FB Ads Budgeting: ABO vs CBO?

When it comes to FB ad budget strategy, you would need to answer this question:

"Do you trust the algorithm or yourself more?"

If you trust the algorithm more,

CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) is the right one

If you trust yourself more,

ABO (Ad Budget Optimization) is the right one

"All right, how does it work?"

For Facebook, we would have 3 levels of advertisement structure:

First level would be Campaign; Second level would be Ad Set; Third Level would be Ad

Through CBO (Campaign budget optimization), you would be doing it at the highest level, a.k.a the campaign level. Meanwhile, ABO (Automatic budget optimization) will be conducted at the second level, a.k.a. the ad set level.

With CBO, you would let FB to spend all of your budget within a specific timeframe

With ABO, you would let FB spend some of your budget that will vary across the days

ABO strategy is for:

FB media buyers/ad specialists who are seeking more control and visibility over their campaign tests, they would use ABO to do so. This is to force FB to spend the same, or similar amount across their ads so they have sufficient data to conclude their experiments. This is especially crucial if you have different audience sizes across your campaigns and wanting to give each audience an equal chance.

Alternatively, it is done when we have little data on pixels and the algorithm would not know what to do.

CBO strategy is for:

Business owners who have no time to optimize their ads or people that are new to FB advertisements, CBO will be a great way to go as FB will automatically allocate spending towards good-performing ads and you can rely on AI until you get a better understanding of the system.

It is suitable for smaller budgets by allowing the algorithm to optimize upon the little budget we provide based on our target objective (e.g. leads/purchase).

PS: CBO has recently been rebranded as Advantage Campaign Budget*, so don't be too worried if you saw that!

Some useful links: