What Facebook’s shift of budgets to campaign level means for advertisers
In September, advertisers will see changes to the budget management options in Facebook ad accounts. Campaign budget optimisation (CBO) will become the default setting for most ad accounts.
What is campaign budget optimisation?
CBO is a way of handling your ad budget within a campaign. You set the overall campaign budget, then CBO uses algorithms to dynamically distribute the budgeted funds between ad sets based on their effectiveness and cost.
What happens without CBO? Whenever there’s a fixed budget for each ad set, funds can’t then be allocated to ad sets with lower CPA to increase overall conversions. As a result, you may be getting less optimal results while poorly performing ad sets keep wasting your money. Preventing this requires constant control with manual edits or setting up automated rules. Both options often reset the learning phase that helps optimise your ad delivery.
CBO solves these problems without affecting your ad sets’ learning process. With this new feature your campaign budget will constantly get redistributed between ad sets, providing more money for a specific group when it is most efficient.
Can I still limit an ad set’s budget?
Yes. You can set:
- the maximum spending limit that will never be exceeded;
- the minimum spending limit (the system will attempt to spend at least that amount, however it is not guaranteed).
How do I measure results?
Many advertisers currently assess the effectiveness of their social media campaigns based on each individual ad set. But with CBO the result rate, quantity, and cost in an ad set does not reflect campaign performance. Only the total number of target actions and their average cost at the campaign level can show how your optimised campaign performs.
What will happen with non-CBO campaigns?
Eligible Ad accounts are being switched to CBO-only in September. If your ad account is eligible, you will have received a notice from Facebook via email and in Ads Manager.
This means that you won’t be able to set a fixed ad set budget in any new campaigns.
All previously set campaigns and ad sets without CBO will keep going as is until their end date. You’ll be able to increase their budget or stop them, but other settings will be locked.
If you have not received a CBO migration notice in Ads Manager, this means your account isn’t eligible at this time and will not switch to CBO-only budgets.
However, you can still choose to use campaign budget optimisation to maximize your results. Just turn this option on during campaign creation.
