Facebook’s CBO Update: What You Need to Know

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Do you advertise on Facebook to grow your business?

If so, you know for a fact that distributing your budget across your different audiences can be tricky.

To simplify your life, from September 2019, Facebook will change the way they distribute your advertising budget to CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization).

This means that some ad accounts will now have CBO as a default feature for managing their budget. If your ad account already has it, you should have received this notification:

Eventually, CBO will be mandatory for all ad accounts sometime in 2020.

Whether you’re new to Facebook Ads or not, you may have some questions in mind:

  • What is Facebook CBO?
  • What are the benefits of CBO?
  • Will it affect any of Connectio’s tools?

We’re going to answer them in today’s post, so keep reading.

Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization: What’s is it?

Let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth:

Facebook campaign budget optimization, or Facebook CBO for short, is a major change to how advertisers set their budgets.

With CBO as mandatory, Facebook will now be the one to distribute your budget across your ad sets instead of you doing it.

You’re able to set the budget only at the campaign level. It’s like telling Facebook how much you’d like to spend on an entire campaign.

From there, Facebook does the rest. It will allocate your budget to better-performing ad sets continuously and in real-time.

By doing that, Facebook helps you get the best results while lowering your total cost per result.

That way, you can save time in figuring out what’s working and what’s not and adjusting your bids.

The diagram above compares two campaigns – one without CBO and one with CBO.

You can see that with CBO, all you need to do is assign a campaign budget.

Let’s say your budget for the entire campaign is $30.

With that $30 budget, Facebook decides which ad set it will spend more money on. In the diagram, Facebook spent more on ad set 2 because it had better results.

BuzzFeed’s Success With Facebook CBO

You may be wondering whether Facebook CBO will truly scale your campaigns.

Tech-powered media company BuzzFeed decided to try Facebook’s campaign budget optimization to test the cost-effectiveness of its branded content campaigns.

Their budget-optimized campaign achieved the following:

  • 10% more video views
  • 10% drop in cost per video view
  • 5% drop in cost per click

Henry Van Zant of BuzzFeed says that through Facebook CBO, they were able to avoid the manual work of optimizing each ad set. Plus they enjoyed its simplicity and the fact that it gave them the lowest cost per performance.

Read BuzzFeed’s full case study.

What It Means for Advertisers Like You

Some people may be upset about this recent change, but we can only learn to adapt. As with any change, there are benefits to Facebook CBO that we should appreciate:

  • You’ll only be changing the campaign budget, which can save you a lot of time. Prior to Facebook CBO, you had to recalculate and change budgets for your ad sets constantly.
  • You will still have some control over the budgets for your ad sets. You’ll be able to set a minimum and maximum ad spend limit. These limits allow your ad sets to get a portion of your campaign budget.
  • If you want more value from your campaigns, that’s what you’re going to get. While Facebook won’t spend your budget equally, it assures you that it will prioritize the best-performing ad sets.

Will Facebook CBO Affect Connectio?

Are you worried that it will impact any of the tools you use at Connectio? Know that you have nothing to worry about!

There’s just one tiny part inside the ConnectAutomate tool that will be changed, and that’s the Budget.

Please watch this short 7-minute video where I explain further:

Ready to Make Your Life Easier with Facebook Ads?

As advertisers, we all have one goal in mind, run high-performing ads at the lowest possible cost. And Facebook campaign budget optimizations helps us achieve that.

It’s not yet mandatory for all ad accounts – although it will be very soon. If your account hasn’t been affected yet, use this time to experiment and get familiar with it.

Want to run smarter, more targeted Facebook ads? Consider using Connectio. We help you win at retargeting, turn your best organic Facebook posts into ads, and more.

Have you got thoughts about Facebook CBO? Feel free to leave a comment below!