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Maximum ROAS in 2025

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Ad Account Best Practices: How to structure your ad account for maximum ROAS in 2025

As ad prices rise and competition intensifies on digital platforms, the technical structure of your ad account becomes a crucial element in achieving a high ROAS. This article dives into the proven best practices for ad account structure in 2025, with a focus on Meta platforms and how to avoid common mistakes that cost you dearly.

The three cardinal sins of ad account structuring

Understanding what not to do is often just as important as knowing what to do. Three critical mistakes stand out as particularly damaging to your ad performance:

Competing ad sets

"Avoid creating ad sets in the campaign that compete against each other"

One of the most common and costly mistakes is creating multiple ad sets that target overlapping audiences within the same campaign. This creates a situation where your own ad sets compete against each other in the auction, resulting in:

Higher CPC (Cost Per Click)
Inefficient budget allocation
Extended learning period for the algorithm
Inconsistent data for optimization

The image of a frustrated person surrounded by error messages perfectly illustrates the confusion and inefficiencies that arise when ad sets compete internally.

2. Neglecting the learning phase

Meta's algorithm requires time and data to optimize the delivery of your ads. A critical mistake is spreading your budget thinly across multiple ad sets:

"As a rule of thumb, allocate budget to an ad set to get it out of the learning stage faster"

By concentrating your budget on fewer ad sets, you accelerate the learning phase and achieve optimal performance faster. This is especially important when:

You launch new campaigns
You're testing new audiences
You implement new creative concepts

Focus on ROAS without regard to LTV

"Control only what your ROAS/POAS is without calculating CAC and your customer's LTV (Life time value)" is one of the biggest strategic mistakes in ad account management.

Managing solely by ROAS without considering customer lifetime value can lead to short-term optimization that undermines long-term growth. An ROAS of 1.2 can actually be profitable if the customer lifetime value is high enough.

Best practices for optimal ad account structure

Now that we've identified the biggest mistakes, let's look at how to optimally structure your ad account:

Implement a funnel-based campaign structure

"2-3 campaigns (awareness, engagement and conversion) that fit your sales funnel"

The most effective ad account structure reflects your sales funnel with dedicated campaigns for each phase:

Awareness campaign:

Purpose: Introduce the target audience to the brand
Channels: TikTok, Meta & Youtube, SEO
KPIs: 50% view through rate, engagement on posts
Budget: 15% of total advertising budget

Engagement campaign:

Purpose: Create interest in the product
Channels: Meta, TikTok, Email marketing
KPIs: Engagement rate, CPC, emails collected
Budget: 10% of total advertising budget

Conversion campaign:

Purpose: Drive sales
Channels: Meta, Paid search, Shopping, Email marketing
KPIs: ROAS
Budget: 75% of total advertising budget

This structure ensures that each campaign is optimized towards its specific purpose in the customer journey.

Strategic ad set structure within campaigns

Within each campaign, it's important to structure ad sets strategically:

For Awareness and Engagement:

Segment by broad audience categories
Focus on reach and engagement over conversions
Implement higher in the funnel conversion actions like video completion or landing page visits

For Conversion:

Segments by purchase intent and product categories
Implement strong audience exclusion to avoid overlap
Apply different bidding strategies based on audience segments

Efficient handling of new creatives

A particular challenge arises when you want to test new creative concepts:

"When you put new ads into an ad set with a 'winning ad', Meta tends to make the safe choice and just continue allocating budget to the ad that performs really well."

The solution to this problem is to implement a special structure for creative testing:

"If you find that the budget is not being allocated to new creative, you can create multiple ad sets in a campaign to quickly test if you have a new performing ad."

This requires a two-step process:

Test phase: New creatives are tested in dedicated test ad sets
Scaling phase: Winning creatives are implemented in primary performance

This approach ensures that new creatives get a fair chance to prove their worth without being suppressed by existing winning ads.

Advantage+ campaign type effectiveness

Data from top performers shows a clear trend:

"Advantage+ is the most effective campaign type on Meta."

The Advantage+ campaign type, which gives Meta's algorithm more freedom to optimize the delivery of your ads, has proven particularly effective in 2025. The key to success with Advantage+ is: