Facebook is abandoning its push to have all advertisers to switch to its automated Campaign Budget Optimization process, which would have seen the removal of manual ad set budgeting options from the available tools for ad management.
Campaign Budget Optimization – or CBO for short – enables advertisers to set a central campaign budget for all of their ad sets, which Facebook’s systems then automatically pull from, in real-time, based on the relative performance of each.
The idea is that CBO facilitates better outcomes by distributing your ad spend to the ads that perform best, which produces better outcomes for Facebook’s ad products, and ideally, better results for advertising brands.
Back in February, Facebook announced that all campaigns would soon be switched to CBO by default, with other, manual budget allocation options by ad set removed. At present, Facebook allows advertisers to allocate specific budgets for each ad within a campaign, but the new system would have seen that capacity deleted, with advertisers only being able to set minimum and maximum spend limits at the ad-set level.
Now, based on advertiser feedback, Facebook is back-tracking on the mandate.
As reported by Marketing Land, Facebook says that:
“To provide advertisers with flexibility and choice in their buying strategies, we have decided not to pursue a mandatory migration for Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). While we still believe CBO provides performance and value gains, we will move to offering CBO as an option and not as a requirement.”
The impact here, either way, is difficult to estimate.
As noted, while Facebook’s CBO process theoretically enables businesses to more effectively allocate their budgets to maximize performance, it’s also based on Facebook’s systems, which means that marketers need to put a level of faith into the results that Facebook’s processes are generating, in alignment with their brand goals.
Without forcing brands to utilize CBO, advertisers will maintain more control over their Facebook ad budgets, but Facebook evidently doesn’t believe that’s in their best interests. The results will come down to how each individual advertiser utilizes the available tools.
Given the varying perspectives, it makes sense for Facebook to maintain support for manual ad set budgeting options, though it may well lead to worse Facebook ad performance overall. It could also see Facebook advertisers getting worse results than they should, or could be – but they will have the option to move to CBO at any time, which Facebook will no doubt emphasize in the process regardless.
Worth noting in your Facebook campaign management process.
You can read more about Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization here, or get specific detail on ad set limits and controls here.
