Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)

Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)

The digital marketing community has been going crazy about Facebook’s latest notification that all advertisers campaigns including current adverts will utilize CBO as of September 2019.

Campaign budget optimisation has been around for a year now, however Facebook announced that as of September 2019 Campaing Budget Optimisation will become a default that cannot be switched.


As marketers it is an ever evolving game of cat and mouse, we refine and develop strategy and then the algorithm shifts.  Those who don’t follow the latest messages and updates coming from Facebook HQ are often caught out an ill prepared.

What is CBO ?

Campaign Budget Optimisation“is a way of optimizing the distribution of a campaign budget across your campaign’s ad sets by distributing budget to the top performing ad sets in real time”.

Essentially CBO removes the campaign pacing issues that businesses encounter. CBO works in real time against a much larger budget than a singular adset budget. If an ad is performing well at a particular time Facebook will feed more budget to that specific ad set.

This is in comparison to Facebooks approach of a much more evenly distributed ad set level, although it does optimize slightly for peak periods. CBO creates a much more agile spend of your budget.

What else does it do?

As we test cold traffic Top of Funnel especially utilizing Lookalike and Cold interest based targeting, there is a degree of natural overlap.

CBO will be especially powerful here by regulating the auction process to ensure that we are not bidding against yourself in the auction.
This is one area where I believe CBO will be incredibly effective and lower CPM’s (cost per 1000 impressions).
CBO will also fuel the algorithms thirst for data, in particular standard event triggers. 

Currently with event triggers and budget being assigned at an adset level most businesses struggle to hit the 50 event triggers per adset per week that the algorithm needs to function at maximum capacity.

Usually businesses do not come close to hitting the required 50 events triggers to get the most from their campaigns or they reset the learning through scaling the ad set budget too quickly.

CBO will solve this issue by working with larger budgets, it is then able to distribute more budget to the top performing adsets to ensure they are fully optimized and delivering results at the lowest cost.

Why have Facebook changed this ?

CBO has been around for 5-6 months now and during that period, Facebook has been working heavily with some brands and marketers testing it’s functionality.

Without knowing the specifics, it is safe to say that the results must indicate the success of CBO in delivering better results at a lower cost. After all Facebook wants brands to be successful advertising on their platform.

CBO Tips & Tricks

If you have been running Facebook Ads for some time you may already have winning adsets and have a calculated manual bid that has been delivering great results. You may be slightly worried that the algorithm is going to show preference to another adset that doesn’t perform quite so well.

One trick being trialed at the moment is to set a higher bid cap for this adset to indicate which adset you want to feed budget to.

Switch up your optimization …. Earlier this year we tested out the difference in results between a 7day an 1 day conversion window. The results were conclusive that 7 day optimization out performed 1 day conversion windows. However as optimization is occurring in real time with CBO , we are currently testing out a 1 day conversion window.

What Choice Do I Have ?

In short there is no choice, CBO is coming and the faster you adapt techniques to the changes in the auction process the better.

If you are reading this post prior to August or September, you have time to test strategies and experiment with this feature.

However, if you are reading in August or September this is a critical point as you will need to check existing campaigns.

We are constantly adapting our techniques already and working heavily with CBO. If your business needs a head start, why not book a call with our team.