- In this episode we're talking all about Facebook CBO
or the Facebook advertising
campaign budget optimization option,
what it is and why you should care, if you should even care
and everything you need to know about it
so you can make sure you're getting the absolute most
from your advertising dollars.
Let's get to it.
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Hey there, my name is Adam Erhart
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Alright so before we dive into the nitty gritty details
of what exactly CBO
or campaign budget optimization really is,
it's first important to understand
that this really isn't that much of a switch
from what they've traditionally done
with ad set optimization.
So really all we're doing here is we're kind of moving
the budgeting aspect where we used to set it per ad set
and moving it to the campaign level.
That's kind of it.
Now obviously the devil's in the details
and there are nuances here
that you're gonna wanna pay attention to
so that you can make sure
that you're getting the most from your advertising dollars,
but the real high level 30,000 foot overview
is really just essentially that.
We're now optimizing at the campaign level
rather than the ad set level as the name kind of implies,
as the name definitely implies.
Pretty much the name says exactly what it's doing.
Now the argument from Facebook
on why they're making this switch
is essentially to benefit the advertisers.
Of course, right?
You see by making the switch they're claiming
that it's gonna free up the advertisers
to spend more time on the things that really matter
like design a new creative and optimizing landing pages
instead of kind of focusing their time
on the granular budget and optimization level.
Now whether this plays out or not is yet to be seen,
but we are actually seeing some pretty good results
in the early stages of CBO
which is why it's worth talking about here,
probably worth testing out in your campaigns.
Now for those control freaks among us,
it is a bit of a scary thought to kind of give
a little more power to Facebook
and allow them to sort of spread out
and optimize your budget across different ad sets
rather than you maintaining control,
but in a lot of instances this is actually a good choice
which we're gonna talk about in a minute
and in some cases you're gonna
wanna maintain control all for yourself.
So first off, how do you even use
campaign budget optimization or CBO?
Well it's actually really simple.
In fact all you really need to do
is go to the campaign and choose on.
And that's it.
Now when you turn it on, what it's gonna do
is essentially take your campaign budget
and the total budget you've set for this campaign
and start divvying it up between your different ad sets
that you've got nested underneath your campaign.
So for nice, easy numbers
let's say you've got a daily budget of $30.
Well if you've got three ad sets in this campaign,
it's gonna essentially give $10 to each different ad set,
at least initially.
But where things get tricky is that Facebook
is going to use its algorithm
and it's gonna take some best guesses
and it's gonna play all these different factors in
to try to figure out which ad set
is going to perform best for you.
And then it's gonna start to take some of the budget
from the other ad sets and put it towards
your highest performing ad sets.
Now in theory this sounds amazing, right?
You just give Facebook a ton of data
and they're gonna give you back
the highest performing ad set possible.
But like the old saying goes,
if it's too good to be true, it probably is
and where we run into issues using this strategy
is that there may be an ad set that you wanna make sure
gets say sufficient number of basically views
or a sufficient amount of that budget allocated to it
and you don't really wanna let Facebook
kind of carve things up and make its own decisions
before you've had a chance to weigh in.
For example let's say that you've got an ad and an ad set
that you just know crushes it
across all kinds of different audiences and placements.
It doesn't matter where you put it.
This ad's a winner.
Well if you nest this in
and under the campaign budget optimization strategy,
essentially Facebook's gonna show it
just as about as much as any new creative
and it might start diverting more budget and more traffic
towards potentially a lower performing ad set.
You see the algorithm's not foolproof
and they're going to be using kind of this learning phase
which is a whole other story for a whole other video,
but regardless they're gonna be using
these early stage impressions to try to decide
which is going to be your best performing ad set
so they can spend your budget accordingly.
Sometimes they get this right and you end up
with an absolute home run of an ad set.
But if they get this wrong,
you risk potentially turning off really good performing ads
and that's never good in the long run.
After all these ads may not get their fair chance
to go out there and try to convert
and try to win you more leads, customers and sales.
There's another side of the coin here
that we really have to talk about
and this is gonna get a little bit more advanced
and a little bit more nerdy so stick with me
if this is completely new to you.
You see the way that the Facebook algorithm works
is that it needs a sufficient number of conversions
or actions on your ad in order to properly optimize it.
