SSA #018: Spend Smarter With Facebook Ads

Read Time: 3 minutes

With Facebook Ads, you can decide to set your budget at one of two levels:

Option #1: The Campaign Level

Option #2: The Ad Set Level

I've tested both of these options rigorously over the years and although I've favored one over the other for a long time, about 5-6 months ago, I switched gears.

Today, I'll spill the beans on which budget strategy I'm using, how it works, and why it works, as well as some best practices, which I cover in-depth inside the brand new, updated for 2023, Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors.

Spend Smarter, Not Harder

For years, I've set the budget for my Facebook Ads at the Ad Set level, with periodic testing of setting it at the Campaign level, but I've always come back to setting it at the Ad Set level because it just worked that much better.

When setting the budget at the Ad Set level, you are essentially forcing Facebook to spend money on that specific Ad Set.

If you set the budget at the Campaign level instead, you let Facebook decide which Ad Sets, within the Campaign, to spend money on and more importantly still, how much money to spend on those Ad Sets, if at all.

In the past, setting the budget at the Campaign level was known as Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO for short). Today, setting the budget at the Campaign level is known as Advantage Campaign Budget – definitely not as catchy as CBO, in my opinion!

But why do I now set the budget for my Facebook Ads at the Campaign level and leave the fate of our advertising budget in the hands of Facebook?

In short, Facebook is smarter than I am!

Here's how Advantage Campaign Budget works...

When you use Advantage Campaign Budget, as I mentioned above, you are letting Facebook decide which active Ad Sets within a Campaign to spend money on – and how much money to spend on those Ad Sets.

Whether you have $20 per day, $200 per day, or $2,000 per day, or more to spend, Facebook will distribute that budget on the Ad Sets that contain the Ads with the highest:

– Engagement Rate (how many reactions, shares, comments, views, etc. of an Ad)

– Expected Action Rate (how likely an Ad is to be clicked, as we use the Traffic objective)

If the Ads within an Ad Set get lots of engagement and generate lots of clicks, then they are likely to receive lots of budget! If they don't generate good engagement or clicks, then they'll receive little to no budget.

In other words, if an Ad Set doesn't receive much budget, this is Facebook telling you that the Ads in this Ad Set aren't good!

Facebook are saving you money!

If you were to set the budget at the Ad Set level instead and essentially force spend on Ads, the results could be disappointing and you'd have spent money on Ads that you needn't have.

It is possible to set a Minimum Spend on an Ad Set to ensure that they receive some budget, but you don't need to do this by any means.

If you do decide to add a Minimum Spend on an Ad Set, I would set it fairly low, at anywhere from 10% - 25% of your total Campaign budget, at most.

For example, if your Campaign budget was $20, you'd set a Minimum Spend of $2-$5 on an Ad Set within that Campaign.

You can also choose to set a Maximum Spend on an Ad Set, but I rarely use that feature, and if I do, I don't set a Minimum Spend as well, because that can have a negative impact on performance.

The beauty of Advantage Campaign Budget is that you, as the advertiser, don't have to decide on a monetary figure to allocate to each Ad Set within a Campaign. Instead, you let Facebook decide that on your behalf!

If there are Ads performing well, Facebook will automatically give the Ad Set containing those Ads more budget.

Have some Ads not performing too well? Facebook knows and will automatically, in real-time, reduce the amount of budget the Ad Set containing those Ads receives.

This makes the management of your Facebook Ads that much simpler because you have one less thing to think about.

You can have anything from 1-50 Ad Sets within a Campaign, and Facebook will automatically allocate budget to every active Ad Set within it, even if that budget allocation is $0.

However, I recommend you stick to no more than 3-5 active Ad Sets within a Campaign. This is all you need, no matter if you're spending $20 per day, $1,000 per day or $10,000 per day.

Wrapping Up...

On a personal note, since implementing Advantage Campaign Budget, in conjunction with my new Facebook Ads strategy (which I cover in-depth inside Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors), I've seen:

– Improved overall performance

– More efficient spend and budget allocation

– Higher conversion rates (doubled in the USA, tripled in the UK)

I'm not saying that setting the budget at the Ad Set level doesn't work, but I have seen vastly improved performance since switching to setting the budget at the Campaign level.

And I would encourage you to test Advantage Campaign Budget for at least 30 days before you write it off because it truly has changed the game for us, and I'm confident it will change the game for you too.

Thanks for reading and I'll be back with you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt