CBO Campaigns – How to Get the Most Out of Them

NOTE: Regular adset budget setup is what I recommend to use for the time being (as of June 2019).

But CBO’s can be profitable too. In this article I explain how to use it.

As most of you already know, CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) is the new way for Facebook to optimize your campaigns. In its core is the idea of assigning daily budget on the campaign level and letting the Facebook machine learning distribute the funds inside it in the most effective manner.

Yet, the reason why everyone is so hyped about CBO right now is not its great effectiveness. In fact, Facebook has already announced that it will be mandatory for all of your campaigns starting from September 2019.

Still not interested? Well, let’s just say that we know a great method of working with CBO that will make your ROAS rise to 5x+. We will get to it later.

BUT first, what is CBO in essence?

As said in another nicely done Facebook one-sheeter about CBO, the main features that it gives you are:

– Automatization while assigning budgets – you will not have to go on and on with every ad set setting it up on low budget and testing different interests. Facebook will do that for you by choosing automatically the best performing ad set and putting more money on the stake;

– Non-overlapping audiences – Facebook assures us that the ad sets with similar audiences will be considered in their algorithm, so the frequency of showing the same ad to the same person will drop with CBO;

– Learning phrase not restarted – when some ad sets start performing better, they will be given a larger piece of the budget, without restarting the learning phrase.

AND LAST, as we will show you, CBO is a great tool for effective scaling of your sales, again because of semi-automatization and ability to do that on the campaign level.

So how do you effectively set up and scale your CBO campaigns?

1. Scale your lookalikes for purchases only.

– Test your Pixel purchase lookalike audiences on 1 to 10% rates (take US, CA, UK, and AU as lookalike audience locations).

In case you are not sure what is lookalike audiences and how to use them, you might want to check this great Facebook article about it.

Otherwise, you go ahead and try starting from there – take your Facebook Pixel data, select the recommended setup, and create the 10 different lookalike audiences.

– Pay attention to the volume of your audience. Ideally, it should be around 5M people or more for one lookalike. You can stack several lookalike audiences into one if the numbers are lower.

– Pick up at least 3, at most 8, lookalikes that performed best for you as the winners and kill the rest of ad sets. CBO will adjust the budget for you.

– Duplicate the CBO with your winners into the new campaign and scale it up gradually until your reach the maximum of sales.

You can start from a $150 budget and raise it to $1000 or even higher.

2. Test and scale lookalikes for purchases, initiate checkout, and added to cart visitors.

– Again, you create around 10-15 ad sets with 1-10% lookalike audiences, this time for not only purchases but also initiate checkout and added to cart events.

It’s best to set up your CBO campaign budget to at least $300 at this point.

– Take the 5 winners out of the tested lookalikes and duplicate them into the new CBO with a 2x budget.

– Again, continue scale them as long as your income gets higher.

3. Add interests for broader audience.

– If you have the interests that worked well for you in the past, take them and use for your CBOs.

This will give the Facebook algorithms more space for the maximum optimization.

– You can use Facebook suggestions and Audience Insights as well to get even more ad sets for testing inside your CBO.

BONUS for the most engaged readers: CBO tips

Based on our experience some CBO set ups work much better than others. What are they?

– 7 days after clicking/1 day after viewing optimization;– On average 4 to 5 creatives per ad set, for Facebook to have room for optimization;

– If CBO doesn’t work well at the beginning, it will not work in 9 out of 10 times. So, you need to kill bad ad sets fast (e.g., the $15 ad spent + ROAS<1.7 cap);

– The minimum budget for CBO to work effectively is $150. Ideally, you should scale it up to $500-$750;

– Check the metrics frequently (quality, engagement, conversion) to make sure that it doesn’t show bad results, as bad metrics usually leads to poorly performing CBOs.

So these are the strategies that we use ourselves and have proven successful.

Did you not try something like that before? Then why are you still here? Go and make profit with your CBO campaigns?

Or did you? What else would you suggest then? We love your feedback and good healthy discussions.

Let’s share our ideas and boost our sales together!