how to get the best result with facebook and instagram ad optimization

Running Facebook & Instagram Ads? You’re probably wondering if you should set your budget on the Campaign Level (CBO) or Ad Set Level (ABO) for the best return on ad spent. Let us clarify that for you. In this short guide, you’ll learn what are the pros and cons of both CBO and ABO. Ad set level optimization has its place. Find out why below.

What are CBO and ABO?

There are two ways of setting up your budget, on a campaign level and ad set level. The difference being how you want to allocate your budget, and how do you structure your ads.

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) Graphic Example

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)

This optimization automatically manages your campaign budget across ad sets to get you the overall best results. With CBO, you set one central campaign budget. This budget is continuously distributed in real-time to ad sets with the best opportunities, throughout the course of your campaign.

Adset Budget Optimization (ABO)

Instead of setting a campaign budget, you can set budgets for individual ad sets. While CBO spends your overall budget evenly over the course of your campaign, ad set budgets can be spent as soon as opportunities become available for that ad set.

Adset Budget Optimization (ABO) - Graphic Example

How does CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) work?

Every ad set that is within the campaign will be using the budget that has been allocated, and each ad set’s budget will vary depending on its performance based on Facebook’s AI. This is a good way to let Facebook’s AI work its magic for you to get better result.

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) Graphic Example

How does ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimization) work?

You can access Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO) by turning off Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). In ABO, you can adjust the budget based on each ad set that you have. This optimization will make sure that the ad set is allocated the same amount of budget daily.

Adset Budget Optimization (ABO) - Graphic Example

Differences between CBO and ABO

In CBO, Facebook’s AI will automatically detect the performance of each ad set in the campaign and allocate a budget based on the performance of each ad set. Meanwhile, in ABO you can manually set the fixed daily budget you want for the ad set.

If you are looking to test your creatives or trying to test different demographics. In order to make sure that your tests are accurate, you need to allocate the same budget to all ad sets that you want to test, and that will give you a better comparison so you can see which one has the better performance and result overall. 

Another use case when you want to use ABO is when you want to allocate a specific amount for the ad set for a specific month, let’s say it’s a promotional season (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.) and you want to be sure that you are targeting the demographics equally. 

After you are done with testing your creatives and ad sets, you can use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). Because now that you know which creative/ad set works best, you would want to group the best together in one big campaign. 

If you are still unsure about what message you want to convey, or what works, it is recommended to use Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO). 

Lifetime Budget or Daily Budget?

For the majority of the ad set, you would set those up with a daily budget, it is very simple and effective. A lifetime budget is used when you are determined, you have a start and end time, and with a certain amount of budget you have for the creative.

summary

Use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) when you are ready to scale your business up to the moon. Use Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO) whenever you create a new creative, image, video, or message because you want to test them. 

Then when you see that they are working well, that is when you bring them into Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), and using a daily budget will work out just great.