Facebook's Advantage Campaign Budget – Yes or No?

Hey,

When setting up a new Facebook Ads Campaign, you'll see an option at the Campaign level called Advantage Campaign Budget, as you can see below. (In the past, this was known as Campaign Budget Optimization, or CBO, for short).

On the surface, this sounds like a great option; Facebook will decide which Ad Sets to spend your money on, meaning fewer decisions for you to make as the advertiser.

However, after spending just over $100 testing Advantage Campaign Budget recently, the results were far from sustainable.

I was testing the same Audiences that have proven themselves to work when not using Advantage Campaign Budget, also known as Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO, for short), and the same Ad Creative.

Inside Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors, I recommend using ABO because it gives you more control over where the budget is spent; you are setting the budget at the Ad Set level.

With Advantage Campaign Budget, when using the 'Traffic' objective, it's trying to give you as many 'cheap clicks' as possible; that's it.

It's not looking at conversions (i.e. sales and borrows), because Facebook doesn't have that data.

If you were running a Conversions Facebook Ads Campaign, then Facebook could see which Ad Sets generated the most conversions and put more budget towards them.

For authors though, we don't have that luxury.

All we are asking Facebook to do is send as much traffic as it can to our books on Amazon for the lowest possible cost.

My Results From Testing Advantage Campaign Budget

I ran this Advantage Campaign Budget campaign for 10 days and spent £114 ($138) and in that time and with that money, it generated a grand total of 4 Sales and 1,600 Page Reads.

Not good.

Compare this with my preferred method of budgeting (ABO; setting the budget at the Ad Set level rather than the Campaign level), where I spent £50 ($60) over the course of 5 days and generated 12 sales and 500 Page Reads.

A much healthier and sustainable conversion rate, I'm sure you'll agree.

Clearly, there was more work to be done on optimizing this better-performing option to improve the conversion rate and lower the cost per sale, but initial signs were strong.

Controlling Advantage Campaign Budget

There are options for helping to deliver better results from Advantage Campaign Budget; the most useful of which is setting a minimum and/or maximum spend for each Ad Set.

Even so, having tested this option too, the results did not improve.

Wrapping Up...

So, next time you're tempted to test out Advantage Campaign Budget, I would just take a minute and re-evaluate.

With Advantage Campaign Budget you're handing the reins over to Facebook and allowing it to make decisions on where your money is spent, despite it not knowing if the money it's spending is actually profitable for you.

Using Amazon Attribution tracking links, you are in a far better position than Facebook to decide which places (i.e. Ad Sets) are best to spend your money on; you have all the conversion data to make those decisions. Facebook doesn't.


To Your Success

– Matt