget. The algorithm will have some leeway to allocate spend, but because the countries are similar, the performance variations won't be as extreme.
• Creative: You can often use English-language ads (especially in the Nordics and Benelux), but you should still test localised ad copy. Ensure your website can handle shipping and currency for all countries in the cluster.
• Goal: Efficiently test and capture secondary markets. If one country within a cluster starts to perform exceptionally well, you can 'graduate' it to its own Tier 1 campaign.

Tier 3: The Discovery Zone
This is your speculative, low-budget testing ground for the rest of Europe (or the world).

• Structure: A single CBO campaign targeting a broad group of countries you're curious about. For example, "Europe - Tier 3 Test". You might exclude your Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries from this.
• Budget: A very small, fixed daily budget. You're not expecting amazing performance here.
• Creative: Use your most successful English-language ads from your Tier 1 campaigns.
• Goal: Purely discovery. You're looking for surprise pockets of demand. If you suddenly see a spike in conversions from a country like the Czech Republic, it's a signal that you should investigate further and perhaps move it into a Tier 2 cluster.

You'll need a better way to think about budget...

This brings us back to your original point about budget and the learning phase. Instead of asking "How can I group countries to exit learning faster?", the better question is "What is the minimum viable budget required to properly test *this specific country*?".

A good rule of thumb is that an ad set needs around 50 conversions within a 7-day period to exit the learning phase and give the algorithm enough data to optimise effectively. So, your budget calculation should be based on your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for that specific country.

Formula: (Target CPA x 50 conversions) / 7 days = Recommended Daily Budget

For example, if you estimate a realistic CPA for a sale in Germany is £30, your calculation would be (£30 * 50) / 7 = ~£215 per day. If that's too high, you accept that the learning phase will take longer, or you work on optimising your funnel to lower your CPA. It's a much more honest and strategic way to budget. What you shouldn't do is just assign an arbitrary budget of, say, £50 a day and hope for the best. That's a surefire way to get stuck in the "Learning Limited" phase forever and never get any real traction.

To make this easier, here is a little calculator you can use to estimate the budget you'll need for your Tier 1 campaigns.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is the main advice I have for you. It's a shift in mindset from chasing easy metrics to building a robust, scalable, and genuinely insightful advertising structure. It takes more effort up front, but it's the only way to build a sustainable presence across multiple diverse markets.

As you can see, building a proper international campaign structure is a lot more involved than just selecting a list of countries in the ad set settings. It requires a strategic approach to markets, budgeting, and creative development. This is frankly where most businesses stumble, they either don't realise the complexity or don't have the experience to navigate it effectively.

While the framework I've outlined above is a huge step in the right direction, the real devil is in the details of execution: picking the right creative angles for each culture, identifying the correct Tier 2 clusters for your specific product, and interpreting the data from your Tier 3 tests to find those hidden gem markets. This is the kind of work that separates campaigns that profitably scale across continents from those that burn out after a few months.

If you'd like to go through your specific situation and map out what this structure would look like for your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could take a look at your account together and give you a concrete plan of action.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh