Campaign, Ad Set, Ad

A Snapchat campaign has three levels: the campaign, the ad set, and the ad.

The campaign holds your objective. The ad set sits under it and holds the targeting, the placement, the schedule, the budget, and the bid. The ad sits under the ad set and holds the actual creative people see. One campaign can hold several ad sets, and each ad set can hold several ads, which is how you test cleanly.

Say you are selling a fitness app. You build one campaign on the app installs objective. Under it you create two ad sets, one targeting men and one targeting women, each with its own budget. Inside each ad set you load three videos. Now you can read which audience and which video are pulling installs, because each setting lives at its own level.

The level you change a setting on decides what it affects. Targeting and budget belong to the ad set, not the ad. People edit at the wrong level, then wonder why a budget change hit the whole campaign or why two ads share an audience they meant to split.

Objective up top, targeting in the middle, creative at the bottom.