In many ways, we’re all one big entrepreneurial community attempting to navigate the ever-changing advertising terrain on a daily basis. For every guru who scales their business using a formula, you’ll find 10 others who achieved success at scale using 10 totally different methods. We test our hypothesis, and then based on the data analysis after, we often end up with a mixed bag of results that works for our business, but not another. Social media marketing is no different.
By Facebook’s own definition, Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is a way of optimizing the distribution of an advertising campaign budget across your campaign’s ad sets. This means they automatically and continuously find the best active opportunities for results across your ad sets and distribute your campaign budget in real time to get those results.
As Facebook marketers, we’ve always been trained to make the budgetary adjustments on our own on the ad set level. Until recently, this has always been a learned and trained human judgement. Now, with CBO becoming the new norm, we’re putting our faith into Facebook’s machine learning algorithm to deliver us results.
However, for these results to be delivered, they of course must first be learned. In order for Facebook to learn, you need to feed it data (both good and bad). In order to feed Facebook both the good and bad data, you have to be paying for ads. You can quickly see where this trend is going, so you need a strategy.
In order to stay ahead of the curve once campaign budget optimization (CBO) becomes the new normal in September 2019, check out this list of top 10 tips:
Auto advanced matching
Auto advanced matching accurately attributes conversions and increases your audience size to drive better results from your Facebook ads. Turn this on! Here’s how to do so.
Simplify your account structure
By simplifying your account structure, you allow Facebook’s machine learning to auto test which creative and ad placements drive the best results so that they can optimize for you in real time. In doing so, you simplify your ad account setup and improve efficiency.
Related: How to Cultivate Your Community with Facebook Groups
Maximize campaign results
The purpose of campaign budget optimization is to maximize campaign results and spend less on underperforming ad sets. You turn campaign budget optimization on when you’re creating a new ad campaign on the campaign level. Campaign budget optimization helps advertisers improve ROI by automatically distributing ad spend to top performing ad sets in real time. Simply set a central campaign budget to optimize across ad sets, boosting both cost and time efficiency.
Automatic placements
Deliver the right ad to the right person at the lowest possible cost across all placements with automatic placements. This feature is set on the ad set level of the campaign. With automatic placements, you can reach your audience through all relevant placements using a single ad set. This saves on both time and cost, as Facebook will work to optimize campaigns to deliver a cheaper cost per outcome across placements.
Dynamic ads
Automatically deliver the right product ad to the right person, based on interest they’ve expressed via your website, app or elsewhere using dynamic ads. If you have a product catalog synced with Facebook (this only applies to e-commerce businesses), then you can automatically display those products users viewed on your website, or you can show relevant products to prospective buyers based on your Pixel data of users who have purchased from you in the past.
Be patient
Give all of your new CBO efforts time to mature! This is a very important tip, as we often see new campaigns do well initially, then drop in performance for a few days. After a couple days of sub-par performance, the campaign will pop back up and start to level out with signs of stability. The timeframe in which this occurs is typically around the 8- to 14-day mark. So, if anything, please do not be hasty in making knee jerk reactions.
Scale your campaign
Once your ad campaign has leveled out, you can then start to slowly scale. Previously, when businesses would attempt to scale out their ad campaigns, you would add around 10 percent to 20 percent of a budget increase and then wait two to four days to see how the budget increase affected the ads. Now with campaign budget optimization, you can be much more aggressive in scaling out your budgets due to the combination of machine learning and improvements under the hood on Facebook’s side.
Expand your creative
Our standard playbook says to have one creative asset in four different formats: you’ll have a static graphic in both 1080 x 1080 feed format and 1920x 1080 story format. Then, you’ll have a video version in 1080 x 1080 feed format and 1920 x 1080 story format. This allows Facebook the option to deliver whichever creative element in the optimal format when its algorithm determines that a conversion can be generated.
If, for example, you only provide one video format in 1080 x 1080 feed format, then you’re severely limiting Facebook’s algorithm to deliver you the maximum amount of conversions possible.
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Keep it simple
When running video ads, make sure they are 15 seconds or less in length. I often have conversations with internal Facebook reps, and this is a very important tip! You have only two to three seconds to grab users’ attention, so be smart about it. Most users don’t have time for a 10 second intro before the video content even starts.
Remember your target audience
My last tip when creating high performing campaign budget optimization ads for Facebook is to remember who you’re creating ads for. Your ad should identify a problem or pain point, agitate the problem and provide your solution quickly. This format will help you stay focused.
All of the above tips are the new wave of tips that are hot off the presses from hard data results across multiple verticals. If you’re using the same tactics and strategy that worked for you in at the beginning of the year, there’s a very good possibility that if you don’t adapt to these new methods, you will find your company’s Facebook ad account with a bad return on ad spend.
