WHAT IS CAMPAIGN BUDGET OPTIMIZATION?

Campaign Budget Optimization

Campaign Budget Optimization was introduced a while ago but it still seems to trip people up. 

There are now two places in Ads Manager where you can set the budget.

• At the Campaign Level - Campaign Budget Optimization or

• At the Ad Set Level - in the industry we call it ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimization)

Campaign budget optimization takes your overall daily budget and feeds the budget to which audience Facebook thinks will perform the best for your goals. You’re essentially giving Facebook more control (and trusting it will do its job). Setting the budget at the ad set level or ABO will spend the daily amount set to that ONE audience - so you’re retaining a bit of control over how it spends your money.

So when should you use CBO over ABO? 

Questions to ask yourself:

• What is the size of the audience?

• Have these audiences worked in the past? 

So, let’s start with size, because we all know size matters. 

Let’s say you have 3 audiences. 

• Audience 1: 1.5 million

• Audience 2: 2 million

• Audience 3: 10 million 

If you set the budget at the campaign level, Facebook will generally feed all the ad spend to the biggest audience. It just has more ‘room’ in that audience to find the people you want. But, it also doesn’t give the other two audiences a chance and you might prematurely declare that Audience 1 and 2 are crap because it’s not getting any spend/leads which might not be the case. 

So, in this case (with the audience sizes above) I’d set the budget at the ad set level and give each audience it’s own daily spend. Then you can see if you have any true winners. Like this: 

$20 - Audience 1

$20 - Audience 2

$20- Audience 3

OK, Laura, but what if I have 3 audiences that are all similar in size?

Well, you could do either but here’s what I do. I determine if these audiences have worked before (maybe you’ve used them before and they performed well). In that case, I’d put them all in CBO campaign and let them duke it out. But, if these are new (not tested) audiences then I’d like to have a little more control and set at the ad set level (ABO) and see if there are any true winners. 

The other thing with Campaign Budget optimization is that you can scale a lot faster than when the budget is set at the ad set level. I’ve doubled my budget and my campaigns remained steady. Not true with ABO. I still recommend gradually scaling these ad sets by 20% every other day. 

And as always, there is no “right” answer here. It’s always important to test, test, test and see what works for YOUR audience.