So, Facebook has again announced the mandatory launch of Campaign Budget Optimisation which is due to land on our screens in Feb 2020. Since the last launch date of CBO (September 2019), we have been testing and familiarising ourselves with this feature and all in all seen some positive results.
As most of you already know, Campaign Budget Optimisation means that you will now have to set daily or lifetime budgets at the campaign level rather than the ad set level. Budgets will then be optimised to distribute across ad sets to favor the highest performers in real-time.
Budget Loopholes…
Luckily, there are a few loopholes to gain back control of your budgets. Facebook allows you to set a minimum and maximum spend. If you set a minimum spend limit, FB will aim to spend that amount. If you set a maximum spend limit, FB will not exceed that amount.
After doing some research and testing, it seems that the trick with CBO is the bigger the budget, the better it performs and the faster you can gain valuable data.
Pros
I was skeptical at first, however, after conducting a few of my own tests and hearing feedback from others, I genuinely think there are a lot of positives from CBO.
As Facebook will be working in real-time to capture the most results for your budget, this should effectively lower your total cost per result. This also means there is less to manage and you can spend your time more efficiently.
Using CBO also prevents the learning phase from restarting (YAY!) every time you want to change your campaign spend levels, as well as helping to eliminate audience overlap and allowing the potential to scale.
Cons
As with anything new, there are always some cons. Take the fact that you will probably have to spend a little more £££…
CBO recommends and requires a bigger budget in order to perform better. Ideally, you should give audiences around 14 days to learn before making a judgment call on performance.
In other words, go slow with CBO, it requires a lot of patience to begin with and can be a little up and down.
Current Tests
At Overdrive, we’ve been testing CBO for a good few months now and have some positive learnings from it.
I’ve seen CPA’s drop by 130% and generally decrease on the whole across the board. Results like the number of leads and Add to Carts have also increased dramatically on a few accounts when comparing the before and after campaigns.
As we have only tested CBO on conversion campaigns and the majority of results have been positive, it would be interesting to hear how it’s performed for more engagement and traffic focused campaigns. Let us know in the comments below.
Good luck, be patient and have faith!
