What is Campaign Budget Optimisation?

CBO, as defined by Facebook

“Campaign budget optimization (CBO) makes the most efficient use of your budget spending to get you the overall best results and ensure that the cost of those results aligns with your bid strategy.

A campaign budget is a budget you set at the campaign level (rather than the ad set level). The amount you set can apply to each day the campaign runs (daily budget) or over the campaign's lifetime (lifetime budget). All campaign budgets use campaign budget optimization.”

Going back: a brief history of CBO 

Facebook introduced CBO in 2017, allowing advertisers to use either CBO or ABO (ad set budget optimisation — where budgets are allocated according to ad set) in their campaigns. 

Not fully grasping the idea of CBO as an optimisation method and why they should favour it over ABO, advertisers largely ignored it throughout 2017 and 2018. They had become so used to optimising on the ad set level —  where they can manipulate different variables within the ad set and ads level — that they saw no reason to change.

In 2019, Facebook announced that they would be ending ABO — leaving only CBO available for use as of September 2019. However, to avoid issues during Q4, the date was pushed to February 2020. 

So far, there has been no mention of any additional delay. Hence, as of writing, Facebook will be rolling out CBO-enabled optimisation only in February 2020.

What are the advantages of CBO?

CBO can save you time by letting Facebook optimise according to top-performing ad sets within your campaign. This means repeated visits to your ad account will no longer be necessary — freeing you up to work on more critical tasks that can help you further grow your business. 

It can also save you money as Facebook’s algorithm optimises your ad spend, using the data gathered from your pixels.

Keep in mind 

This does not mean that once you set your campaign to CBO, it’ll automatically enable you to generate hundreds of purchases or 4-5x ROAS.

You’ll still need to lay the groundwork: quality products, a well-defined target market, and compelling content. If you don’t have the proper product-market-content fit, neither CBO nor any other optimisation method can help you. 

Facebook’s main goal with CBO is to help advertisers create more stable campaigns that will yield profitable long-term results. By freeing up your time from manual optimisation, it’ll enable you to focus more on crafting high-quality content, another factor for your success on the Facebook advertising platform.