Solved: Separate Facebook Business Manager and Ad Accounts

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how to structure your Facebook advertising for your three businesses. It's a question I see a lot, and getting the foundation right from the start will save you a world of pain down the line. The short answer is you absolutely need to keep things separate, but how you do that within Facebook's ecosystem is what matters.

Let's walk through why the right structure isn't just about being tidy—it's about performance, security, and your ability to scale effectively without one business's problems kneecapping the others.

We'll need to look at the 'One Hub, Many Spokes' Model...

The fundamental mistake most people make when starting out is thinking of the Ad Account as the top-level container. It isn't. The Facebook Business Manager (FBM) is your command centre. It owns all your assets: your Pages, your Ad Accounts, your Pixels, your people, everything. You should have only one FBM that you, the business owner, control.

From this central FBM, you then create what I call 'spokes'. Each of your businesses is a spoke, and each spoke gets its own dedicated Ad Account. This isn't just a suggestion; for effective and safe advertising, it's non-negotiable. Trying to run three different businesses, each with their own website and goals, from a single Ad Account is a recipe for disaster. Your data will be a mess, your billing will be a nightmare, and you're creating a single point of failure for your entire marketing operation.

Think of it like this: your FBM is your company's headquarters. Each Ad Account is a separate, independent branch office. They are all owned by HQ, but they operate independently with their own staff (pixel), their own customers (audiences), and their own bank account (payment method).

I'd say you need to protect your Pixel data at all costs...

The single most important technical reason for this separation is the Facebook Pixel. This little bit of code on your website is the brain of your advertising operation. It learns who your customers are, who is likely to convert, and it feeds that data back to Meta's algorithm to find more people just like them. It's the engine behind effective retargeting and the creation of powerful Lookalike Audiences.

Now, imagine you have one ad account and one pixel installed across three different websites for three different businesses.

• Business A sells handcrafted jewellery.
• Business B is a local cleaning service.
• Business C is a B2B software tool.

Your pixel is now trying to learn from three wildly different customer profiles. The person buying a necklace has nothing in common with the office manager booking a cleaning service, who has nothing in common with a tech founder trying your SaaS product. The algorithm becomes hopelessly confused. It can't build an accurate profile of a "good customer" because it's getting conflicting signals from all three businesses. Your conversion optimisation will be ineffective, your retargeting audiences will be a mix of irrelevant people, and your Lookalike Audiences will be useless. You're basically pouring water, sand, and oil into the same engine and wondering why it's sputtering. By giving each business its own ad account and its own pixel, you ensure each one builds a clean, highly-relevant, and powerful dataset specific to its unique customer base. This is the foundation of profitable advertising.

You probably should prepare for the worst...

Another critical factor that beginners often overlook is risk management. Facebook's advertising platform is automated and, frankly, notorious for disabling ad accounts with little warning or clear explanation. It can be for a minor policy violation you weren't even aware of. It's a risk every advertiser lives with.

If you run all three businesses out of a single ad account and that account gets disabled, all three of your businesses are offline instantly. Your entire paid marketing strategy grinds to a halt. The appeals process can be slow and frustrating, leaving you powerless for days or even weeks.

By separating them into three ad accounts, you create firewalls. If the ad account for Business A gets flagged because of an issue with an ad creative or landing page, the ad accounts for Business B and Business C are usually unaffected and can continue running. It contains the damage. While there's always a risk that the entire Business Manager could be restricted in a severe case, ad account-level disapprovals are far more common. Don't build your house on a single pillar when you can have three.

Below is a simple risk assessment. It's not about if, but when you'll face an account issue. The question is how much of your revenue you want to put at risk when it happens.

You'll need to think about future growth and performance...

Finally, let's talk about clarity and scalability. As you start spending money, you need to know exactly what's working and what isn't for each business.

• Clear Reporting: With separate ad accounts, you can see at a glance the total spend, return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per lead (CPL), and every other metric on a per-business basis. In a single account, you'd have to manually tag every campaign and ad set with the business name and then spend hours filtering and exporting data to try and piece together a clear picture.
• Clean Billing: Each ad account can have its own payment method. This is essential for clean bookkeeping and accurately tracking the P&L for each individual business.
• Scalability: What happens when one business takes off and you want to hire a freelancer or an agency to manage its ads? With a separate ad account, you can grant them access only to that specific account's assets. They won't see anything related to your other businesses, ensuring privacy and security. It's the professional way to delegate access.

Before you even start spending, it's worth playing with some numbers to understand the potential. I've run campaigns for eCommerce clients that achieve a 600%+ return, and software campaigns where a £7 cost per trial is a massive win. The numbers vary wildly by industry. The calculator below gives you a rough idea of what to expect based on some typical performance benchmarks for a direct-to-consumer eCommerce business.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To sum up, getting this foundational structure right is more important than any single ad you will ever create. It sets you up for clarity, safety, and scalable growth. Don't take shortcuts here—the frustration you felt learning the difference between an FBM and an Ad Account is a sign you're already on the right track by trying to understand the system properly.

Getting this structure implemented correctly from day one is the first step. The next is navigating the complexities of audience targeting, creative development, and campaign optimisation. It's a full-time job, and the landscape changes constantly. While you can certainly manage this yourself, the learning curve is steep, and mistakes can be costly.

If you'd like to fast-track that process and ensure your campaigns are built on a solid foundation by experts who do this every day, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your businesses and map out a specific strategy to help you get started on the right foot. Feel free to book a time that works for you.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh