Over a year ago, Facebook’s campaign budget optimisation was launched as a beta test on various accounts.
After a huge amount of testing, Facebook will be launching campaign budget optimisation in September making it a fixed default that can’t be turned off.
This is a really big change in the structure of Facebook campaigns. In short, you’ll no longer be able to set a daily or lifetime budget at the ad set level. However, you will still have some control over your budgets at this level.
Facebook has allowed advertisers to set a minimum and maximum budget so a set budget can’t be exceeded or unspent.
So, what exactly is campaign budget optimisation?
Campaign budget optimisation provides a way to optimise the distribution of a campaign budget across a campaign’s ad sets.
This means that Facebook is automatically and continuously finding the best active opportunities for results across ad sets and distributes campaign budgets in real-time to get those results.
A campaign budget is a budget you set at the campaign level (rather than the ad set level).
The amount that you can set applies to each day the campaign runs (daily budget) or over the duration of the campaign (lifetime). All campaign budgets use campaign budget optimisation.
Facebook then optimises your campaign budget in real-time on an opportunity-by-opportunity basis. Their goal is to get you the best results possible, and for the cost of those results to align with your bid strategy.
Using campaign budget optimisation, advertisers set a budget at the campaign level that Facebook optimises to distribute across audiences to favour the highest performers.
Facebook will simply distribute more or less budget based on how an ad set is performing compared to the others. It doesn’t simply find a winner and allocate the full budget to one ad set. This feature is most beneficial when running campaigns with multiple ad sets.
How does it work?
Without campaign budget optimisation, Facebook will attempt to spend the daily budget per ad set, regardless of performance.
With campaign budget optimisation, Facebook will react to the performance of each of your ad sets. You may then instead spend more or less per ad set to get the best results.
For example, let’s say you have three ad sets and spend $10 per ad set (as shown in the example below.)
Without campaign budget optimisation, Facebook will attempt to spend $10 per ad set, regardless of performance.
With campaign budget optimisation, Facebook will react to the performance of each of your ad sets. You may then instead spend more or less per ad set to get the best results.
Let’s take a look at the results…
Without campaign budget optimisation, the campaign resulted in 10conversions. But, one ad set clearly outperformed the other two.
With campaign budget optimisation in place, Facebook optimises to distribute more of the budget to the highest performing ad set, resulting in 15 conversions.
This feature is eligible for all ad objectives. After activating campaign budget optimisation, Facebook will include an option to establish a minimum of maximum daily spend per ad set.
After September 2019, it will still be possible to control spend at the ad set level by using ad set spend limits.
If you set a minimum spend limit, Facebook will aim to spend that amount. If you set a maximum spend limit, Facebook will not exceed that amount.
It is also worth noting that campaigns using budget optimisation will not be eligible for ad scheduling (dayparting) or accelerated delivery.
What does this mean for campaigns?
The new update will be helpful in terms of simplifying the creation process from the supplier’s side.
From a budget point of view, it allows users a greater insight into how best to set budgets moving forward, from both a lifetime and a daily perspective.
This is going to be a controversial change for all involved but it’s likely this will create better strategies, allowing budgets to be spent more effectively and efficiently.
It’s an update that Facebook deems to be important to aid campaign performance for all advertisers based on the positive results seen so far.