Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization

Facebook’s goal is to enable us to configure “set and forget” campaigns.  At some point, it will be possible to just set up a budget, tell Facebook what’s your website and your objective, and their AI will do the rest. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.

Campaign budget optimization is one more step in that direction, together with dynamic creatives and dynamic ads.

What’s Campaign Budget Optimization?

Campaign budget optimization is an option you have on a campaign level. When it’s turned on, Facebook’s own algorithm will optimize the budget distribution across the ad sets in that campaign.

Facebook automatically and continuously calculates the best results and optimizes the budget spending in order to get those results. It’s important to notice that this an ongoing, real-time process.

The option is available both in the “Quick Creation” editor and in the “Guided Creation” workflow.

Campaign Budget

Once enabled, you’ll have a “campaign budget” instead of ad set budget, and you can choose between “daily budget” or “lifetime budget”.

Campaign Bid Strategy

Lowest cost – you’ll get the most results for your budget across ad sets. If you decide to “Set a bid cap” you’ll be able to set a maximum bid for each ad set within the campaign.

Target cost – you’ll maintain an average cost for each ad set when you raise the budget.  Using this strategy may result in not getting the lowest cost because the biding will aim to stay around the targeting cost.

Ad Set Spend Limits

If you want, you can set desired, non-guaranteed, minimum and maximum spend limits for each ad set inside your campaign.

This will decrease the flexibility but can be useful if you want to maintain some control over your ads delivery.

How Does Campaign Budget Optimization Work in Real Life

Let’s say you have two ad sets under a normal campaign. Each has a budget of $100. One ad set performs well and all its budget is spent. The other ad set is underperforming, and only $50 are spent. Your total spending for this campaign will be $150 and you’ll miss out some opportunities by not running more ads from the first ad set.

The same scenario for a campaign using budget optimization. This time we have a global budget of $200 configured at the campaign level. The underperforming ad set will still spend $50 before delivery is stopped, but the other ad set will not stop at $100, using the rest of the budget instead. This way the full $200 budget will be spent, with the better performing ad set spending $150.

TIP: Run this type of campaign with medium to large budgets and on significant audiences, so the algorithm has enough data to analyze. Use ad set spending limits only if you really need them. More flexibility will give better results.