5 Things You Should Know About Facebook CBO Campaigns

After being postponed from September 2019, it looks like we’ll be getting CBO(Campaign Budget Optimization) in February 2020 without any delays. It’s already permanent on some of our accounts where we exclusively use only CBO campaigns, but we still have the option to create regular, adset level budget campaigns on our old ad accounts.

This article is here to prepare you for the official CBO move in February 2020 with some valuable tips you don’t want to miss!

 

1. You Can Set Up A Minimum/Maximum Ad Spend Limit Per Adset

If you already tried launching a CBO campaign with multiple adsets, you probably noticed that each adset got its own budget. I’ve yet to see a CBO campaign divide its budget evenly between all the adsets. This is not a mistake or a bug and it’s actually how CBO works.

With CBO campaigns, Facebook is the one who controls how much budget each adset will get. If an adset is performing well and brings conversions, Facebook will give that adset more budget to spend over other adsets. Which should guarantee that a good performing adset will keep on performing and bring us more results.

In reality, Facebook doesn’t always do a good job here and in some cases, it just wastes our budget on bad adsets. We had plenty of cases where an adset that brought a sale spent only $4 and Facebook for some reason decided that it received enough budget for the day. Instead, it gave more budget to a bad performing adset…

So how do we counter it and gain more control over Facebook? It’s easily done by giving each adset a minimum or a maximum(or both) budget. This way Facebook will have no choice and it will be forced to at least spend the amount we set up.

We usually work with the minimum adspend only and leave the maximum adspend empty.

This is how we calculate the minimum budget each adset should get: (CBO budget /(divided) the numbers of adsets) : 2

If our CBO daily budget is $50 and we have 5 adsets, the minimum budget we set up for each adset is: (50:5) :2 = $5 minimum budget to spend per adset.

 

2. CBO Campaigns Work Really Well With Big Audiences

I never thought I would say this but big(huge) audiences are actually working… If you’ve read my posts on this blog, you probably know that I don’t really like big audiences. For me the perfect audience size for testing is up to 1.5 million and the perfect audience is something around ~500k.

I also have no problem at testing really low sized audiences like 30k, 20k, even 15k – Check point 2 on my Ecommerce Myths article here. So after talking to some colleagues and seeing other people results, I just went for it and it looks like CBO is great with big audiences.

Just a quick example of one of our campaigns. One of the adsets audience size is 6.6 million(like the picture) and the other one has a bigger audience of almost 10 million. We’re testing more cbo campaigns on other products and so far it works really well.

If you were afraid of big audiences(like myself) when testing, I suggest you try it now with CBO campaigns.

 

3. CBO Is Yet To Be Well Optimised

A few days ago, I was asked by a friend of mine what I think about CBO? And my answer was “It’s Annoying!”…

CBO is to be permanently applied to all advertisers on Facebook in February 2020 and the chances it will be postponed again or “cancelled”, like some theories say, are really low. CBO is probably here to stay and as always, we will have to adapt.

I personally don’t worry too much about this change and as you see, we’re already testing CBO campaigns on some of our accounts. Some of our tests are successful and some are less but these methods are not a secret so I’ll eventually write about it if we find something good.

CBO is annoying… It’s not yet well optimised and it looks like there’s still work needed to be done in order for it to be more stable. As you can see from the screenshot above, this CBO campaign decided to spend all the remaining budget on an adset that had one sale. Instead it should’ve at least give a bit more budget to the other adset with a sale for $8.

This is exactly what I meant when I said “annoying”. CBO needs more work and you can definitely test CBO if you haven’t but stick to the basics for now. Once CBO is permanently here, you’ll have all the needed information to make it work.

 

4. CBO Has Created New Ways To Scale Our Facebook Campaigns

The most popular scaling method with regular campaigns is duplicating a good adset. It can be a simple duplicate, duplicate with a slight change in targeting, duplicate with a higher daily budget, etc. With CBO, it’s now different and we won’t be duplicating any adsets.

Unlike adset level budget, with CBO we set up a budget for the whole campaign. Each adset will take it’s own budget from the our “budget pool” and use it to get us the results we need. This means that if we duplicate an adset, we will ruin the budget optimisation because there’s now one more adset to feed.

Instead, what we can do is duplicate the entire campaign one or more times(keep only the good adsets running). Or we can duplicate a good adset(s) and create a new CBO campaign just for it with the same or increased budget.

Another way is to simply raise our daily CBO campaign budget. It won’t hurt the “learning” of the adsets inside the campaign and it will just give them more budget to play with.

As you can see, the scaling methods have changed and the old popular methods will disappear.

 

5. CBO Campaigns Can Be Adjusted To Similarly Work As Regular Campaigns

Do you want to test a CBO campaign but afraid a big chunk of your budget will go to the wrong adset? Already tested CBO but got burned? Well there are still ways to “safely” test CBO campaigns and make them work almost like the old campaigns.

The first way is to set up a minimum and a maximum adspend limit per adset – This way we can have control on how much each adset will spend just like with the old campaigns. The warnings you see shouldn’t scare you as they’re the same as when you set up a purchase event with a new pixel. In worst case-scenario, you won’t get any results but at least you won’t spend $40 to get zero results. And it’s possible this adset won’t deliver at all but I highly doubt that will be the case.

The second way is to use only one adset in a CBO campaign – This way the single adset in that campaign will get the full campaign budget. And to test more adsets, you’ll have to create more campaigns. It’s the safest way to test with CBO and you don’t have to worry about your budget going crazy and feeding the bad adsets.

 

To Sum It Up:

Like every update with Facebook ads, there’s sometimes a lot of discontent among the advertisers but we have no choice but to adapt. We have about 2 months till CBO is officially here and if you still can’t make it work, then just stick to the regular adset level budget campaigns. I believe that in 2 months, the CBO is be much better optimised and we will know exactly what works and what doesn’t

Hope you liked this week’s article and let me know if you have any questions.

Good luck and Merry Christmas!

 

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