Solved: Separate Campaigns for Different Products?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question about structuring your Facebook Ad campaigns for your clothing brand. It’s a common question, and honestly, most of the advice you see floating about is either outdated or just plain wrong. The instinct to create a seperate campaign for every product line – T-shirts, hoodies, shorts – feels logical, but in my experience, it's often the quickest way to burn through your budget with very little to show for it. It's one of the biggest and most costly mistakes we see when we audit new client accounts.

The real answer isn't about neatly organising your campaigns by product category. It’s about understanding who you're selling to, how the ad platform's algorithm actually works, and how to guide a potential customer from being a complete stranger to a loyal fan of your brand. Getting this right is the difference between an ad account that barely breaks even and one that becomes a predictable, scalable engine for growth.

Let's get into it.

You probably should stop thinking about products and start thinking about audiences...

Right, first things first. The biggest mental shift you need to make is from being product-focused to being audience-focused. The platform doesn't care if you're selling a hoodie or a t-shirt; it cares about finding the person most likely to buy *something* from you based on the instructions you give it. Your job is to give it the right instructions.

So, when does it make sense to seperate campaigns? Only when you are targeting fundamentally different groups of people.

Let's say you sell two types of t-shirts. One collection has vintage, faded designs inspired by 70s rock bands. The other collection has sharp, minimalist geometric patterns. The bloke buying the rock tee is probably not the same person buying the minimalist one. They listen to different music, follow different accounts on Instagram, read different blogs. Their entire digital footprint is different. In this case, yes, you'd want to create seperate campaigns because you need to craft a completely different message and targeting strategy for each audience. You'd target the first group with interests like 'Led Zeppelin', 'Classic Rock', 'Vintage Clothing', and the second with interests like 'Minimalism', 'Dezeen', 'Graphic Design'. The ads would look and feel different, the copy would speak to different values.

But if you're selling t-shirts, hoodies, and shorts that all fit within a cohesive 'streetwear' aesthetic, the person buying your hoodie today is very likely the same person who will buy your t-shirt next month. They share the same interests, follow the same influencers, and are motivated by the same trends. Splitting them into different campaigns is just making your own life harder and, more importantly, it's starving the Meta algorithm of the data it desperately needs to do its job properly. You're telling Facebook to find a 'hoodie buyer' and a 't-shirt buyer' when you should just be telling it to find a 'your brand buyer'.

This goes beyond simple demographics. Forget "males aged 18-24". That's useless. You need to get into their heads. What's the real reason they're buying your clothes? It's not just to cover their body. Are they trying to signal they're part of a subculture? Are they looking for comfort? Are they flexing a certain level of taste? Your ICP isn't a demographic; it's a problem state, a desire, a 'nightmare'. For a fashion brand, the nightmare might be feeling invisible or boring. Your clothes are the solution to that nightmare. Once you understand that, you stop selling a "hoodie" and you start selling "a piece of identity". That's what you target. That's what you write your ads about. Everything stems from this understanding. Without it, you're just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping something sticks, which is a very expensive way to do marketing.

I'd say you should let the algorithm do the heavy lifting...

This leads me to my second point, which is probably the most contrarian bit of advice you'll get. You should aim to have as few campaigns as possible. I know, it sounds mad. But you've got to trust the machine.

Think of the Meta algorithm like a new employee. On its first day, it knows nothing. You need to train it. Every time someone clicks your ad, visits your site, or buys a product, that's a piece of data. It's a lesson for your new employee. The more lessons you give it, the faster it learns who your ideal customer is. When it has enough data, it gets very, very good at its job. This is what's called the 'learning phase'.

Now, imagine you hire ten new employees on the same day (ten different campaigns). You give each of them a tiny piece of the training manual (your budget) and tell them to get to work. What happens? None of them ever get enough training to become competent. They all stay stuck in the 'learning phase', performing poorly and wasting your money. This is exactly what happens when you split a small budget across too many campaigns. Each campaign struggles to get the 50 conversions per week that Meta recommends to exit the learning phase, so your performance is unstable and your costs are all over the place.

The solution is consolidation. By bunching your similar products (e.g., all your streetwear items) into a single campaign, you're pooling your budget. You're giving one employee the entire training manual. That campaign will exit the learning phase faster, your costs will stabilise, and the algorithm will start delivering results much more efficiently.

We see this time and time again. I remember one client, a women's apparel brand. When they came to us, their account was a mess. Dozens of campaigns, one for every single product category. They were spending a fortune and getting nowhere. One of the first things we did was consolidate everything into a simplified funnel structure. We grouped their collections into logical, audience-based campaigns and used Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO). CBO is a setting that lets you set your budget at the campaign level, and Meta automatically allocates more money to the ad sets and ads that are performing the best. It's like telling your now-trained employee, "Here's the budget for the week, you figure out the best way to spend it." The result? We got them a 691% return on ad spend. It's a powerful approach, but it only works if you give the algorithm enough data and freedom to work its magic.

For another client selling prize draws, a totally different niche but the principle is identical, we saw a 200 percent increase in purchases simply by consolidating their offers into a more streamlined campaign structure. Stop fighting the algorithm and start working with it. It’s a lot smarter than most people give it credit for, you just have to set it up for success.

We'll need to look at a funnel-based structure, not a product-based one...

So if you're not structuring by product, how should you structure your account? The answer is by funnel stage. This is how professional media buyers do it. It's a simple, powerful, and scalable way to think about your advertising. You essentially need just two core campaigns to start with:

1. A Prospecting (Top of Funnel - ToFu) Campaign: The only job of this campaign is to find brand new customers who have never heard of you before.
2. A Retargeting (Bottom of Funnel - BoFu) Campaign: The only job of this campaign is to convert people who have already shown interest in your brand.

That's it. It’s that simple to start. Here’s how it breaks down:

Campaign 1: Prospecting (Finding New People)

• Objective: Always, always, always set this to Conversions (optimising for Purchases). Do not use "Reach" or "Brand Awareness". That's just telling Facebook to find you the cheapest people to show ads to, who are by definition the least likely to ever buy anything. You're paying to find non-customers. You want to tell the algorithm your final goal, which is a sale. Let it work backwards to find people likely to do that.
• Budget: Use Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) and set your daily or lifetime budget here. I’d suggest starting with at least £30-£50 a day to give it enough data.
• Ad Sets (Your Audiences): Inside this one campaign, you'll create multiple ad sets. Each ad set will target a different group of people. This is where you do your testing. You might have:
  • -> Ad Set 1: Interest Targeting - Competitors. Target people who like brands similar to yours (e.g., Supreme, Stüssy, Carhartt WIP).
  • -> Ad Set 2: Interest Targeting - Publications. Target people who read streetwear blogs and magazines (e.g., Hypebeast, Highsnobiety).
  • -> Ad Set 3: Interest Targeting - Related Activities. Target people interested in things your customers love (e.g., Skateboarding, Hip Hop Music, Street Art).
  • -> Ad Set 4: Broad Targeting. Once your pixel has a lot of data (thousands of purchases), you can test an ad set with no interest targeting at all. Just age, gender, and location. It can work surprisingly well.
  • -> Ad Set 5: Lookalike Audiences. Once you have at least 100-1000 purchases, you can create a Lookalike audience. This is where Facebook finds millions of people who are statistically similar to your existing customers. This is often the holy grail of prospecting. You can create Lookalikes of your website visitors, video viewers, and of course, your purchasers. Start with a 1% Lookalike of your purchasers. It's usually the most potent.
• Ads (Your Creative): Inside each ad set, you should test 2-3 different ads. Use your best-selling products. Use lifestyle images and videos of people actually wearing your clothes in a cool enviornment. Carousels are great for showing off a collection. Test different headlines and copy. The CBO will automatically push budget to the winning ad in the winning ad set.

Campaign 2: Retargeting (Bringing People Back)

• Objective: Conversions (optimised for Purchases), again.
• Budget: This will usually be smaller than your prospecting budget. Maybe 20-30% of your total spend. CBO is a good shout here too.
• Ad Sets (Your Warm Audiences): Your ad sets here will target people who already know you. These are your most valuable audiences.
  • -> Ad Set 1: Website Visitors (30 Days). Anyone who has visited your site but not purchased.
  • -> Ad Set 2: Social Engagers (90 Days). Anyone who has liked, commented, or saved a post on your Instagram or Facebook page.
  • -> Ad Set 3: Add to Cart / Initiated Checkout (14 Days). This is your hottest audience. These people were *this close* to buying. You need to be aggressive here.
• Ads (Your Creative): The ads here can be more direct.
  • -> Use Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs). These automatically show people the exact product they looked at or added to their cart. It’s incredibly effective and feels personal.
  • -> For the Add to Cart audience, you could test an offer. "Still thinking about it? Here's free shipping on us." Or "Your cart is about to expire!". A little urgency can work wonders.
  • -> Show them customer reviews or User-Generated Content (UGC) to build trust and social proof.

This two-campaign structure is clean, scalable, and lets you speak to people differently depending on how familiar they are with your brand. It gives the algorithm the consolidated data it needs while still giving you control over testing your audiences and creatives. It's the foundation of almost every successful e-commerce ad account we manage.

Here’s a simple table to visualise it:

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

Having the perfect account structure is useless if your ads are rubbish. Your creative (the images/videos) and your copy (the text) do all the heavy lifting of actually persuading someone to click and buy. This is another area where people fall down.

For your prospecting ads, you have to grab attention in the first 3 seconds. The feed is a busy place. Your ad needs to stop the scroll. High-quality, authentic-looking lifestyle creative is what works. Forget sterile product shots on a white background for prospecting; that's for your website or maybe retargeting. People want to see your clothes in context. They want to see the vibe. Video is king here. A simple, well-shot 15-second reel showing off a few different looks can outperform a glossy, expensive photoshoot any day of the week. User-Generated Content (UGC), or ads that *look* like UGC, are absolutly golden for fashion. It feels more real and trustworthy than a polished brand ad.

Then there's your copy. Don't just describe the product. "100% cotton black hoodie." Boring. Sell the feeling, the outcome. Use a framework like Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: Describe their current frustration. "Tired of fast-fashion hoodies that fall apart after three washes? Sick of seeing everyone on the street wearing the same generic designs?"
• After: Describe the ideal world your product creates. "Imagine a hoodie that's built to last. Premium, heavyweight cotton that feels incredible, with a limited-run design that makes you stand out."
• Bridge: Introduce your product as the solution. "Meet the [Your Hoodie Name]. The last hoodie you'll ever want to buy. Shop the collection now."

This connects with the 'nightmare' we talked about earlier. You're not just selling a piece of fabric; you're selling durability, exclusivity, and identity. That's a much more powerful proposition.

You need to test, test, test. Test different hooks in your videos. Test different headlines. Test long copy versus short copy. Test emojis versus no emojis. Every audience will respond differently, and the only way to know what works is to test relentlessly. CBO will help by putting money behind the winners, but you have to provide the raw material for it to test in the first place.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a world away from just creating one campaign per product. But this is the methodology that drives real, scalable results for e-commerce brands. It's about moving from guesswork to a systematic process of testing and optimisation. Here are the main takeaways I'd recommend you focus on right now:

Putting all this together isn't just about a one-time setup. It's an ongoing process. You need to be in the account regularly, analysing performance, turning off losing ads and ad sets, and constantly testing new creative and audiences to beat your winners. It's a significant amount of work to do it properly, which is why many brand owners eventually decide to get expert help.

It's not just about knowing the theory; it's about the relentless execution and having the experience to interpret the data correctly and make the right decisions quickly. We've seen it all, from subscription boxes hitting a 1000% ROAS to helping software clients reduce their cost per acquisition from £100 down to just £7. That experience lets us move faster and avoid the costly mistakes that many people make when they're going it alone.

If you'd like a second pair of expert eyes to look over your account and map out a specific growth plan for your brand, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can jump on a call, review what you're doing now, and give you some straightforward, actionable advice on how to implement the kind of structure we've discussed today. It might be the most valuable 20 minutes you spend on your marketing this year.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh