Solved: Meta Ads Campaign Structure for Low Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on setting up the Meta ads for your client. It’s a common situation to be in with a new account and a tight budget, and your first instinct to use Advantage+ is understandable, but I'd say it's probably not the best route to take right now. With a budget like $600, every single penny has to be accounted for, and giving the algorithm free rein without any data to guide it is a surefire way to burn through that cash with very little to show for it.

My main advice would be to go with a more traditional, manual setup where you have complete control. It's more work upfront, but it'll let you test methodically, gather clean data, and find out what actually works before you even think about scaling or handing the keys over to Meta's AI.

We'll need to look at why Advantage+ is a trap for new accounts...

I see this a lot. Meta pushes Advantage+ really hard, making it sound like a magic button for easy results. And to be fair, for accounts with tons of historical conversion data and big budgets, it can work wonders. But for a brand-new website and a pixel with no meaningful data, it's a different story. It's a black box, and you're essentially giving Meta $20 a day and saying "go find me some people, I guess".

The problem is how the algorithm thinks. When you set a campaign objective like "Sales" but have no sales data, the algorithm doesn't really know what a 'buyer' looks like for you. So it defaults to its secondary objective: getting you the most clicks or actions for the lowest cost. I've seen it time and time again, this is how you pay Facebook to find you non-customers. The algorithm finds the users inside your broad audience who are cheap to reach precisely because they're not in high demand. They are the serial 'likers', the people who click on everything but buy nothing. They're not your customers. You're actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find the worst possible audience for your client's products.

With a manual setup, you're in the driver's seat. You define the audience with precision, you control the budget allocation, and you can analyse the data from each specific ad set to see what's working and what's not. On $600 a month, this level of control isn't just nice to have; it's absolutely necessary. You can't afford to waste a single dollar on an audience that was never going to convert in the first place. We need to be deliberate and methodical, not just hope the algorithm figures it out for us. It won't, not without data, and you don't have the budget to buy that data the hard way.

I'd say you need to define your customer's real problem...

Before we even touch the campaign setup, we need to get this right. Your ideal customer profile (ICP) isn't just "a man aged 25-55 who owns a Ford F100". That's a demographic, and it tells you almost nothing useful for creating ads that actually work. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain, their obsession, their urgent need. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Think about it. Who are the people buying parts for a 50-year-old Ford F100 or a classic C10? There are a few distinct types:

• The Hobbyist Restorer: This person is in their garage every weekend. Their 'nightmare' is a missing part holding up their entire project for months. They scour forums, watch YouTube restoration channels, and subscribe to classic truck magazines. They're not just buying a part; they're buying the satisfaction of moving their project forward.
• The Daily Driver: This person relies on their old Hilux to get to work. Their 'nightmare' is a breakdown. They need a reliable, affordable part, and they need it fast. They're searching for "toyota hilux starter motor replacement" and value trust and quick shipping above all else.
• The Custom Builder: This person is creating a show truck. Their 'nightmare' is having the same parts as everyone else. They're looking for unique, high-performance, or aesthetic upgrades. They follow custom shops on Instagram, go to car shows, and are influenced by specific brands known for quality and style.

These three people are completely different. They have different pains, they hang out in different places online, and they respond to completely different messages. A generic ad targeting "Ford F100" will be mostly ignored by all of them. But an ad that speaks directly to the restorer's frustration or the daily driver's urgency will get a click. You need to build your entire strategy, from targeting to ad copy, around these specific 'nightmares'. This is the work you have to do before you spend a single dollar on ads. Forget demographics, focus on the problem you solve.

You probably should structure your campaigns manually...

Right, so let's talk structure. Forget ad groups for each model within one big Advantage+ campaign. We're going to build a simple, clean, and effective funnel structure that makes the most of your limited budget. It's all about separating your cold traffic from your warm traffic. For a new account, it'll look like this:

Campaign 1: Prospecting (Sales Objective)

This is your cold audience campaign. Its only job is to find new people who have never heard of your client's website before and bring them in. Here you'll use CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) and set the daily budget to around $15 of your $20/day total. Inside this campaign, you'll have your ad sets. Each ad set will target a different customer persona or angle. Don't create ad sets for car models. Create them for customer types.

Example Ad Set Structure:

• Ad Set 1: Ford/Chevy Restoration Hobbyists
• Ad Set 2: Toyota/Japanese Truck Daily Drivers
• Ad Set 3: General Classic Truck Enthusiasts

In the beginning, you might only have the budget to run one or two of these at a time. That's fine. The goal is to put these different audience hypotheses against each other and see which one brings in the cheapest, most relevant traffic. Inside each ad set, you'll have 2-3 ads with different images/videos and copy tailored to that specific audience. For example, the 'Restoration' ad set gets ads talking about project progress and hard-to-find parts. The 'Daily Driver' ad set gets ads talking about reliability and fast shipping.

Campaign 2: Retargeting (Sales Objective)

This is your warm audience campaign. Its job is to bring back people who have already visited the website but didn't buy anything. You'll give this campaign the remaining $5/day of your budget. This is often the most profitable part of any ad account, even with a small audience. The audience here will be simple:

• Ad Set 1: All Website Visitors (Last 30 Days) - Exclude Purchasers

The ads in this campaign can be different. You could show them a small discount code, testimonials, or remind them of the specific product they looked at using a Dynamic Product Ad (DPA) if you have a catalogue set up. The message is, "Hey, remember us? You were interested in this, maybe now's a good time to buy."

This two-campaign structure is simple, logical, and gives you a clear view of what's working. You can easily see if your problem is finding new people (Prospecting campaign is failing) or closing the deal (Retargeting campaign is failing). With a $600 budget, this clarity is everything. Don't overcomplicate it further. This is the foundation you need to build on.

You'll need to get your targeting right from the start...

This is where we apply the 'customer nightmare' idea from earlier. Layering broad interests like "Ford F100" and "auto parts" is exactly what we want to avoid. It's too generic. A million people who just 'like' the F100 page because they saw a cool picture once will be in that audience. They're not your customer.

We need to get way more specific and use audience layering to build a profile of our ideal customer. The key is to think about what stuff people in your target audience like, what pages they follow, what interests they might list on their profile. The goal is to pick interests that contain a huge number of your ideal buyers, and very few people who aren't. For the 'Restoration Hobbyist' persona, instead of just the car model, we could build an audience like this:

People who match ALL of the following:

• Interest 1 (The Vehicle): Ford F-Series, Ford F-100, Chevrolet C/K, Chevrolet C-10
• Interest 2 (The Hobby): Classic Trucks Magazine, Street Trucks Magazine, SEMA Show, Custom car
• Interest 3 (The Action): Behaviours like 'DIY enthusiast', or interests in specific tool brands like Snap-on or Mac Tools, or part manufacturers like Holley, Edelbrock, MagnaFlow.

You see the difference? Anyone in this final audience MUST like the specific type of truck, AND be into the restoration scene, AND likely works on cars themselves. This is a thousand times more qualified than the broad audience you initially suggested. You'll have a smaller audience size, but that's a good thing on a small budget. You're aiming for precision, not scale. Here's a visual way to think about it:

You'll need to do this research for each persona. For the 'Daily Driver', you might layer the car model with interests like "auto repair" or "car maintenance". For the 'Custom Builder', you'd layer it with specific high-end brands, influencers, and events like SEMA. This upfront work is what makes or breaks a campaign on a small budget. Test these narrow, high-intent audiences against each other and let the data tell you which 'customer nightmare' is the most profitable to solve.

You'll need to build a message they can't ignore...

Once you have your highly-specific audience, you can't just show them a generic ad. The ad copy and creative must speak directly to the pain point that you used to define the audience in the first place. You don't sell "auto parts"; you sell solutions to frustrating problems.

Using our personas, here’s how that looks in practice. This is the Problem-Agitate-Solve framework, and it works.

The image or video creative should match this. For the restorer, show a clean shot of the part itself, maybe a before/after on a truck. For the daily driver, maybe a graphic that emphasizes speed and reliability. For the custom builder, a slick shot of a finished, modified truck featuring the parts. Everything needs to align with the specific customer you're talking to. This relevance is what drives down your costs and increases your conversion rate. A generic message is a wasted impression.

You probably should set realistic expectations for a $600 budget...

This part is really important, especially for your client. A $600 monthly budget breaks down to about $20 per day. At this level, you are not going to generate a massive volume of sales. It's just not going to happen. The primary goal of this initial phase is data acquisition and proof of concept, not revenue generation.

You are trying to answer a few simple questions:

1. Can we find an audience on Meta that is interested in these products?
2. Which customer persona (restorer, daily driver, etc.) is the most responsive?
3. What kind of ad creative and messaging gets the best click-through rate?
4. What is a realistic Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Purchase (CPP) for this niche?

Let's do some rough maths. In the auto parts niche, let's be optimistic and say you can achieve a $1.25 CPC. With a $20 daily budget, that's just 16 clicks to the website per day. An average eCommerce conversion rate for a new store is around 1-2%. So, best case scenario, you might get one sale every 3-6 days (1 sale per 50-100 clicks). This means some days you will spend the full $20 and get zero sales. That is normal and expected. The client needs to understand this so they don't panic and pull the plug after three days.

You need to know what a good Cost Per Purchase is for them. This interactive calculator can help you figure out the maximum you can afford to pay for a sale while still hitting a target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Have the client play with this to align on goals.

If the calculator shows their maximum affordable CPP is $50, then your job for the first month or two is to see if you can achieve that with any of your test audiences. If you can, you've found a winning formula. If all your audiences are resulting in a $150 CPP, then you know something is fundamentally wrong with either the targeting, the ads, the website, or the pricing, and you need to rethink the strategy rather than just spending more money. This methodical approach is the only way to succeed with a limited budget.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can probably tell, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about deep research into the customer, a methodical testing structure, and creating compelling ads that speak to a real need. With a small budget, there's very little room for error. Every choice matters.

That's where getting professional advice can make a huge difference. We've managed campaigns for many eCommerce businesses, from store launches getting 1500 leads at $0.29 each to generating an 8x return for established brands. With years of experience, we can help you avoid the common pitfalls and implement a strategy designed to get the most out of every dollar you spend.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail and have us take a look at the account, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can walk through a tailored strategy for your client and answer any other questions you might have.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh