If you’ve ever launched a campaign on Facebook, you might have noticed that phrase with a toggle button during the initial campaign set up: Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)

This used to be pre-checked for many accounts only a short while ago. Many accounts we take over – especially from eCommerce brands with not lots of time or experience – would come with campaigns pre-set with CBO. 

How to decide whether an account is better off not utilizing CBO depends on many factors. Thus making the decision of whether or not to use it is not a simple one. 

First, we can start by explaining what Campaign Budget Optimization actually is and what it does. 

In Facebook, in order to get the best value for every dollar you spend, your campaign structure needs to be built based on some rules. In this article, you can find more about how to start setting up your account when you first open your Facebook Business Manager & Facebook Ad manager.

Once you set your campaigns properly, you will build different ad sets under each campaign. If you choose to turn on Campaign Budget Optimization, you will not need to set budgets for each Ad Sets. You will set a daily budget for your Campaign, and Facebook will allocate that budget between all the Ad Sets that exist under your Campaign.

So the question is, should you let Facebook do its magic, or should you set your daily Ad Set budgets yourself?

It all depends on your expertise in running Facebook ads, as well as how much time you can spend on your ad account every day.

I think the most important thing to note about running efficient Facebook campaigns is, that you have to daily adjust your spending based on results, pause or launch new ads. This can get tricky if you do not have time each day to go through your account every day. If that is the case, you can choose Campaign Budget Optimization and give Facebook the full autonomy to run all your ad sets and allocate budget.

There are many downsides to doing that. First and foremost, you will no longer have control of your daily ad set budgets. Some days, you will see the ad sets with the stronger CPAs are not spending, because there’s a larger audience that’s eating your whole budget.

This is the main reason why we started Bowery Boost. For busy eCommerce site owners like yourself. It’s always better to have more control over your daily budget and how you spend it rather than letting the engine manage – sometimes not to your advantage.