Campaign Budget Optimisation, or in short CBO, is a new type of campaign Facebook will make us use in February 2020. It was already postponed from September this year and this time it’s here to stay(99%). CBO is still a bit unstable but I believe that till February, it will be better optimised and work well.
So to make the transition easier for you, I wrote this article to teach you how you can test products with CBO campaigns.
1. The Old School Method – Only One Adset Per CBO Campaign
It’s no secret CBO campaigns can be less stable – We launch a CBO campaign with a specific budget and wake up to one adset eating up almost all our budget. And to make it worse, the adset that ate all our budget didn’t bring any sales and has less than average results.
One of the ways to fix this problem is by launching only one adset per campaign like it was done some years ago. So if you want to test 3 adsets, you’ll have to create three CBO campaigns each containing only one adset. This way we would not have to worry about any rogue adsets eating our budget with no results to show.
Who is it good for?
People with a winning product and already know exactly what audience to target – Example: In my POD(print-on-demand) niche, I have a product that sells each year again and again. I already know what audiences to target so launching a CBO campaign with only 1 adset can be a great way to have a stable adset that brings me sales. And if needed, I can always increase the budget and my adset won’t go into the learning stage.
People who do not trust Facebook’s learning – If you hate giving Facebook control, this method is the safest way for you to test products.
2. In Facebook We Trust – Just Let It Run!
If losing more than usual on testing doesn’t scare you, then this method is for you. A simple CBO campaign with a budget you like and with the amount of adsets you’re willing to test, no tricks and no limitations. Choose your audiences, your placements, create your ads and let it run 🙂
Pay close attention to your adsets and be prepared for some adsets acting a bit “weird”. If you know your audience well and have a BOMB product, then it should all be working just fine like you see in the picture above.
This is one of our recent campaigns and as you can see the conversions are pretty sweet. cbo2 adset is clearly the best and it will be the first one to be scaled. cbo3 is a bit expensive so we will have to adjust some things for it to work better.
And the exact problem CBO campaigns can be spotted in this campaign – cbo1 which has a much better conversion rate(and more events) received only $30 while the one with a higher conversion received $67. You would expect for the budgets to spread evenly but Facebook decided to feed cbo1 adset with less budget. In this case, it’s not a big deal because we still got sales but imagine if cbo3 had 0 sales? This is a possible scenario and if you can’t afford to lose, it will really hurt!
3. Setting Up Boundaries – Limiting The Ad Spend Per Adset
The budget of each adset inside a CBO campaign can be limited. This way you can have control over how much each adset will spend thus making it work almost like the regular campaigns we’re all using. Facebook gives us the contorl to set up a minimum and a maximum ad spend limit for each adset but I personally use only the minimum limit and leave the maximum blank. This way I guarantee that each adset will spend a minimum I like and won’t be stuck with barely any budget(it happens quite often!).
If I were to add a maximum limit and that adset would perform well, then increasing the campaign budget won’t affect it because the spend limit is there. Increasing the CBO budget doesn’t affect the adsets inside it and it’s a pretty good scaling technique you should use if you’re getting solid results. To remove the maximum limit, I will need to do adset level adjustements thus risking the adset entering the learning stage again.
Here’s how other dropshippers and I calculate the minimum limit: (Your CBO budget divided by the number of adsets) divided by 2 – Example:
If my CBO budget is $50 and I have 5 adsets, my minimum limit per adset will be (50 / 5) / 2 = $5 minimum budget limit per adset.
4. Playing It Safe – Testing CBO Campaigns With Much Smaller Budgets Than The Usual
This is the only CBO method from the four mentioned in this article we haven’t tested yet… But based on the results a kind friend showed me over the weekend, it looks promising and well worth the try!
This is how it works:
You launch a CBO campaign with no limitation(as is) and create a number of adsets you need, same as number 2 “Just let it run” method. But the difference is that your daily budget will be much lower than the usual. I’ll explain.
With regular campaigns, I usually gave my adset a daily budget of $8~$10 and I usually launched 3 to 5 adsets per campaign. This means if I launched 5 adsets with a $10 adset each, my daily budget for this campaign is $50. If I stick to that and launch a CBO campaign, then I should give it a $50 daily budget to test 5 adsets I like.
But with this method, I lower my daily budget by 30%~50% to “play it safe”. This means that the new CBO campaign will have a daily budget of only $25 with 5 adsets inside. It may seem low but this method works on how Facebook adjusts the budget.
Facebook spreads the budget unevenly, however they want, so there’s a chance one of the 5 adsets will receive much more than all 4. This way you will risk much less than you used too and and wouldn’t have to worry about one adset getting a bigger chunk of your budget.
To Sum It Up:
It’s safe to say that many advertisers didn’t like it when CBO was first introduced. The first ones to test it had terrible results and the majority of advertisers really hoped for this CBO to be gone and stay with the good old campaigns with budgets adjusted on the adset level. Since then, Facebook fixed a lot of issues with CBO and it looks like we’re now heading in the right direction.
If you haven’t tested CBO yet, I strongly suggest you start testing it a bit now and hopefully one of these testing methods will work for you 😉
Hope you liked this week’s article and let me know if you have any questions.
Good luck and Happy New Year!
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