After announcing in February that Campaign Budget Optimisation (in short CBO) will be mandatory, Facebook has now pushed back on the mandate and it is no longer mandatory. The decision is based on advertiser feedback, says Facebook, and is aimed to provide flexibility and choice in the buying strategies. “While we still believe CBO provides performance and value gains, we will move to offer CBO as an option and not as a requirement.”, Facebook explains, as reported by Marketing Land. 

What is CBO anyway?

In short, CBO takes the budget allocating from the ad set to the campaign level. 

With a daily or a monthly budget set per campaign, Facebook automatically distributes it between the different ad sets to get the best results. The 2 main tools that advertisers can use to continue control over ad delivery are:

• the optimization events, which can be set at ad set level 
• setting minimum and maximum bid caps per each ad set. 

Not sure if CBO is good for you? Here are some pros and cons to help you make up your mind:

3 pros of using CBO as part of your advertising strategy

More value for the money

By distributing budget in real-time, CBO ensures that you get the best results out of your audiences, thus maximizing the total value of your campaign. By eliminating the need to re-calculate budgets halfway through, CBO usually brings better overall results.

Less time spent managing

This is an automated process, so it eliminates the need to continuously check ad set spend and results and shifting of budget between audiences. As a result, the best performing ad sets will exit the learning phase sooner and will perform better. 

De-duplicate audiences

Extremely useful, especially when it comes to lookalikes audiences with high audience overlap. The CBO algorithm identifies the overlap and spends that budget in another ad set, thus ensuring that the overall performance of the campaign is optimal. 

3 cons for using CBO, as reported by advertiser testing

Not good for testing audiences

If your strategy is to address different audiences within the same campaign and compare results, CBO might prevent your ads from being delivered to all. You can use the testing feature instead. 

Some ad sets will get stuck in learning limited

As some ad sets will be the stars of your CBO campaign, others may deliver poorly or not at all, so they will get stuck in the learning limited phase. To prevent this from happening, use bid caps, and spend limits for each ad set. 

Less control on ad spend at ad set level

If you want to make sure specific ad sets are spending a certain budget within the campaign timeframe, CBO might not be for you. While you can use desired minimums and/or guaranteed maximums for each ad set, these are only estimated and non-guaranteed. 

Our advice

Start testing CBO if you haven’t already. If you choose to stick to the manual ad set budgeting option, keep an eye on overall performance. While Facebook will continue to maintain support for ad set budget management, this feature may still lead to lower performance overall. Remember, you can always use the CBO option instead, which Facebook will emphasize in the process, without a doubt. Just choose what’s right for you, the options are there!

Links:

https://marketingland.com/facebook-pulls-back-on-campaign-budget-optimization-mandate-278938?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow

https://searchengineland.com/facebooks-campaign-budget-optimization-is-coming-are-you-ready-323665

https://www.facebook.com/business/m/one-sheeters/campaign-budget-optimization

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebooks-migrating-all-ad-campaigns-to-campaign-budget-optimization-info/549056/

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-abandons-mandatory-shift-to-campaign-budget-optimization-for-ad-ca/576490/