On January 9, Facebook launched a new feature: Campaign Budget Optimization.
This new feature will help advertisers who want to:
- Set a campaign-level budget and have some flexibility in how that budget is spent across the ad sets in their campaign
- Receive the highest number of results possible from their campaign
- Simplify campaign set up and save time by reducing the number of budgets that need to be manually managed
How does this new feature work and can you benefit from it?
Let’s take a look!
How do Facebook ad campaign budgets work?
To better explain this new feature, it’s important to understand how Facebook ad bidding and budgets are set up.
Up to now, all Facebook ad campaigns followed this simple logic: you set up an ad campaign with multiple ad sets. Each ad sets has a separate daily or lifetime budget.
For example, you could have four ad sets with different budgets:
- AD SET 1: Daily budget $50
- AD SET 2: Daily budget $10
- AD SET 3: Daily budget $20
- AD SET 4: Daily budget $100
Read more: Facebook Ads Cost in 2018 – How the Facebook Ads Bidding Works?
All your ad budgets were set up on the ad set level.
However, things are getting more interesting with the new Campaign Budget Optimization feature.
What is Campaign Budget Optimization?
As its name implies, the new Campaign Budget Optimization feature allows you to set up your Facebook advertising budgets on a campaign level.
You can set on campaign-level ad budget and let Facebook allocate it between your ad sets, based on their results.
To get started with campaign-level budget optimization, create a new Facebook ad campaign and select the “Optimize budget across ad sets” option. (This feature is not yet rolled out to all accounts, so you may not see it yet.)
Up next, set up your ad campaign as you normally would. Note that you need at least two ad sets for the budget optimization to work.
As you publish your new campaign, Facebook’s algorithms will start learning, and will allocate your budget between the ad sets so that you will get the most results at the lowest cost.
Tip: In addition to setting a daily or lifetime campaign budget, you can set bid caps and spend limits for each ad set.
You can do so by selecting the “Add spend limits to this ad set” option.
Up next, you’ll be able to tell Facebook the minimum daily budget you’d like that specific ad set to spend.
Why would you want to set a minimum or maximum spend per ad set?
For example, if you’re running a Facebook App Installs campaign, you will have one ad set for iOS users an another for Android users. If you want to avoid Facebook allocating the entire campaign budget to eithet iOS or Android ad set, you can set a minimum budget per each ad set, and let Facebook allocate the rest.
Example:
- Total campaign budget: $200
- Minimum spend for AD SET 1: $50
- Minimum spend for AD SET 2: $50
- Extra budget that Facebook can allocate between the ad sets: $100
Campaign budget optimization is available for any campaign objective and is best suited for campaigns with multiple ad sets.
When to use Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization?
There are multiple use cases for campaign-level budget allocation that may benefit you.
Mostly, it comes down to A/B testing different campaign elements and having Facebook automatically optimize your budgets.
1. Split testing your target audience
Use the Campaign Budget Optimization when targeting several audiences.
As you can only select one target audience per ad set, you can create 2-5 different ad sets, and let Facebook allocate the largest share of your campaign budget to the best-performing audience.
For example, you could test promoting to:
- Your Facebook page fans and their friends
- An interest-based audience of 50,00+ people
- A Lookalike Audience based on past buyers
Tip: When setting up your target audience for split testing, use the EXCLUDE feature to exclude Custom audiences. (To avoid audience overlap)
2. Split testing your ad creatives / offer
Another great use case for campaign-level budget optimization is when testing multiple creatives.
As you use Facebook creative split testing feature, it may happen that the algorithms spend all your ad set-level budget on 3 best-performing ads out of 10.
That won’t happen when placing all creatives in different ad sets.
If you want all of your ads to be shown for a minimum budget, and the best-performing ads to get an extra budget on top of it, set up multiple ad sets with one ad creative in each of them, use the Campaign Budget Optimization, and set a minimum spend for each ad set.
3. Testing multiple landing pages
If you’re unsure which version of your website performs best, set up a Facebook ad campaign with two ad sets:
- AD SET 1: all ads point to landing page version 1
- AD SET 2: all ads point to landing page version 2
Up next, optimize your ad sets on conversions, e.g. purchases.
As a result, Facebook will automatically allocate a higher budget to the ad set with the best-performing landing page.
Optimizing your landing pages can be highly efficient. For example, creating a different website version helped to increase the sales of Moz’s PRO memberships by 51.83%.
As said before, this new Facebook feature isn’t yet available on all advertiser accounts. Go and check if it’s applicable on your Facebook ad account!
Want to learn about more Facebook news in 2018? Read this article: TOP Facebook Updates in Q1 2018 Every Marketer Should Know