This is why the old advice
of having a number of different ad sets
and putting tiny little budgets in each of $5 or $10
really doesn't fly in today's market.
You see with these tiny budgets
you're simply not giving Facebook enough data
for them to properly optimize
across all the different data points in their algorithm.
Now how this affects us when we're using CBO
is that we need to make sure that we're using
a sufficiently high budget
for that overall campaign structure
for us to put a number of different ad sets under it.
So for example let's say we're using $100 a day.
Well that would probably allow us to use maybe two
or maybe three, maybe even four different ad sets under it
because they're gonna get around that $25 or $30 budget
allocated to each at least initially.
On the other hand if you've got a much smaller budget
of say $10 a day, maybe $15 a day,
well you're obviously going to want to have
probably just one ad set under that initial campaign
because otherwise you're gonna be spreading yourself
far too thin and you're gonna be giving Facebook
far too little data for them to properly optimize.
This is why when it comes to smaller budgets,
it doesn't really matter whether we're using CBO
or ad set budget because we're still
probably wanna gonna have just one campaign,
one ad set and maybe just one ad.
After all we don't have the budget
to accurately spread it out and get enough data back.
Alright nerdy technical stuff over.
Let's get back to CBO and how to use it most effectively.
Now when it comes to properly setting up
Facebook campaign budget optimization
and essentially your campaign structure overall,
well there's gonna be differences
depending on what type of advertiser you are,
how you like to structure your campaigns.
But using this new format
you're going to want to keep things relatively structured
and relatively organized under that campaign.
So for example let's say you're running
a conversion campaign for a lead magnet download.
Well under that campaign you're gonna have
a number of different ad sets.
The key here is you're gonna wanna make sure
that your ad sets are at least somewhat related
in some way, shape or form,
whether it's various audiences or various audience sizes
or similar interests
or maybe different degrees of lookalike audiences.
Whatever it is, it's gonna be important here
to keep things relatively congruent.
Now this wasn't an issue before
when we were using ad set optimization.
After all we could have all kinds of different ad sets
and we could target different things
and put them in different places,
but because we're optimizing at the campaign level,
it's important to keep all of these congruent
because that way they're gonna get kind of a fair shake
and a fair chance at really representing
which one's gonna be best for your campaign.
Another really important point here
is on scaling up your CBO campaign
and we kinda touched on this briefly
when we were talking about those smaller budgets,
but what you're gonna do is as you go through CBO
and you've got your different ad sets
and you've got your different ads nested under that,
well eventually you're gonna find a winner,
that ad that just has the lowest cost per acquisition
and it just dominates everything else.
Well the key here is you're gonna wanna duplicate that ad
and run a single CBO campaign ad set/ad combination.
Sounds confusing, but stick with me for one second.
Basically what you're doing here
is you're taking that winning ad
and you're gonna run that only in a new campaign
so you're gonna have a campaign with one ad set
and with one ad being that winning ad.
And again what you're doing here
is you're taking the power back from Facebook
and ensuring adequate distribution
of your top performing ad.
Alright so let's wrap things up here with some real
takeaway and actionable items here.
Should you use CBO in your business
and my recommendation here
is yes, you should absolutely test it,
meaning you probably shouldn't go through
and start switching everything over to CBO
from regular ad set optimization,
especially if something is already working.
So let me make this really clear.
If you've got an ad set that is already
absolutely crushing it, please do not touch it.
Leave it alone.
Let it keep doing good things for your business.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't duplicate it
and test against it using CBO
in order to see which one's gonna do better for you.
Here's the position that I'm taking
and that we're taking inside the agency.
After looking at essentially
dozens of new client accounts every single week,
we've pretty much seen it all
and there's no one size fits all answer
that we can confidently go out there and say
yeah, you absolutely have to use CBO or definitely not.
In fact we're seeing a pretty even split
between campaigns that are doing better using CBO
and campaigns that are better doing
kinda the old ad set monitoring.
All that said, CBO is the way of the future.
This is going to be mandatorily enforced.
Essentially everything's going to be switching over
to it anyways so you might as well
jump on that one as quick as you can and start to figure out
how you're gonna optimize your campaigns
to best take advantage of this new shift.